I meet Gord Magill at Fall Creek House in Ithaca, New York. It’s a dive bar, a real one, cash only, with a bathroom door that doesn’t lock and Miller Lite ads taped onto the wall. Across the street is a towering red brick smokestack with the words ITHACA GUNS inlaid in white stone, the last remnant of a firearms factory that shuttered in the 1980s.
Although he has lived in Ithaca, his wife’s hometown, for about 10 years, Magill has been everywhere. He was born in Canada and began trucking as a teenager, following in his dad’s footsteps. He spent nearly three decades driving all around North America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, hauling just about everything you can imagine: logs, produce, waste-oil sludge. Magill, who’s 47, tells me he lost his last trucking job two-and-a-half years ago. He still has his license, but he’s spent the last few years working construction; he hasn’t found a trucking company that’ll pay him enough to deal with the bullshit.
“I feel very strongly that the industry is being fucked by a number of forces and choices and policy decisions that didn’t need to be made,” Magill tells me.
This is the subject of his new book, End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, which was published a few weeks ago. In it, Magill describes how truckers—the most common occupation for young men without a college degree—are forced to contend with, among other things, shrinking wages, competition from exploited migrants, the threat of automated vehicles, and mass surveillance through driver-facing cameras and electronic logging devices, or ELDs, which monitor how long a trucker has been driving.
