It's mid-morning on a muggy Wednesday in August, and Melissa Rojas and I are careening east through Texas on Interstate 30. The sky is ominous and dark for miles, but we’re making good time, and we’re convinced we'll outrun any storm that’s brewing.
Just outside of Dallas, though, the heavens crack open and we slam into sheets of water. The road becomes a manic, gray blur. Red brake lights pop up ahead. A man’s voice yells over the CB radio: "Where the fuck did the road go?" Twenty yards up, a black sedan has spun out. Rojas, 34, slows our Freightliner Coronado to 55 miles per hour, then 35, then 15 as we glide around the accident.
Throughout this meteorological emergency, Rojas has kept her French-manicured hands resting calmly on the steering wheel. As we drive past the breakdown, she eases the 13-speed gearshift into sixth. "This is actually no more dangerous than being in a car," she says casually, reaching up to adjust her rearview mirror. "That car spun out ’cause it was really light.”
"But," she adds, turning her eyes back to the road, "if I hydroplane, we're flipping over."
I'm trying not to panic, but I will later be told that my knuckles turned white during what seemed to be a close brush with death. But for Rojas, a third-generation truck driver, this moment could not be more ordinary. The Michigan-based mom has been behind the wheel of long-haul trucks for three and a half years and currently runs a route that takes her from Michigan to New Mexico and back again — a six-day, 3,500-mile round trip that she makes every single week.
By the time we hit the rain, we're five days in. We've dined in the truck, slept in the truck, and considered the possibility of urinating in the truck. We have answered to no one and, with the exception of getting the cargo at the right time, have made our own schedule, determined our own route, and stopped whenever nature called.
This isn’t to say that the open road is totally lawless. There are rules — regulations, even! — that govern the behavior of the men and women who commandeer 18-wheelers. But trucking is one of the last American industries in which those seeking to start over can create themselves anew on the country's highways. Training programs are open to anyone and everyone, and many see it as a path to salvation in exchange for little more than putting life, limb, and sanity on the line and staring down the very nothingness of the turnpike in the name of American commerce.
Melissa Rojas is one of very few women who do this job. In 2014, 3.4 million truck drivers were on the road, and only 5.8% of them were women. It's a dangerous job all around; in 2013, 3,858 drivers were involved in fatal accidents. There are also constant, unexpected hazards: One of Rojas's male friends would later tell me about encountering alligators at a loading dock lot in Louisiana bayou country. But for female drivers, the danger goes much further. Reports of rape and sexual harassment on the road are rampant, often at the hands of other drivers. And trucking is riddled with an outdated boys club mentality; last year, lawsuits were filed against at least two major trucking companies, claiming that female employees were routinely harassed or assaulted, and that supervisors did nothing about it.
Driving a truck keeps Rojas away from her children and puts aches and pains in her body. The road can be tiresome, and the hours of solitude sometimes become heartbreakingly lonely. But she's propelled by her desire to take care of her kids by any means necessary, and the job’s isolation is balanced by the constant promise of freedom over the horizon.
“What other job, besides construction, do you get to be outside all day long?" she says. "What other job can you set your own schedule? I thought about doing something else. Dispatching or something. ... But this is the best job I ever had.”
Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News
Our trip begins on a pristine Saturday afternoon at Rojas’s two-bedroom home in Coldwater, Michigan, on the banks of Cemetery Lake. After picking up her truck’s cab from its parking spot down the street, we take a 45-minute southwesterly drive to Kautex's warehouse in Avilla, Indiana, where we’ll retrieve a truckful of empty racks. An international automotive supplier that makes and distributes car parts, Kautex manufactures the smog-checking devices that we’ll be transporting back from New Mexico. Inside the warehouse, Rojas picks up paperwork from a matronly, bespectacled receptionist dressed in a highlighter-yellow safety vest, then returns back to the truck.
"The only trucker code that's out there now — but it's dying — is you help your brother."
