Review by Oliver Bateman in Real Clear Pennsylvania
Unless you’ve spent hours penned in by big rigs on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, you may not realize how much skin Pennsylvania has in the trucking game. As it stands, the Commonwealth ranks fourth in the country in professional truck drivers, fifth in tonnage moved (900 million tons worth $1.1 trillion in 2022, projected by TRIP to nearly double in value by 2050), and ninth in fatal large-truck crashes, with 185 deaths in 2022, a 14% increase over the year before. Trucking employment in the state has grown roughly 41% since 1992.
Anyone who has driven the Turnpike west toward Pittsburgh in the last few years, or watched the Lehigh Valley turn into one continuous warehouse, has experienced the rigged and exceedingly dangerous system that Canadian trucker Gord Magill spent twenty-five years inside and now indicts at book length in End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers.
Only a genuine insider could have written this much-needed jeremiad. The relevant academic literature on American trucking has been accumulating for a quarter-century. Michael Belzer’s Sweatshops on Wheels came out in 2000. Steve Viscelli became a trucker in order to write The Big Rig (2016) — and spoke to me and Magill in 2022. Karen Levy’s Data Driven (2022) offers a reasonably thorough account of electronic surveillance inside the cab. David Correll at MIT has been testifying before Congress for years that long-haul drivers are spending nearly half their legal hours sitting unpaid at loading docks.
A fair amount of investigative journalism likewise exists: USA Today’s “Rigged” series on lease-operator peonage; the Wall Street Journal’s ongoing reporting on Amazon Relay contractor crashes (140-plus motorists killed by 2024); CBC’s coverage of the foreign-driver pipeline into Canadian and U.S. trucking. What had not existed until this very moment was a writer with all of it in his head at the same time. Magill — who has in-laws in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood — is the nigh-mythical working-class autodidact who has consumed all of it while hauling steel out of Hamilton mills and pulling road trains across the Australian Outback during the same period these academics were writing their own supposedly pathbreaking work.
