The Disorganized Effort of a Trucker Strike Against Rising Diesel Prices

By the time this article goes to press, truckers around America may have (or may not have) gone on strike to protest the ridiculously high price of diesel fuel in this country. And we'll presume you all stocked up on toilet paper in the event truckers park their trucks for a week and don't get it to your local grocery stores. But while the strike hasn't happened yet as I put this article to paper, I can pretty much guess the outcome. It's quite clear that because there isn't a consolidated opinion on the issue, several factions have developed that will mean scattershot truckers sitting it out somewhere around the first week of April...and who will probably get in trouble in the process for not working. Plus, I suspect that if there was a consolidated effort, our own government would force them back to work by threatening to fire them much like the infamous American Airline ATC strike in 1981. You may recall Ronald Reagan firing all the air traffic controllers who were on strike then to give the message that they shouldn't disrupt America's economic machine.

Well, maybe I'm wrong and the trucker's strike will be more successful by the time you're reading this. You may have heard that it was all started via an internet campaign by a trucker in Missouri who supposedly managed to get the commitment of 1,000 other truckers around the U.S. who would all go on strike April 1 (which is probably a bad day to do it for obvious reasons). When you read comments on the websites devoted to this, however, you see other truckers piping in saying they've heard at least half-a-dozen other campaigns to sit it out as a form of striking against high diesel prices. After seeing all that confusion and inability to join together--it makes you feel that the war of getting out from under the ever-increasing strong thumb of OPEC is becoming futile.