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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