The last cowboys

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0:49In this documentary from the PPC World Service, we travel alongside long-haul truck drivers. These workers are often seen as symbols of freedom and independence. But how free is life on the road today when the watchful eye of the system is always upon them? I am Elli Salo and this is The Last Cowboys.

1:20Finnish truck driver Tiia Rajala has dreamed of the open road since childhood. As we follow her across Europe, she masters her powerful machine and reflects on the stereotypes surrounding truckers and what they reveal about masculinity, class and identity.

1:52I think I was five or six.

2:01We are driving from my home towards the lake to the ice road. I just see whiteness, sun, sparkling snow Some islands, even as a hint from the other shoreline And the forests over there Ice everywhere The roads are made for Mainly to get the logs out of the islands In the lakes because there is a lot of forests and it's thick ice. It's like, well, it needs to be thick to carry us with the car.

2:50I'm sitting on the side of my dad on the passenger seat and then he just gets me on his lap and tells me to steer and uses the gas and the brakes and clutch and gear and stuff like that. I remember the feeling of like the weird feeling of freedom. I'm seeing like in a child's mind massive thing. A normal car, but back then it felt massive. It's kind of the same feeling that you have when you drive for the first time with a truck.

3:40I'm out.

4:09My name is Tiira Jala, I'm a truck driver.

4:16This truck is a Scania R500.

4:23V6 engine. Now I don't have any trailer. Only the tractor or the lorry. this is not my normal vehicle that I tried so this is not decorated.

4:37I drove for the first 20 years in Finland only because I wanted to be home for my kid so I worked from home and even when I drove the same roads every night you always find something new from it. You always see something that you haven't seen before. So for me, going to an office or to a factory, that everything every day is in the same place, you press the same button over and over again, that will kill me in weeks.

5:22Freedom has always been kind of a central how truckers see themselves and their work. And part of this comes from the unique nature of the work itself. I'm Timo Aho from the University of Jyväskylä. I have been researching topics related to working life and masculinities, especially working class masculinities and gender. For example, when comparing to traditional factory work, For instance, where tasks are tied into one place, fixed machinery, constant supervision, trucking takes place on the move.

6:06So the mobility is the essential part of the work.

6:17And so in trucking you are out on the open road. Far from managers, direct control, operating independently inside a powerful machine. You're mastering the machine. So historically this mobility has made it very difficult to kind of subject to the same kind of time-space discipline like in factories. From Monza to Langenau in Germany. Frankfurt, Helsinki, and then I'm going to go home.

6:58When I'm at home, I'm really bad at staying somewhere. So I kind of miss being on the road. I kind of miss it all the time.

7:17This is my house. Either you can make it your home or you can feel like you're continuously working. I try to make it as homeless as possible when I'm staying in my truck. I've decorated mine. I have flowers on my window and lights. and I have mats on the floor. Some other little decorational things in here and the guys are laughing when they see my truck. The beer bullet, mullet-wearing trucker. Well, the stereotype is obviously it's a man, usually a middle-aged man with a big belly who smokes like three packs of cigarettes minimum per day. and then all the free time he drinks.

8:27And I think it's partly a caricature from the popular culture and partly a reflection of this kind of old school working class masculinity or something like this. but I think that this image inside the industry is often seen outdated as well.

8:54The lone wolf image, the solitary man against the world, it's kind of associated with these kind of Western ideas of hegemonic masculinity or these kind of ideas that true masculinity is something which is trying to master the world alone.

9:38idea of a man who controls his environment. This is a false picture because we very seldom heard anything about the spouses of those men. Their wives, they care, they do all the domestic responsibilities. They wash their laundries, they make lunchboxes to them and everything.

10:20It has been for decades, for hundreds of years, centuries it has been that men get away from home and can stay out for weeks to make living for the family and then they come home and then they go again but when it's a woman you get treated a bit differently and you get a lot more judgment I think when you choose to be the one staying out of home and traveling a lot. It's broader kind of structure in the working life and life in general that we have this very gender-segregated and patriarchal values still. So dragging doesn't make any kind of exception to this picture, I think.

11:10Stereotype still in these days is somehow living. When I started my career, I applied for my first jobs in the end of the year 2000 when I got my driving license. and back then I even I got like answers to my applications like which said directly we are not hiring you because you're you're a female because you you don't stand when you pee oh Germany okay it's nighttime it's dark it's raining but it's not raining that much that you need to drive 60 kilometers per hour like on a motorway on like a major four-lane highway sometimes you just wonder what kind of circus you're in i'm calm i'm calm okay yeah so my daughter also choose to be a truck driver so she chose the same career.

12:17When they started to practice the reversing in school with the trailers, I got a lot of phone calls to mom's trailer reversing help phone. She was supposed to graduate already last summer, but they found diabetes from her. It kind of delayed her graduating because they needed to make sure that she's able to even have a license for trucks.

