Download or read book The Big Rig written by Steve Viscelli and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long-haul trucks have been described as sweatshops on wheels. The typical long-haul trucker works the equivalent of two full-time jobs, often for little more than minimum wage. But it wasn’t always this way. Trucking used to be one of the best working-class jobs in the United States. The Big Rig explains how this massive degradation in the quality of work has occurred, and how companies achieve a compliant and dedicated workforce despite it. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews and years of extensive observation, including six months training and working as a long-haul trucker, Viscelli explains in detail how labor is recruited, trained, and used in the industry. He then shows how inexperienced workers are convinced to lease a truck and to work as independent contractors. He explains how deregulation and collective action by employers transformed trucking’s labor markets--once dominated by the largest and most powerful union in US history--into an important example of the costs of contemporary labor markets for workers and the general public.
Download or read book The Long Haul A Trucker s Tales of Life on the Road written by Finn Murphy and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There’s nothing semi about Finn Murphy’s trucking tales of The Long Haul.”—Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair More than thirty years ago, Finn Murphy dropped out of college to become a long-haul trucker. Since then he’s covered more than a million miles as a mover, packing, loading, hauling people’s belongings all over America. In The Long Haul, Murphy recounts with wit, candor, and charm the America he has seen change over the decades and the poignant, funny, and often haunting stories of the people he encounters on the job.
Download or read book The Trucker s World written by Rothe, J. Peter (John Peter) and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about truck driver's lives, risks, and views on safety. As "a "group, truckers represent a significant population of road users whose high-exposure driving creates a major challenge for safety. Research into the larger social, political, and economic forces that affect trucker's safety problems has been scarce. "The Trucker's World "comes to terms with the socioeconomic environment that contributes to breakdown in trucker safety and chronicles the lives and times of truckers as they try to make ends meet. It analyzes driver risk by exploring the reasons, reactions, and consequences of risk. The author approaches his task with a research question: Why is the average trucker continuously placed in conditions that, according to truckers, demand risky driving? As a result of direct experience with truckers and trucking, Rothe observes that truck drivers act as they do to gain autonomy over their work, freedom from control of others, and assurance of a reasonable livelihood. In order to maintain a sufficient income in the transportation market, even the most serious drivers perform tasks that often impinge on lethality and safety, not as blatant radicals or daredevils fighting the system, but as persons responding to the fear that they may lose their livelihood in trucking. The thrust in trucker safety has followed a victimization philosophy in which emphasis on interventions has been aimed directly at truckers. Rothe contends that safety programs would work better if they emphasized what influences, motivates, or encourages truckers to take chances on the road. With this in mind, he analyzes driver risk, vehicle maintenance, owner-operator, company driver, policing, home life, drugs and alcohol, government regulations, and hours of service as they are seen by truckers, industry officials, and others. Expanding our vision to encompass essential factors in the socioeconomic reality of the truck-driving culture. Rothe elucidates the far-reaching consequences that safety issues have for truckers, other road users, policymakers, and traffic safety educators.
Download or read book A Trucker s Tale written by Ed Miller and published by Apollo Publishers. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wit, wisdom, adventure, and revelations from sixty years on the road. They say that only truck drivers experience the true grandeur and landscape of America: the winding mountainsides at sunrise, the first frosts of winter descending on apple orchards, the call of the rising roosters. In A Trucker's Tale, Ed Miller gives an inside look at the allure of the work and the colorful characters who haul our goods on the open road. He shares what it was like to grow up in a boisterous trucking family, his experience as an equipment officer in Vietnam, the wide range of vehicles he's mounted, and the daily trials, tribulations, risks, and exploits that define life as a trucker. Ed's vibrant, no-holds-barred tales are hilarious and heartwarming, sometimes cringeworthy or unbelievable—recollections of heroic feels as well as the “fishing stories” that have stretched and shifted from CB radio to CB radio. Many are the results of what he calls, “just plain stupidity.” Others bring to light the small acts of kindness and grand gestures that these Knights of the Highway perform each day, as well as the safety risks and continual danger that these essential workers endure. Together they paint a compelling portrait of one of the most important, but least-known industries, and reveal why Ed, and so many like him, just kept on truckin’.
