Truckers are Being Treated Horribly During the Coronavirus Pandemic

“I was talking to a trucker today who has literally been on the road for six weeks straight. He has not gone home for one night because his wife has a pre-existing lung condition and he is not allowed to go home. He has been picking up and dropping off the great products we all need and want from all sorts of random places around the country to all sorts of other random places. He’s traveled across Canada all the way to Alberta and into the USA and he can’t wait to be able to go home and see his family. But he understands that right now he needs to stay away from his loved ones.

He tells me (with a certain amount of frustration in his voice and bloodshot eyes) that there is a serious problem with rest stops across the country. They are either closed down, or extremely dirty because no one is cleaning them. Just this week he opted (twice) to not take a shower because the shower was disgustingly dirty (e.g., dirt, hairs, weird stains on the walls and floors). And he is constantly stopping to use the restrooms and being met with a locked door. To add insult to injury, he told me that last week he was in a tucked away place in northern Ontario picking up a load and was refused the use of the company bathroom with the response “go out there in the woods”.

I can’t get over this. This is outrageous. Truckers, the literal backbone of what is keeping us all safe, and happy and fed with all of our online ordered goodies during this coronavirus pandemic, are being treated less than human. These guys can’t even eat in a truck stop restaurant. They have to eat in their cabs when they struggle to pick up some food somewhere. Some can’t go home. They can’t shower in clean facilities and then they are being asked to take a dump in the forest. This makes no sense whatsoever in 2020. Amazon and company are slowly eating up our wallets market share and the truckers don’t have the proper infrastructure to provide them a decent workplace environment.”—Alex Vinetti