12:51My daughter was seven months old when she was first time with me in my truck. By the time she was maybe four or something, she knew all the brands already. She was sitting on the passenger's side in her baby seat and telling every single brand that was coming towards, like, oh, there comes a Volvo, that's a Scania, that's a Sisu.

13:21If somebody says that they want to be a truck driver, I'm always encouraging them, like, go ahead, go for it. See where it can take you. It can take you to, like, massive projects all over the world.

13:42in general when people say when they are asked like okay what do you do for living and they say i'm just a truck driver why like belittle your own work which is massively important like in every society if we stop from working everything stops literally everything stops in two days if all the wheels stop two days any country in europe is gonna be in a chaos because everything nowadays is on wheels everything that is fresh medication the trash supplies for hospitals gas to the gas station wood and stuff for the The factories that create one, all the storages are on wheels.

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15:18I am Elli Salo, and this is The Last Cowboys. Driving itself is a relief. you can have the experience that now it's my time to relieve and listen to radio or something like music and it might be a you know very relaxing in a sense the driving kind of meditating thing as well it's it's kind of in my nature to travel i'm a sagittarius so it's like if you believe in signs and if you believe in descriptions of different signs i'm definitely underlining my I sign with the continuous urge to travel and see new places and be on the move.

16:03Today, I think there are two major forces that have transformed the field. The first is economic control. In the name of seeking economical profit, manufacturers and retailers have shifted to so-called just-in-time. supply chains. They try to cutting down the warehouse storages because they are expensive to store things. And they are relying on trucks to deliver goods exactly when they are needed. And to make this possible, the entire logistics system is tied together through real-time tracking technologies. So this makes the whole process more efficient, maybe, but it also leaves very little flexibility to drivers.

17:00So I'm basically 13 kilometers away from our depot, ran out of driving time. So I need to sit here for 45 minutes to drive the rest 13 kilometers. So there is no slack left in the system. Most of the trucks are equipped with the digital tago-crafts Digital God Which kind of automatically track every movement So I'm taking my driver's cord Otherwise I forget it into the tago-craft And then I don't have it and then I'm in trouble So this is the stupidity In a way it's good that there is some regulations because otherwise some people would just drive 24 7 without like any kind of brakes but then there is then there is us who are who are driving like if we didn't have this straight these like so strict regulations what comes to the driving times i would have probably now to strive the rest it would have gone over time like about six minutes so i would have probably driven that and like it would have had no affection whatsoever to anything that i do in the future but i can't take the risk Truckers are no longer the exclusive masters of the transporting process anymore.

18:41In a way, they once probably were. Being under the continuous surveillance, I don't think any one of us is enjoying it. I think it's super stressful for all of us. There should be another way to keep people from doing stupid things, like driving massive over times, than to put us all suffer from insanely tight rules and regulations. Time is a scar resource like it's everywhere but in this job it's really scar resource so I came up to this idea that truckers are operating like buffers you know in this system

19:38They are those who try to reconcile these rhythm conflicts they experience the rhythmic conflicts in their bodies.

19:50It's actually a work where you have to think a lot of the process that how do you organize things that you are not getting into trouble in the future. So the saving time is one thing that they try to avoid the problems that you have some extra time here that you can give to the system if needed. Yeah, it's risky. If the system recognized that, okay, drivers are flexible, so why wouldn't we squeeze it even more? Why wouldn't we tighten the belt even more?

20:43I'm not diagnosed, but I definitely do have a lot of ADHD features. And if something this profession has taught me through the years is waiting, I've become a really, really advanced waiter. In the beginning, in the first years, you get stressed because you're like behind your schedule. and oh my god they're gonna put me away for hours and I'm gonna be late and you get really stressed about that but that goes away quite fast because this job is so much just waiting I would like to see a lonely wolf a movie which is concentrated on paperwork and and and where drivers are like waiting like five hours in a dock and doing nothing that's the romantic side side of the work

22:05BWA

22:20DWA Of YAH

22:34El You

22:41Spielberg Sylvester Now it's Gatwick, Manchester, Liverpool Again head towards Germany Frankfurt, London Ferry at 3 from Helsinki to Travemundel Barcelona, Cossi demar And now about 6-7 hours of driving

23:10When they found diabetes from my daughter and occasionally she has been hospitalized for it. Obviously every time when she calls me and is crying like, mom I don't know what to do that's that's the moment when your heart gets ripped out of your chest because you can't be there physically holding and she's she's turning 20 and she's always saying like mom I'm an adult stop patronizing me but then when the situation gets worse or something bad happens or she don't know what to do then she then she's mommy's child I love what I'm doing. I love that I'm able to travel and stay in different countries to do my job.