By Meagan Day

In January of 1976, the number one song on the Billboard pop chart was C.W. McCall’s “Convoy,” about a band of rebellious truck drivers who tear through America, disregarding speed limits and breezing past checkpoints. A film adaptation starring the heartthrob duo of Ali MacGraw and Kris Kristofferson followed two years later.

In 1977, the second-highest grossing film was Smokey and the Bandit, with Burt Reynolds as a hot shot trucker who agrees to smuggle bootleg beer past pursuing state troopers.

The 70s were the cultural heyday of the American trucker. In CB radio parlance, every cop was a Smokey and every ambulance was a Meat Wagon. Fill up your K-Whopper (Kenworth big rig) with go-go juice (gasoline) and ignore the double nickels (55 mph speed limits) as you drive non-stop from Idiot Island (California) to Pizza and Murder (Chicago) — that was the dream for a cadre of working-class American men.

But the imminent arrival of self-driving trucks may spell the end of trucker culture, CB slang replaced by binary code.

By the time the truck driver emerged as a cultural icon, the road had long meant freedom from social constraints. From prohibition bootleggers to beat poets on drugs, its roving denizens were fun-loving, free-wheeling and fearless outlaws. In the late 20th century, the trucker was a modern-day bandit, an interstate cowboy. But trucking was also a stable job back then, a ticket to the middle class that often came with job security, a union card, and a decent paycheck. The trucker was a masculine two-for-one: part fugitive, part family man.

Since then, however, trucking has become a low-wage job characterized by long hours, high turnover and little collective bargaining power — leading some to compare modern freight trucks to sweatshops on wheels. And now it looks as though this new technology may replace the truck driver altogether. Is there any hope for the industry in the face of new automated technology? And if the jobs are so decidedly bad, are they worth fighting for?

Freight truck driving has a history as old as the automobile itself, and in the early 20th century it was a low-paid job just like any other working class gig. But in 1950s, after the passage of the Interstate Highway Act and the expansion of the American highway system, truckers began to organize and acquire union representation — mostly the Teamsters, but other outfits too. Thanks to robust collective bargaining and industry-wide worker protections, writes Steve Viscelli in The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, “from the 1950s to the late 1970s… truckers were the best-paid and most powerful segment of the US working class.”

A 1966 comic book about a truck stop waitress’s romance with a truck driver, via retrospace.org

In 1973, 62% of truckers were unionized. But by 1996, that number had fallen to 23%. Correspondingly, wages had dropped by 30%. The shift was due to a series of deregulatory legislative efforts culminating in the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which effectively exempted the trucking industry from federal economic regulation. The industry became a competitive free-market race to the bottom, and numbers of independent contractors swelled as wages took a nosedive. Viscelli explains the transformation this way:

Trucking jobs weren’t always so bad. Hauling general freight, in particular, used to be one of the best blue-collar jobs in the US — until the late 1970s. That’s when trucking’s highly unionized labor force began losing control of trucking’s labor markets, and the federal government began deregulating the industry. Deregulation led to complete deunionization of much of the industry, as employers responded to hypercompetitive conditions. Many companies went belly-up, and wages plummeted and working conditions deteriorated among those that remained, as new, low-cost firms emerged.

A truck driver for Phil Poggi Trucking of Imperial, California shot in 1979. © Library of Congress/American Folklife Center

The deregulation of the trucking industry was part of a trend in American economics at the time. The 1973 oil crisis had left the economy flagging, and the consensus of academic economists and think tanks was that strict industry regulations, which had been in place since the New Deal, should be eliminated in order to free up the market and jumpstart the economy.

Deregulation has been great for big freight companies, which continue to reap massive revenue, and for the American consumer, who continues to receive cheap stuff via freight transit daily. But starting in the 1980s, the individual truck driver was left in the dust. As Southern rock band Alabama’s single “Roll On (Eighteen Wheeler)” dominated the Billboard country chart in 1984, glamorizing the big rig lifestyle, the job itself was becoming less glamorous.

“As effective hourly wages have declined,” writes Michael Belzer in Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation, “the only option for individual drivers who are trying to maintain their standard of living is to increase earnings by driving faster and working more hours.” In the hypercompetitive deregulated market, the maximum drive time of eleven hours is hard to enforce, with over half of drivers exceeding legal limits according to Belzer.

Longer drives result in fatigue, which leads to medical problems and depression, as does eating unhealthy road food and consuming stimulants like methamphetamine (the use of which is disproportionately common among commercial truckers). The combination of sleep deprivation, poor health and substance overuse — plus increased speed and sheer number of hours on the road — leads to an increased mortality rate, making long-haul trucking the most dangerous job in America.

And now, here come the self-driving trucks. They’re not in full swing yet, but a convoy successfully made its way across Europe earlier this month, demonstrating that the technology is maturing. No labor costs make them cheaper. No human sleep cycle makes them capable of driving all night. Programmed speed makes them fuel efficient. No judgment errors or distraction or fatigue presumably makes them safer for everyone on the road. In short, they’re hard to turn down.

Self driving trucks from the European Truck Platooning Challenge. © Daimler

If self-driving trucks were to replace truck drivers tomorrow, 1.6 million people would be out of work — that’s 1% of the US workforce. Obviously that spells trouble for the economy, but some contend that the decreased cost of common commodities due to slashed transportation cost would soften the blow, among other potential upsides. Still, the era of the human truck driver would be over. (There may still be people in self-driving trucks, but they’d be more like conductors — a whole different species.)

Once considered “the last American cowboys”, truckers are now more likely appear on screen as serial killers (see Joy Ride or Suspect Zero) — meaning their reputation has suffered along with their wages. Still, their disappearance would mark a huge loss for American culture. In addition to being the backbone of our economy for decades, truckers have been a huge part of the national imagination since the 1970s. Even as their working conditions have deteriorated, they’ve always seemed like a mainstay.

No more truck-stop diners, no more songs or movies about big rigs, no more of that universal hand-motion for getting a driver to honk his horn — it’s hard to imagine an America without the truck driver. A computerized truck fleet may be efficient, but it certainly doesn’t evoke the freedom of the American road.