Not only is the Left disgusted by it, but it refuses to recognize it is happening. In the same way that a nonfeminist woman is degraded to the status of not a woman, or a racial minority with the wrong politics is accused of multiracial whiteness, workers taking political action that isn’t controlled by the Left are deemed not workers at all. Returning to their orthodox Marxist categories, they sniff that the majority of these workers own their rigs and are thus more like the middle class.
But this doesn’t capture the way truckers often slide from being company workers to owner-operators and back again. It doesn’t capture that truckers are obviously united by the very nature of their work and the unique culture of trucking itself, more than they are divided by their notional economic relationship to the means of production.
In this case, the traditional class categories matter. Truckers earn their living through their skills. That separates them from members of the laptop class, who earn it by their knowledge and formation in higher education. The Covid-19 pandemic has only highlighted and heightened the differences between “essential workers” such as the truckers and the people who hid in Zoom life. People who make deliveries by driving 40-ton trailers on asphalt don’t see a need for the kind of leadership on offer from people who talk about “deliverables” on digital slide decks. It’s notable too that this is a movement almost entirely of men. Remember that the truckers in the 1970s wanted faster roads, and the freedom to earn more. Perhaps the Left is now only suited to lead women workers, whose demands in the workplace are for conformity and social rules that tame the environment, who want safety.
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