Truckers of the world, unite

"Little people in big rigs" left tired and vulnerable in today's market

By: Mel Watkins

  At the risk of doing grievous insult to the many decent independent truckers of Ontario, it has long seemed to me that the monster truck is the truest symbol of the monstrous Harris government. For starters, the Ontario Minister of Finance's priors (as they say on the TV cop shows) include being on the owning side, not of a big rig, but of big trucking company.
  Flying truck wheels decapitating drivers were the swoosh of the first Harris administration. Nowadays, to drive a car on the highway is to be surrounded by big trucks, often with one sitting on your tail, and to feel anxiety and fright and rage - the quintessential emotions, after greed, on which neoliberalism might be thought to thrive.
 

In the recent federal budget, though taxes were madly cut and some spending restored, the truckers got nary a mention

  The reason why there are so many trucks on the road is, in its turn, because of those signature policies of neoliberalism, free trade and deregulation. The first caused the quantum leap in cross-border transport that is clogging the traffic arteries. The second facilitated too easy entry into the industry and created a rush-to-the-bottom competitiveness that left many truckers not only tired much of the time - which makes me in my car shift automatically from anxiety to panic - but also vulnerable to adverse market shifts.
  Like the doubling of the price of diesel, with every expectation that it will rise some more before it comes down. Of course, you have to be a neoclassical economist working for the Competition Bureau in Ottawa to think this is just the outcome of free markets, the oil industry being riddled with the monopoly powers of OPEC and Big Oil.
  So they're the winners. The truckers are the first on the firing line as losers. They are little people in big cabs who are being pushed to the wall by the realities of "globalization" and "the market." They have two options. Each of them can wait to negotiate a better contract with the big shippers, meanwhile sinking below the poverty line and risking bankruptcy. That's the way of the market. (I almost wrote "working of the market" and then remembered it's only people who work.) In the words of the great Uruguan writer Eduardo Galeano, "Free markets allow us to accept the prices imposed upon us."
  Or they can give collective voice; they can protest, organize, unionize. They can do their damnest to compel the shippers to give a better deal fast and governments to offer some help now.
  Call this non-market behaviour and laud it for being that. It's the logic that has led the truckers to organize and the CAW, to its great credit, to give them $10,000 to help them do that.
  Meanwhile, our governments, being free market apostles, offer nothing by way, say, of tax relief. In the recent federal budget, though taxes were madly cut and some spending restored, the truckers got nary a mention. (Why do we pay people to wash their hands of our needs?)
  Environmentalists will be tempted to say that this is as it should be because any relief on fuel prices simply worsens pollution. They are right on the latter point but it is unfair to truckers and their families to let them be hung out to dry at this desperate moment in their lives. We should respect their rights today while continuing to work, with or without them, for a radically different system tomorrow.
  That way we'll have happier truckers forthwith and I'll feel better when I'm boxed in on the highway - and in the long run about breathing.

Mel Watkins is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Toronto.

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