Trucking is an industry in crisis. There’s a shortage of drivers: In 2021, a record 81,000 jobs went unfilled. But the problem isn’t a lack of people who can drive a truck, as Emily Gogolak explains in this reported essay. Rather, it’s the lifestyle: Truckers work insanely long hours for low pay, and they often live out of their cabs. So what kind of person wants to become a trucker today? Gogolak meets several candidates at a training school in Texas, who together offer a window into the death of the American dream:
Yanis was younger than the rest of us, but she was already stressed about her future. She wanted to be out of her parents’ place by winter, but that meant she needed to graduate from Changing Lanes and start filling her nearly empty bank account. Her family lived on ten acres of land in an unincorporated pocket of Travis County that was still mostly rural but was being eaten up fast by developers. Yanis reckoned that her father—who was also a truck driver—could sell the land for a couple million, but he didn’t want to. The problem was that they didn’t have utilities, which was why she wanted to make enough money to move out before the cold set in. It was weird being surrounded by a boomtown but disconnected from it, she told me: “We kind of live like in the old times.”
Yanis had worked as a cleaner at an airport lounge; at a UPS warehouse; as a security guard at an Apple corporate office in the hill country. Then she started working security at Tesla’s nearby Gigafactory. It took a full hour to walk across; when Elon Musk came to visit, his dog apparently had its own security guard. Yanis and her boyfriend, who also worked there, figured out that electricians made the best money at the factory, so they became electricians. In all of her work, she’d often been one of the few women. “You have to show them that you can do things better than them,” she said. “If you’re doing an outlet, the outlet has to look beautiful.” Ultimately, though, Yanis’s jobs have taught her about how the world works—that “the job that you can die on,” she told me, “is where they’re gonna pay you the most.
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