Ryan Ray
A group of trucker owner-operators briefly held up traffic in Tallahassee’s busiest downtown thoroughfare to protest what they call the “deterioration” of the trucking industry.
The group convoyed from Miami, with around a dozen semi trucks bringing traffic at the intersection of Monroe and Tennessee streets — about three blocks from the Florida Capitol — to a completely standstill for 15 minutes.
According to the Tallahassee Democrat, two arrests were made at the scene of the protest. Javier Figueroa was booked by Florida Highway Patrol officers for blocking an intersection and resisting arrest without violence, while Magdiel Millar was arrested by LCSO for impeding the arrest of Figueroa and resisting arrest without violence.
In a memo released Monday, truckers Ponce Seoane and Alberto Cruz-Torres, two of the protest’s main organizers, said changes in the industry are leaving them with precious little to show for their work.
“We provide for an entire nation while barely providing for our own families,” they wrote in the trucking publication Overdrive Online.
The protestors cited decreasing wages, the rise of transportation brokerage firms who take a profit and limit the autonomy of owner-operators, and a lack of transparency in the rates of profit and driver payment in the industry.
One truck bore the slogans, “No more brokers, no more abuse” and “Say no to cheap freight.”
“We’ve just had enough. We feel like we should be compensated fairly for what we do,” they said Monday. “We want transparency from the brokers and a fair wage.”