Download or read book On Looking written by Lia Purpura and published by Sarabande Books. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “These pieces are not so much essays as prose poems, lyrical hymns to beauty and aesthetics.” —Publishers Weekly Lia Purpura’s daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura’s hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson’s words: “I like the silent church before the sermon begins.” In “Autopsy Report,” Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the “dripping fruits” of organs and the spine in its “wet, red earth.” A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in “On Form,” where she notes that “in order to see their particular beauty . . . we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction.” Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual. Above all, Purpura’s essays are a call to notice. She is writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror. As she says: “By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare.” This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book from a recipient of numerous awards for both prose and poetry. “Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing.” —Albert Goldbarth “Purpura’s prose is a system of delicate shocks—leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience.” —Sven Birkerts
Download or read book Eddie Stobart written by Martin Roach and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From humble beginnings in a Cumbrian farmyard over forty years ago, the Eddie Stobart fleet has found a big parking place in the nation's heart, loved as much for its 2,200 immaculate green and red trucks, each emblazoned with a girl's name on the front, as for its famous army of dedicated Stobart Spotters who try to find each one. Buckle up with the Stobart drivers, and join them on a week in the life of a massive delivery, from paperwork to pallet. Learn what it's like to be sat in the driver seat of a Stobart truck - the noises, visibility, clutch control, gears, steering - and discover the sheer size and power of these machines. Illustrated throughout with amazing photographs, and featuring first-hand stories of incredible journeys from the intrepid truckers, as well as astonishing facts and stats and the history of the fleet, this is truly an irresistible book for Stobart fans of all ages.
Download or read book Trucker Jokes Gold Rush written by Arthur Ross Romero and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Truckers are a rare breed of folks; rambling and gambling, living freedom the way true Americans live their lives. The United States of America relies on the Transportation Logistics Industry as a main lifeline for continued well being. To be able to maintain a cool and positive attitude on the road is what professional drivers do best. Laughter makes the world go around and a good joke always makes for a good day! Don't hesitate, Truckers Jokes Gold Rush, is easy reading, great on the road, at break time, for anyone, anytime and makes a perfect gift!
Download or read book Trucker and Train written by Hannah Stark and published by Clarion Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trucker loves ruling the highways, frightening other vehicles out of his way, but Train not only impresses the other vehicles, it forces Trucker to wait.
Download or read book Hush Little Trucker written by Kim Norman and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soothe truck-loving toddlers off to sleep with this vehicle-themed bedtime picture book Hush, little trucker, you’re in luck. Mama’s gonna find your lost toy truck. A new spin on the classic song “Hush, Little Baby,” this truck-themed lullaby follows a mother and child as they discover different vehicles, from a bulldozer to a front-end loader. Kim Norman’s gentle rhyming text, paired with Toshiki Nakamura’s imaginative illustrations, makes this picture book a great option for bedtime read-alouds.
Download or read book American Trucker 2010 written by Carl Smith and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-08-13 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Book is written to offer information to everyone entering trucking.
Download or read book Negotiating Work Family and Identity among Long Haul Christian Truck Drivers written by Rebecca L. Upton and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws upon ethnographic and qualitative research in the United States to demonstrate the means through which long-haul truck drivers navigate work and family tensions in ways that resonate across categories of race, class, gender and religion. It examines how Christianity and constructions of masculinity are significant in the lives of long-haul drivers and how truckers work to construct narratives of their lives as ‘good, moral’ individuals in contrast to competing cultural narratives which suggest images of romantic, rule-free, renegade lives on the open road. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, observations of long-haul truckers, and participation in a CDL school, this rich ethnography highlights how Christian trucking opportunities provide avenues through which balance is struck between work and family, masculinity and other identities. Embedded in larger social discourse about the meaning of masculinity and similar to evangelical perspectives such as those of the Promise Keepers, Christian truckers often draw upon older ideas about responsible, breadwinning fatherhood in their discourse about being good “fathers” while on the road. This discourse is in some conflict with the lived experiences of Christian truckers who simultaneously find themselves confronted by more contemporary cultural narratives of “the work-family balance” and expectations of what it means to be a good “worker” or a good “trucker.” The book offers new insight in the field of work and family studies and an extremely relevant voice in the broader contemporary discourse in the United States on the meaning of fatherhood and religion in the 21st century.
