‘I felt worthless’: harassment and violence shut out female truckers amid driver shortage
In October 2020, Laura Zuniga got a call from a dispatcher at Eagle Trucklines. She would be picking up a load in Fresno, California, that morning and dropping it off in Florida that evening. She had never driven with the male colleague assigned to co-drive with her before, but said yes because she had recently graduated from training and needed the experience as well as the money.
Zuniga drove first so the other driver could rest in one of the two beds in the back of the cab. But once they were on the road he kept coming to the front in his underwear. He asked her if she liked sex. Then he told her he wanted to pay her for sex. When she told him she wasn’t a sex worker, he claimed he was joking and returned to the back.
When Zuniga eventually pulled over to take a nap, her co-driver repeatedly put his arm over her and got under her blanket. “Then I just remember him on top of me and trying to push me down,” she said.
Her usual lightning-fast cadence slows and she chokes out the words, describing how she fought him as he pulled her pants down. He was naked. “His hands were everywhere,” she said. “I remember saying no, don’t, stop. And he doesn’t care, he’s smiling.”
She called her dispatcher in tears, only to be told that she shouldn’t call the police, to just keep driving, so she did. But when her co-driver kept coming to the front and patting her on the head, Zuniga pulled over and called 911. “I just wanted to come home,” she said.
Female truckers make up only 7% of the workforce, and in a recent study more that 90% reported experiencing at least one incident of sexual harassment in their careers. This, in addition to physically grueling conditions and falling pay, makes a profession that is hard for male truckers nearly impossible for women.
As the world’s supply chain remains snarled, with shelves going bare and prices increasing, a lack of truck drivers comes into sharp focus. The American Trucking Association says that the industry is short 80,000 drivers, a number it warns could double within 10 years – a big problem for an industry that moves 72% of the country’s freight. Trucking used to be a solid middle class job, but when the industry was deregulated in the 1980s, the conditions cratered and compensation has gone down by 40%. Drivers often aren’t paid for the time they wait for goods to be loaded or unloaded, which can take hours, and are frequently classified as independent contractors and denied benefits and protections that regular employees enjoy. The largest companies have turnover rates of more than 90%, meaning that nearly everyone who starts out driving will leave within a year.
If the trucking industry wants to close its driver shortfall, it can’t shut out half of the workforce. But that requires ending an epidemic of sexual abuse that spreads unchecked throughout the trucking industry, and that companies prioritize humane working conditions over ever-faster delivery times. When Zuniga told the dispatcher she had called the police, he was angry and worried about the load getting to its destination. By the time police arrived and filled out a report, her codriver had fled on foot. Zuniga drove the truck to Arizona alone, dropped off the load, and drove back home to Fresno.
After the incident, Eagle stopped calling her to work. The company didn’t pay her for the drive to Arizona. Her assailant, meanwhile, kept driving for Eagle for months afterward.
Zuniga’s story is recounted in a lawsuit that she’s filed naming the company and the other trucker, alleging sexual and racial harassment and discrimination as well as sexual battery, wrongful termination, and a failure to pay her what she was owed. Eagle Trucklines has denied the allegations in the lawsuit, but has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment. To date, Zuniga’s lawyer has been unable to find the other trucker and serve him with papers.
“The way the company treated me, I felt worthless,” Zuniga said.
Many of the factors that make sexual harassment more likely in any workplace proliferate in trucking. Sexual harassment is more common in heavily male-dominated workplaces, deployed as a way to show the few women that they aren’t welcome. Getting into trucking requires training, almost always from another driver, which creates a power imbalance because that person is a trainee’s ticket to graduation and certification.
Most trucking companies hire entry-level workers to co-drive so that they can move products faster by trading off driving and sleeping. Out on the road, trainers decide when stops get made for showers or bathroom breaks. New drivers have to accumulate experience and money before they can own their own trucks, putting them once again at a disadvantage with the more experienced co-driver. Truckers are isolated on the road with their trainers and co-drivers, and they share a small space, including to sleep.
Women may also be afraid to speak out about abuse and call attention to themselves and may not be taken seriously by the men they report to. Desiree Ann Wood is a truck driver and president of Real Women in Trucking.
“The companies just basically push it under the rug,” she said, referring to sexual harassment. “They make the woman feel like she did something wrong.” Wood said many companies required a witness to an incident before they would investigate, which is next to impossible in trucking.
It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: with so few women in the industry they are frequently targeted for abuse, forcing them out of jobs that pay more than female-dominated service sector work. Other women who might consider entering may stay away, knowing the danger they could face.
