Homeless on Wheels
A trucker in today’s deregulated industry is nobody’s idea of an entrepreneur.
Photo by Benjamin Lorr.
Backbencher will post from time to time contributions from other writers, on the theory that the proprietor can become a bit of a bore. This essay is adapted from Benjamin Lorr’s excellent new book The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Benjamin Lorr.
I meet Lynne (not her real name) in an empty parking lot. She’s standing talking on a Bluetooth headpiece, stomping around the asphalt, her rig gleaming behind her.
I didn’t know what to expect, but not this. Standing a solid six feet, two inches, large in all proportions, overweight in none, Lynne looks like she walked off a shot put team. Her hair hangs down like a stringy curtain over her face. She wears cowboy boots, a t-shirt, and a pair of ripped jeans.
“He’s here,” she says to no one but me. Her phone call definitely over, the Bluetooth is off her face, and suddenly a giant hand is stuck out to greet me, attached to a very skeptical glance.
We stand there in handshake for a moment.
“I recommend you get yourself a Gatorade bottle.” She looks me up and down, “Wide mouth for you.”
I don’t believe that I react to this.
“Stop looking pale. I’m just fucking with you. Nothing in those pants looks like you’re a wide mouth anything.” She turns back toward the truck. “I’m saying we’ll be doing a lot of driving. Hope you know what you’re getting into.”
Everything in your life comes to you in a truck, from big appliances to the smallest bite of food—every single staple, butter knife, copper wire, or ceramic mug. A staggering 10.7 billion tons of freight per year get moved around the country on trucks, which breaks down to 350 pounds per man, woman, and child per day. Trucking is the most common form of employment in most states, with more than 12.6 million commercial drivers on our roads. It is also one of the most dangerous jobs, up there with deep-sea fishing and timber cutting. It’s an industry uniquely connected to our economic life, the circulatory system through which GDP flows, firmly but invisibly attached to everything we consume.
Lynne and I started at Alamance Foods, outside Charlotte, North Carolina. Two Mexican lumpers scooted pallets of something labelled DAIRY into our truck. Lynne scrawled her signature on a clipboard, the lumpers pulled down the back door, and Lynne drove off. We had 1,050 miles to go and three stops to make at different distribution centers.
At the third stop, while we wait at 4 a.m. for Lynne’s truck to be unloaded outside an ALDI distribution center, we try to calculate what she might make for the trip.
Lynne gets $1,231 gross, or $1.16 per mile. The shipper adds in $368.50 to help pay for fuel, Lynne’s single biggest cost by a wide margin.
It all sounds pretty good for two to three days’ work until you look at what comes out.
Cargill takes 28 percent of the gross and 10 percent of the fuel cost for the privilege of driving in its fleet. There’s a $300 weekly payment for leasing the truck, plus $300 Lynne must pay for the previous week, when work was slow but her truck payment was still due. Add in lumper fees, heavy-usage taxes, costs for various federally mandated fuel additives, and a mandatory cleaning service after every load, and we’re below $500 for the entire trip.
Then there are the fixed costs. Lynne pays taxes per mile, per state, and the trucking company that issues her check requires that she hire an accountant to handle the complexity of that.
The trucking company also requires that she retain its lawyer to handle billing disputes, and that she buy insurance.
Then there’s maintenance on Lynne’s truck, which, when you drive 12,000 miles a month, is a whole different ball of wax than getting a tune-up for your Honda Civic.
Then there’s a security escrow account, maintained by the trucking company, to which Lynne’s contractually obligated to contribute as a hedge against her throwing up her arms and deciding she wants to walk away from her lease-to-own agreement.
Finally, there are various tiny fees for administrative work, for mapping devices, for “mobile communication terminals,” some of which she can’t completely explain even as they bleed her paycheck.
As an “owner-operator,” Lynne absorbs certain inherent financial risks on behalf of the trucking company. The week before I joined her, while she dozed at a truck stop, the driver next to her crunched into her. Lynne awoke to the jolt and scrambled out of her bunk only to watch as the driver fled the lot, sticking her with the insurance claim. The damage was fairly slight, but the thousand-dollar deductible left her liable for the entire amount.
“If I need a repair done, and I actually have the money, I just pay for it,” she says. “But that is never the case. Instead I gotta get approval, then I gotta get a loan, and then they charge extra fees for the loan, and then I have to use their garage to get it fixed.”
Worst of all, every time there is a repair, Lynne sits. No loads, no money coming in.
Lynne estimates that she grossed $200,000 last year, but that she took home less than $17,000. This for a 14-year veteran trucker who knows her industry inside and out. Who lives in her truck and stays out on the road three weeks at a time. Who worked more than seventy hours the week I was with her, sleeping in four to five hour bursts. Who didn’t see her mother for two years because she didn’t have the time off and couldn’t get loads that lined up with her mother’s location.
That $17,000 figure, I feel pretty sure, is inflated by pride. The week I was with her Lynne received a check for $100, which was what she’d received the week before, and the week before that.
“It’s in my contract,” she says. “No matter how many expenses I have, I always have the right to a check for $100. So that is what I usually get.… I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing how to stretch it.”
To recap: Lynne is homeless, sleeping exclusively in the cab of a truck she does not yet own, and that almost certainly she will lose eventually, when she can no longer make payments on it. Her credit is shot. She has outstanding vet bills for her two dogs, the closest and most beloved members of her family. Her personal health is so wrecked that it’s hard even to discuss. Suffice to say, she cannot eat most food because she lost every one of her teeth and her new dentures are not properly fitted, so it pains her to chew. When I learn this, Lynne’s obsession with Pepsi for calories shifts, in my brain, into absolute sadness.
Lynne is very good at her job. Hyper-vigilant on the road and extremely hardworking, a team player, who never in my presence complains about a task given to her or her lot in life. She is a walking, breathing demonstration of how trucking fell from being a middle class job in the 1970s to its current reality, where the driver is liable to be just another disposable part designed to be worn to exhaustion.