The truckers' revolt.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Column

Until the beginning of April, Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, "Hit me! Please, hit me again!"

Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take--inaction. Faced with $4/gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down, and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching "as far as the eye can see," according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 mph. Outside of Chicago, truckers slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; they slowed down the port of Tampa, where fifty rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off "to pray for the economy."

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The truckers who organized the protests--by CB radio and Internet--have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can't break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely aware that the government had found, in the course of a weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns, while their own businesses are in a tailspin.

But the truckers' protests have ramifications far beyond the owner-operators' plight. Nearly 70 percent of the nation's goods--from Cheerios to Chapstick--travel by truck. We were able to survive a writers' strike, but a trucking strike would affect a lot more than your viewing options. As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker, told me: "If all the truckers decide to shut this country down, there's going to be nothing they can do about it."

More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to "take back America," as one put it to me.

"We continue to maintain this is not just about us," JB (which is his CB handle and stands for the "Jake Brake" on large rigs) told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. "It's about everybody--the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can't afford their heating bills.... This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people." Hayden mentions his parents, ages eighty-one and seventy-six, who've fought the Maine winter on a fixed income.

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