US truckers hitting the brakes on tanking economy

Until the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, "Hit me! Please, hit me again!" You can take my house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time before you repossess. Take my job and I'll just slink off somewhere. Oh, and take my health insurance, too; I can always fall back on Advil. Then, on Apr. 1, in a wave of defiance, American truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks drove 20 miles an hour. Outside of Chicago, they drove three abreast. Near Buffalo, one driver said he was taking the week off "to pray for the economy." The truckers who organized the protests have one goal: to reduce the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, 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 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–first, because trucking is hardly a marginal business. Seventy per cent of America's goods–from Cheerios to ChapStick–travel by truck. Americans were able to survive a writers' strike, but a trucking strike would affect a lot more than viewing options. As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker, said: "If all the truckers decide to shut this country down, there's going to be nothing they can do about it." More important, the truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to "take back America," as one said. "We continue to maintain this is not just about us," JB (his CB handle) told me from a rest stop in Virginia. "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." At least one of the truckers' tactics may be translatable to the foreclosure crisis. On Mar. 29, Mr. Hayden, the Maine trucker, surrendered three rigs to be repossessed by Daimler-Chrysler–only he did it publicly, right in front of the statehouse in Augusta. As the Daimler-Chrysler representative took the keys, he said, according to Mr. Hayden, "I don't see why you couldn't make the payments." To which Mr. Hayden responded: "See, I have to pay for fuel and food, and I've eaten too many meals in my life to give that up." Suppose homeowners were to start making their foreclosures into public events–inviting the neighbors and the press, getting someone to camcord the furniture on the lawn. Maybe, for a nice dramatic touch, have the neighbors shower the arriving bankers with dollar bills and loose change, since those bankers never seem to get enough. But the larger message of the protest is about pride or, more humbly put, self-respect. Missouri-based driver Dan Little told me: "My granddad said, and he was the smartest man I ever knew, 'If you don't stand up for yourself, ain't nobody gonna stand up for you.'" The actions during the first week in April were just the beginning. There's talk of a protest in Indiana on Apr. 18, another in New York City, and a giant convergence of trucks in Washington on Apr. 28. Who knows what it will all add up to? Already, according to JB, some of the big trucking companies are threatening to fire any employee who joins the owner-operators' protests. But at least we have one shining example of defiance in the face of economic assault. There comes a point when you stop scrambling around on all fours and, like JB and his fellow drivers across America, you finally stand up. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of Nickel and Dimed and, most recently, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy