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Truck drivers who did not participate in the strikes were once again attacked with bricks, rocks, and even shot. This protest brought American commerce to a screeching halt. Factory workers were laid-off when factories couldn’t get the supplies they needed, farmers had crops rotting in their fields with no one to transport them to market, and even the cross-country migration of the American people was halted, as moving trucks refused to operate for fear of violence against them. President Carter even called the protesting drivers ‘terrorists.’ In 1983, yet another violent trucker strike began, lasting 11 days. Seventy drivers were injured and one was fatally shot through the neck in North Carolina, all protesting an increase in taxes on diesel fuel, large vehicles, and certain tires. The violent acts committed during these protests were strongly denounced by President Reagan, who stated that it would be the “worst thing in the world” for the government to cave in to those “committing murder.”On February 10, 1983, the strike was called off thanks to the promise of a congressional hearing on truck taxes and new road users’ fees. ”[We have] been able to accomplish, for the entire industry, more than we have ever been able to in the past,” Overdrive founder and trucking activist, Michael Parkhurst, said of the February 10th agreement in a New York Times news conference.
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“The shutdown brought to the forefront the actual truckers that Congress didn’t know about, that the media didn’t care about, which then also supported and influenced the start of big trucking movies,” he later said. For many years afterwards, the trucking industry remained fairly quiet, faithfully hauling goods to Americans across the nation.is, until fuel costs rose again in 2008 thanks to tensions in the Middle East and inflation in the US. During that time, a few hundred truck drivers shut down or participated in slow rolls, but the demonstration did little to facilitate change. Trucking protests surfaced again in 2014, when a small uprising of truck drivers at Los Angeles and Long Beach ports walked off the job in protest of low pay as a result of misclassification. The truck drivers claimed to be improperly classified as independent contractors, leaving them with lower pay and fewer protections in the workplace than those classified as company employees. When asked about the possibility of a more widespread trucking shutdown the same year, Parkhurst suggested that it wouldn’t gain enough traction. “They don’t have the guts or the money or the ability to organize a shutdown or, ‘hello why haven’t they done it?’” he said. In 2018, following the implementation of ELDs and a desire for changes to the HOS rules, a group of truckers banded together on Facebook to form ‘Black Smoke Matters,’ a group that would act as the impetus for a series of protests in 2018 and 2019.
