John Cox

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Interesting

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | How Life as a Trucker Devolved Into a Dystopian Nightmare

Long-haul truckers endure extreme surveillance, declining real wages since the 1970s, and dangerous working conditions—forced to work excessive hours because they're paid by the mile rather than hourly—which creates the endemic exhaustion that safety systems are deployed to manage. Deregulation in the 1970s destroyed the unionized trucking industry, triggering a 91 percent turnover rate as workers flee wages and conditions that have become progressively worse. The vaccine mandate that sparked the Canadian trucker protest resonated precisely because truckers already experience such total control over their labor and bodies that this additional government mandate became the breaking point for an industry that has been "a keg of dynamite waiting to explode for 39 years."

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www.inverse.com

15 Years Ago, a Visionary Director Made a Shocking Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie That Was Ahead of Its Time

Alex Rivera's 2008 science fiction film *Sleep Dealer* imagines a dystopian near-future where a sealed U.S.-Mexico border no longer stops American exploitation of Mexican labor—instead, workers have nodes implanted in their bodies to remotely control robots performing jobs in the U.S. while their physical bodies remain in Mexico, drained of energy in networked factories. The film follows Memo, a young man who journeys to Tijuana after a drone strike kills his father, only to discover that even this technological form of cross-border employment offers no escape from dehumanization and the hollow promise of the American Dream. Rivera uses practical effects and modest cinematography to explore how systems of oppression manipulate even marginalized people into enforcing them, while ultimately suggesting that connection to the land and solidarity against common enemies might offer resistance to this new world order.

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Washington Post

Trucking used to be a ticket to the middle class. Now it’s just another low-wage job.

Port truck drivers in New Jersey have been devastated by decades of deregulation that converted unionized employees into misclassified "independent contractors," leaving them earning roughly $28,000 annually while bearing all costs for fuel, tolls, insurance, and equipment. The Teamsters union has pushed legislation to presume drivers are employees unless companies prove otherwise, but faces opposition from the trucking industry, the governor's office, and even some drivers themselves—including organizer Edisson Villacis, who fears that reclassification would destroy the informal Latino-owned service businesses that depend on independent operators. The article explores how this shift has created an exploitative system where companies benefit from unpaid waiting time and uncompensated delays while drivers like Miguel Tigre face bankruptcy, health crises, and impossible working conditions.

Permalink laboreconomicstrucking

Salon.com

Bring back the 40-hour work week - AlterNet - Salon.com

Drawing on 150 years of historical research and business data, this article argues that the modern expectation of 50-60+ hour workweeks is economically counterproductive and based on false assumptions about productivity. Knowledge workers have only about six productive hours per day, and working beyond 40 hours per week consistently produces fatigue-related errors, safety hazards, and reduced output that negates any gains from extra time in the office. The article traces how this consensus—accepted from the 1930s through 1960s by major corporations including Henry Ford—was abandoned in the 1980s when Silicon Valley's startup culture romanticized "passion" and extreme hours, a mentality that spread across industries despite research showing that brief overtime sprints lose their productivity advantage after eight weeks and create lasting burnout that takes weeks to recover from.

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