Before every trip that they take, drivers are required by federal law to conduct a vehicle inspection. They check their brakes, steering mechanisms, lighting reflectors, tires, horn, wheels, and emergency equipment to make sure they’re functioning properly. These inspections are done again every morning before getting on the road, and once again at night before going to sleep. Drivers don’t always adhere to the rules, but Rojas — like many other women who get behind the wheel — is a stickler for precision.
“If you don't pre-trip your cab,” she says, “you’re an idiot.”
The truck Rojas and I will be living in for the next six days is notably enormous; imagine four grown elephants walking in tandem, trunk to tail. There’s a good 3 feet between the bottom of the truck and the pavement, into which Rojas, at 5'2", crouches easily to examine the brake lines, brake pads, tire pressure, and landing gear. She then climbs up between the cab and the truck — an area called the fifth wheel — to inspect air and electricity hoses.
It’s worth noting here that Rojas doesn’t allow the grit of the job to preclude any feminine beauty practices. Her asymmetric bob is freshly blown out and highlighted with pale streaks of baby blue and My Little Pony purple. Her acrylics glisten, rhinestone-pocketed jeans accent her physique, and her makeup is painted on with a deft hand — all of which proves a striking contrast to the greasy, oily gray of the machinery.
As she takes me on a tour of the machine, I point to the empty truck that will eventually house our cargo.
“What is this called?” I say.
Rojas looks down at me incredulously.
“The trailer?” she says. “Trailer” — she points again to the large compartment — “tractor” — she points to the cab. “Tractor-trailer. I have never been around anyone who is literally that clueless.”
"I have to realize," she will tell me later, "that there are people out there like you."
Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News
The brisk blue Indiana horizon is punctuated with cherry-red barns and cobalt tractors and golden rows of corn. Over the course of two hours, the two-lane farm road intersects Route 3, which eventually merges with Interstate 69.
The country's roads are almost part of Rojas's genetic makeup. Her mother and stepfather both operated long-haul commercial vehicles, as did her maternal grandfather. As a teenager, she was often left alone while they were on the road, and she swore up and down and on everything holy that she would never follow in their footsteps.
But in 2012, she was working three part-time jobs — bartending, cashiering at McDonald’s, and selling shoes — and still struggling to support herself and her children. One day, she was scrolling through Monster.com and an ad kept popping up. “‘Get your commercial driver's license! Make $60,000 a year!’” she remembers. “I did it because I needed money."
C1 Truck Driver Training, the school that ran the ads, put Rojas up in a hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for four weeks of training. True to her genes, she was a natural.
"I took to it like a fish to water," she says. "It was not necessarily conducive to the home life I wanted to have, but it paid the bills — more than working at McDonald's for the rest of my life."
Rojas went on to work for three companies: USA Trucks and Schneider National — both of which are among the largest trucking companies in the U.S. — and her current employer, a mom-and-pop operation owned by Michigan-based Therese and Larry McComb.
The trucking industry has changed tremendously since Rojas’s parents were on the road; in the past 30 years, capitalist competition has erased the once-courteous relations between companies. According to the IRS, after the industry was partially deregulated in 1980, “the formerly gentlemanly manner in which the big players dealt with each other became a battle to the death.”
In the U.S., the largest trucking companies — including J.B. Hunt, C.R. England, and Swift Transportation — operate tens of thousands of vehicles each. Drivers are at the mercy of anonymous dispatchers, and can be on the road for months at a time.
The McCombs, on the other hand, operate five trucks. Larry McComb and Rojas talk on the phone daily, and he deeply understands the importance of getting her home to see her kids; the McCombs' daughter was killed by her husband in 2010, and they now run a nonprofit, The Venus Foundation, for victims of domestic abuse. Rojas’s bosses also allow her to bring her children on the truck if need be; they’ve come along over school vacations and long weekends, and Rojas briefly experimented with home-schooling them from the road.
For the McCombs to care so much about their employees is a breath of fresh air in an industry that’s plagued with problems. In addition to drivers being run into the ground with unrelenting routes, their pay has been tumbling for decades, many are beset with health issues, and sexual harassment is common enough that one major U.S. trucking company has faced multiple lawsuits in the past decade.