Download or read book Vietnam Convoy Trucker written by William E. (Bill) Patterson and published by Xulon Press. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vietnam Convoy Trucker recounts the story of Specialist Five William (Bill) Patterson, as he and his fellow truck drivers delivered supplies to American combat troops battling the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong. The men experienced moments of fear, boredom and humor during their almost year-long tour during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The Lord watched over them and brought all but one back safely. Various members of the company took the photographs that accompany many of the incidents he describes. Author Bio: William E. ("Bill") Patterson was born in Augusta, GA in 1943, one of seven children. He has lived all his life within ten miles of the Augusta National Golf Course. No, he has never played there! He attended public schools, and used his G.I. Bill benefit and graduated from Augusta College (now Georgia Regents University) with a Bachelor Of Business Administration (emphasis Management) degree. He was awarded the U.S. Army Commendation Medal for his Vietnam War service. Bill was a Georgia State Bowling Championship Team member as a youth and as an adult. He was awarded the U.S. Army Major Command Outstanding Program (Bowling) Managers Award in 1988 and 1989. After nearly forty years' employment with bowling centers he is now retired. He and wife Shelley are Christians and very active in their Warren Baptist Church. His priorities now are God, Family, Country and "Other" in that order of importance. He hopes his fellow Vietnam War Veterans and others will find this book worth reading.
Download or read book Blue Collar and Proud of It written by Joe Lamacchia and published by Health Communications, Inc.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Adventures of Pugsley the Pug and Trucker Joe written by Carmen Oliva and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a child, Carmen always enjoyed writing but never thought she was good enough at it until she grew older and learned there is nothing we can t accomplish as long as we apply effort and willingness to our goals in life. Her husband and children are always there to give her confidence and keep her going. Raising her children, taking care of her husband, working and going to school has created challenges but she says with their love and support, she can find herself leaping over all the hurdles. Carmen Oliva will continue to write her stories, and continue this series. Pugsley and Trucker Joe will continue to send out a message of love, bravery, and life s true meaning.
Download or read book Where the Devil Don t Stay written by Stephen Deusner and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.
Download or read book The War on Normal People written by Andrew Yang and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller from CNN Political Commentator and 2020 former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, this thought-provoking and prescient call-to-action outlines the urgent steps America must take, including Universal Basic Income (UBI), to stabilize our economy amid rapid technological change and automation. The shift toward automation is about to create a tsunami of unemployment. Not in the distant future--now. One recent estimate predicts 45 million American workers will lose their jobs within the next twelve years--jobs that won't be replaced. In a future marked by restlessness and chronic unemployment, what will happen to American society? In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang paints a dire portrait of the American economy. Rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and automation software are making millions of Americans' livelihoods irrelevant. The consequences of these trends are already being felt across our communities in the form of political unrest, drug use, and other social ills. The future looks dire-but is it unavoidable? In The War on Normal People, Yang imagines a different future--one in which having a job is distinct from the capacity to prosper and seek fulfillment. At this vision's core is Universal Basic Income, the concept of providing all citizens with a guaranteed income-and one that is rapidly gaining popularity among forward-thinking politicians and economists. Yang proposes that UBI is an essential step toward a new, more durable kind of economy, one he calls "human capitalism."
Download or read book Driving the Line written by Buck Hammer and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2015-09-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since she was a young child, the beautiful Laura Halsey has wanted two things in life: to raise a family and to drive a truck like her father. Her father insists, “Women don’t drive trucks,” but she’s determined to prove him wrong — until he dies in a terrible accident when she’s only a teenager. A week after her divorce is finalized, Laura, now 43, leaves her office job and enlists her brother Mark to help her fulfill her dream of becoming a truck driver. Facing harassment, demanding customers, a grueling schedule, careless drivers, and her own fears, Laura struggles to succeed in an industry vastly different from the one her father knew. But driving isn’t without its rewards — including the chance of finding love again in the form of fellow driver Bill Johnson, a smart, handsome widower. Both are drawn into a relationship involving a common problem: loving someone who can be miles away for long periods of time in a high-risk job.
