Shipping costs: Precarity, race and migrant truck drivers in Canadian long-haul freight transportation

Abstract

In advanced capitalist countries, the seamless circulation of goods depends more than ever on the labour of migrant truck drivers. The trucking industry has undergone significant transformations in recent decades, including deregulation, fragmentation, platformization and periods of freight recession. Through the lens of racial capitalism and critical logistics studies, this paper examines how the Canadian logistics and long-haul transportation sector increasingly relies on racialized migrant truck drivers to sustain itself during economic downturns. By using precarious immigration status as a competitive advantage, carriers have intensified their pressure on migrant drivers. Drawing on an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with migrant truck drivers, company owners and key industry actors, the article reveals how migrant truck drivers experience semi-legal and illegal practices. The analysis section demonstrates that the race-to-the-bottom in labour standards is not incidental but structural. Some carriers bend labour and migration laws and use tactics such as unpaid waiting time, logbook falsification, deportation threats, wage theft and in-cab technological surveillance.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Human Geography, 2026 · DOI ↗