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Zuniga, 39, had worked at a laundromat since 2016 and loved her job, but the pay was $11 an hour and she struggled to provide for her three daughters, ages 14, 12, and 10, often turning to public assistance programs and carrying credit card debt. “If I don’t have the money I feel like a horrible parent,” she said.
She has long yearned to buy a house where her daughters can have their own rooms and a yard. She spotted an opportunity when she saw men pull into the shopping center where the laundromat is located in nice cars talking about buying houses. She found out they earned their money in trucking. When her co-worker Eunice went to trucking school in early 2019, Zuniga decided she should do the same, though she knew nothing about trucks.
She started from scratch, memorizing the steps it takes just to start the engine. The learning curve was made harder by the reception from men who were the majority of trainers and fellow students. The trainers refused to give her a turn in the truck; it wasn’t until one offered to let her do it after hours that she was able to learn. It took her about six months to get the experience she needed to pass the test to graduate in October 2019.
Then she started looking for a job. When Eunice started working with Eagle Trucklines and showed Zuniga her big paycheck, she signed up there, too. “I was thinking about the money,” she said. “I just wanted to work.”
One week of driving a truck can net Zuniga $1,800-$1,900, which, despite her assault, makes it hard for her to leave the industry. “Every time I get in the truck I’m confident, I feel happy,” she said. “It feels good to work and have money.”
But going on a long hauls means leaving her daughters with her elderly mother. “Every time I leave I feel like I don’t deserve my daughters,” she said. Her youngest always cries; her oldest tells her not to leave. She has missed birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. “I feel like a horrible mother,” she said, “missing out on everything.”
Since being assaulted, Zuniga is wary of trucking companies trying to take advantage of her in any way. She has left six jobs due to feeling cheated by her employers.She says they’ve undercounted the miles she’s driven, tried to make her drive on her days off, and pushed her to drive longer hours than the rules permit. She gets docked for being late even if it’s because of traffic or she needed to fuel up. She pees in a cup in the truck to save time. She left her most recent job after the company didn’t pay her on time. “I had I think $100 in my bank account,” she said.
All the while, Zuniga is still dealing with the trauma of the assault. “My mind’s been messed up. I haven’t been the same,” she said. “I wish I had a button in my head I could just delete that.” She has lost hair and gained weight. She has nightmares, and her therapist has diagnosed her with posttraumatic stress disorder. She feels like a puzzle missing a piece, “and I want my piece back.”
She takes new precautions on the road now, carrying pepper spray, and drawing a hood up over her head and a mask to “feel safe”. If she could afford karate or boxing classes, she’d go, to “learn to kick them,” she said.
“I’m always a happy person. I like to laugh, I like to talk,” she said. But after the assault, she lost her confidence. “I felt like he had taken something away from me.”
Zuniga’s experience is, sadly, common. Sexual assault frequently leads to PTSD and other psychological effects, such as harms to self-esteem and what psychologists call safety schemas.
“It damages the way you feel about the world and about yourself in the world,” said Louise Fitzgerald, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois, who has worked on sexual harassment cases against truck companies. It disrupts victims’ sense of trust, both in other people and in themselves. “They feel that they’ve lost some part of themselves, that they’ll never be the person that they used to be,” she said.
It can also have employment repercussions. “One of the outcomes of trauma is that you try to avoid everything that’s associated with the trauma,” Fitzgerald said. That can make it nearly impossible to want to get back in, say, the cab of a truck after being assaulted there. ***
There are ways to mitigate sexual harassment and assault in trucking if companies are serious about eradicating it. Professionalizing the whole process would go a long way. Training programs, Wood argues, should fall under the purview of the education department and be subject to Title IX gender discrimination protections. On long trips with trainers or co-drivers, drivers should sleep in motels, and companies can create more routes that get drivers home faster.
Workers need to know their rights and how to report violations of them. They need a safe and secure way to report incidents quickly after they happen – maybe panic buttons, or through regular, automatic check ins – and to trust that the companies will take them seriously and act without retaliating. “Those seem like simple things, but they can be really transformative,” said Jennifer Mondino, director of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which offers low-income workers legal and media support in sexual harassment cases and has aided Zuniga’s case.
Wood argues that people who harass or abuse their trainees or codrivers should have their CDL licenses revoked or be banned from training or co-driving. She has also called for companies that are sued over sexual harassment and assault to be put on probation by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and removed from the Department of Labor’s apprenticeship programs.
In mid-March, Zuniga was hoping to get a new job driving trucks for a different company. “I just want to keep going forward,” she said. There are many days when she just wants to give up. But she knows she has to keep trying. “Because my daughters are watching.”
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 802 9999. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
The way the company treated me, I felt worthless
Laura Zuniga