That company is Iowa-based CRST Expedited, which employs over 3,500 drivers and sends them on the road in teams. Often, women are paired with men for one-on-one, hands-on training. In 2007, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit on behalf of 270 female CRST Expedited employees or former employees who had allegedly been sexually assaulted by fellow drivers or trainers.
The allegations were shocking. In one instance, a female employee said that her trainer raped her on his truck after she turned down his bribery and advances. “He said, ‘Well, you give me a piece of your ass, and I will grade you and will pass you,’” she stated in her testimony. When she said no, “he force[d] me to have sex with him.” In another instance, a male trainer allegedly told his female trainee that he and his friends wanted to tie her up and “do things to her.” When she repeatedly turned down his requests for sex, he pulled out a knife, placed it on the dashboard, and refused to let her off the truck.
After reporting him to several of her supervisors, the trainee went up the chain to a member of CRST Expedited’s nearly all-male senior management team. “What are you going to do when they [harassing male drivers] kill one of these women?” she asked. The manager replied, “We'll deal with that when it happens.”
Though CRST ultimately settled with the lead plaintiff, the class-action suit was dismissed by a federal judge because the EEOC hadn’t met certain requirements before bringing the claims to court. (The EEOC and CRST Expedited have since been in a protracted legal battle over whether the commission should pay the company’s court fees, a case that is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court later this month.) In 2011, CRST was ordered in a separate case to pay $1.5 million to another former driver who alleged her trainer had raped her.
Most recently, in May 2015, another lawsuit was filed against CRST Expedited by three female drivers on behalf of an estimated group of over 100 women. It alleges that nothing has changed in the past several years, and that some women resorted to sleeping with knives and tasers under their pillows to ward off any attacks. CRST has since earned a nickname: Constantly Raping Student Truckers. (The company declined BuzzFeed News’ request for comment).
Desiree Wood, 51, founded the advocacy group REAL Women in Trucking in 2010 after constantly hearing stories about female drivers suffering sexual harassment and assault — herself included — and then being ignored by their superiors. “What I found was, [harassment and assault] wasn't just happening where I was working,” she says. And brushing off womens' reports "seemed to be the way they dealt with drivers. The easiest way to deal with a woman who’s complaining about sexual assault or sexual misconduct is to say she can’t drive, or she’s crazy, and make her go away.”
Rojas knows all of this quite well; at one of her old companies (she declines to say which one), she was sexually harassed by a colleague. She called her supervisor and insisted that the other driver be reprimanded. He was, but as far as Rojas knows, he was not fired. “I had asked that he be reprimanded instead of fired if it had been his first report,” she says. “I hate to see someone lose their job [but] I wanted him to be aware, women in our field will not tolerate such behavior.”
Jessica Ogilvie for BuzzFeed News
A general lack of attention to female employees’ safety exists despite the fact that the industry is desperate for more drivers; according to the American Truckers Associations, the trucker shortage in the U.S. was near an all-time high as of 2014, at 38,000 vacancies and counting. The group notes that the lack of women drivers is part of the reason for the shortage, and that they represent a "large, untapped portion of the population"
Efforts have recently been made to fix the problem, but trucking still poses major safety risks for women. Overnight rest areas are not overseen by security personnel, nor are showers or truck stops. (Driving equipment for women is even hard to come by; at a truck stop in Indiana, Rojas has to buy men's working gloves, which dangle off her fingers like a kid’s hand-me-downs.) With all this in mind, Rojas takes no chances. "If I ever have to stop at night where I don't feel comfortable," she says, "I will get out, and I will take my tire thumper with me."
"Guys will joke when I walk by, like, 'I didn't do it, I swear!' I'm like, 'Yeah,'" she says, hoisting her eyebrows, “'Keep it that way. ’Cause I'm not afraid to start swinging, buddy. If I catch you in the nuts, I don't care.’”
Jessica Ogilvie for BuzzFeed News
No comments:
Post a Comment