Millions
of truck drivers around the world are considered the next "species
for extinction" from the working class, as many predict their
replacement by trucks without drivers. Once again, however, the enemy
is not among the machines.
Forty years
will be passed in a few months since the release of "Convoy"
by Sam Peckinpah - one of the few productions that had transferred to
the big screen not the content of a book, but that of a song. Bill
Fries' same title "Convoy", tells the story about a
rebellion of a group of truck drivers crossing the US from the West
to the East Coast without stopping at police and national guard
controls.
Despite the
fact that the song and the film are two digestible products of the
new American Country and that of anti-Westerns school in which Sam
Peckinpah had specialized, they manage to capture the effects of the
first major crisis of the capitalist system after WWII .
Drivers
revolt against the new 55-mile speed limit imposed after the 1973 oil
crisis when the US was trying to limit fuel consumption.
At the same
time, however, in order to increase their paycheck a little bit, the
truck drivers start to tear the so-called swindle sheets, the
logbooks of the truck in which they were obliged to record the
driving hours so as not to exceed the limit imposed by the federal
government. Therefore, "Convoy", as a song and as a movie,
captures the latest outbursts of the unbridled spontaneity that
characterizes American truck drivers as their sector is the first
that experiences the crisis of the 1970s.
Paradoxically,
the legend of the uncontrollable asphalt cowboy will be maintained
over the next decades (as we see in the low quality movie "Over
the Top" with Sylvester Stallone), despite the fact that drivers
are losing continuous battles against the government, and above all,
against the major transport companies.
With the
development of computers, companies begin to record not only the
driving hours and the speed of the vehicle, but even how often and
how much the vehicles are braking and accelerating. Trucks and
drivers become the sprockets of a giant 700 billion dollars industry,
which transports 70% of the products within the US.
In this
chain, however, drivers are the weak link. Their wages (together with
the loaders and other supporting jobs around the industry) exceed 75%
of the total cost of road transports. Adding to this "flaw"
the fact that they need to make stops to rest and sleep, but also
that they are often involved in accidents that cost US economy
billions of dollars, and you can easily understand why some would
want to replace them with robots as soon as possible.
The first
successful attempt was made a year ago when an 18-wheel truck of the
OTTO company, which has been bought by UBER, transported 45,000
thousand Budweiser beer cans (pay attention to the symbolism) in a
distance of 200 kilometers. At the same time, a truck convoy without
drivers crossed Europe in the context of an experimental project
jointly conducted by DAF, Daimler, Iveco and MAN.
Concern is
evident in several professional drivers' unions around the world. The
famous 'teamsters', the union of drivers in the US, is now fighting
against time to prevent Congress regulations that will speed up the
introduction of unmanned vehicles for very large trucks.
Would the
solution be a real, this time, rebellion of drivers? Is a new
Luddites movement - industrial workers who were destroying machinery
of the factories at the beginning of the 19th century - ready to take
action? Perhaps. As long as drivers, like Luddites, understand that
their real enemy is not robots and machines. The American truck
drivers, recently the Guardian reported, were earning 38,000 dollars
in 1980. Adjusted for inflation, the amount now stands at 114,000
dollars, but drivers earn today only 41,000 dollars. It's not robots
that stolen all that money from them.
The
destruction of the machines, as explained by the Marxist historian
Eric Hobsbawm, was a form of "collective negotiation through
rebellion." And it was just as effective as any other form of
collective negotiation. However, machines and technology were never
the real enemies.
Article
by Aris Chatzistefanou, translated from the original source:
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