Gord Magill’s End of the Road reviewed by COMPACT.
Coverage of fatal crashes involving transport trucks steered by immigrant drivers often follows a familiar script. One CNN newscast from October covering a crash in which three people were killed started, “This is a tragic case, but it’s drawing particular attention from right-wing media not because of who the victims of the crash were, but because of who the driver of the truck was”—an undocumented immigrant from India. Viewers are subtly invited to drop this story into a jar marked “right-wing culture war,” and move on with their lives. The problem isn’t the system, the narrative seems to say, but the attitudes of those questioning it.
Gord Magill’s new book, The End of the Road, reveals a much more complicated and troubling picture. What looks from the outside like a series of unrelated incidents is, in Magill’s rendering, the product of a profound transformation in the trucking industry. There is a “war on truckers,” the book’s subtitle tells us, and it is being waged not just with cheap labor from abroad, but with surveillance, safetyism, and threats of automation that strip autonomy from workers.
Magill, a veteran trucker, discusses his subject with familiarity and pride. He recalls a time when trucking, though always difficult and never fully free, carried with it a degree of autonomy. It was a way of life as well as a job, with its own shared spaces in truck stops and bars, unwritten codes of conduct, and a hard-won competence that commanded respect.
