Those who hate all things “woke” are targeting the wrong enemy. They attack trans people, Justin Trudeau, Black Lives Matter and anything related to diversity, equality and inclusion but they rarely, if ever, mention the entities that have done way more to mess up their lives – and restrict their “freedom”: corporations.
Take truckers for example. In February 2022, a bunch of them angrily occupied downtown Ottawa demanding an end to government COVID19 vaccine mandates. Many had F*&% Trudeau! signs and some of their leaders sought to overthrow the federal government in the name of “freedom”. However, none of them said anything about how the trucking companies they work for restrict their freedom. Why haven’t truckers tried to occupy Ottawa, or any other city, to protest the electronic logging devices (ELDs) federal regulation that came into force in January 2023 with the support of the trucking companies?
ELDs track a driver’s hours of service — the amount of time they can be behind the wheel on any given day. The regulation came into effect in June 2021 but Transport Canada only began enforcing it for certain commercial vehicle drivers, such as long-haul truckers, on Jan. 1, 2023. , ELDs have been required in the United States since 2017.
ELDs are billed as a way to make roads safer by keeping truckers accountable to their allowed hours of service. However, Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance says that the most vigorous study on the American rollout of ELDs showed they didn’t lead to any improvement in the most important safety outcomes. In fact, truck crashes didn’t decrease after the mandate began to be enforced—and for small carriers, they actually increased.
Furthermore, ELDs could be a canary in the coal mine for workplace surveillance experts say as they raise questions about what information employers are collecting about their workers. Levy says that the proliferation of ELDs has opened the doors for other monitoring systems that can monitor driving behaviours, like hard braking or swerving, and may include driver-facing cameras that use artificial intelligence to track eye movements and check for signs of drowsiness.
That seems like a way bigger attack on freedom than wearing a mask…
The May 1, 2023 Smart-Trucking.com article The Truck Driver Shortage – The Dirty Truth No One Talks About said, “The shortage of truck drivers is not due to the lack of individuals interested in becoming drivers. There are lots of potential drivers interested in becoming career truck drivers, but once many of them discover: the low pay, the lack of respect, the often poor working conditions, and the demands of the job – they abandon the idea.” These conditions have existed a lot longer than mask mandates so why haven’t we seen massive trucker protests against them? One reason might be that almost all truckers are men…
A quick reminder before proceeding that not all truckers supported the Ottawa occupation. CTV reported in January 2022 that “several trucking groups have also condemned the protests. The Canadian Trucking Alliance says nearly 85 per cent of drivers are fully vaccinated. Just before the convoy was about to kick off, the group said it “strongly disapproves of any protests on public roadways, highways, and bridges.””
The truckers who took part in the occupation were almost all white and it’s white heterosexual men who are leading the attack on all equity groups. Some blame women for their problems and fuel the popularity of men like Andrew Tate. But, as with most movements driven partly by anger, the reasons behind it are much more complex than the reasons offered by the movement’s leaders.
In his January 2023 New Yorker article What’s the Matter with Men?, Idress Kahloon writes, “Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “incels” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide.”
Kahloon cites the work of British American scholar of inequality and social mobility Richard V. Reeves from his latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. In the book Reeves argues that “the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn [have negatively impacted men]… Reeves sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations. All this, he says, has landed hardest on Black men, whose life prospects have been decimated by decades of mass incarceration, and on men without college degrees, whose wages have fallen in real terms, whose life expectancies have dropped markedly, and whose families are fracturing at astonishing rates.”
In response to these very real and complex issues, people like Andrew Tate simply say “it’s women’s fault”. An April 2023 NewsWeek article quoted Tate promising to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” It also said he has been banned from Twitter twice for arguing that women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted by men. Expressing this and similar views has earned his videos billions of views.
On the gender wage gap, Tate’s view isn’t what you might first think: that it’s justified because men deserve to be paid more. It’s that there isn’t one. It appears (and wouldn’t be surprising) that Tate hasn’t read either Kahloon’s article or Reeves’ book as they say there’s a gender pay gap and provide one very clear reason why. Kahloon writes, “Within occupations, there’s often no wage gap until women have children and reduce their work hours. “For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite,” Reeves observes. “For most men, it barely makes a dent.”” Tate, and all those like him, ignore these inconvenient, complex realities…probably because they don’t make for good YouTube videos. Tate, of course, doesn’t critique ideas of how to get rid of the wage gap because he doesn’t think one exists.
Kahloon does provide one solution for the wage gap from Harvard labor economist Claudia Goldin who says the gender gap, “…would vanish if long, inflexible work days and weeks weren’t profitable to employers.” As expected, Tate doesn’t critique corporations’ role in maintaining the “non-existent” gender wage gap.
People like Tate and Jordan Peterson don’t criticize corporations at all. In fact, Peterson indirectly frames corporations as the victims by implicitly including them in his defence of organizations being targeted by what he sees as EDI zealots. As I said in my post Jordan Peterson wants us to shut up about D.I.E., deliver his Amazon packages and DIE, Peterson mistakenly accuses “equity-pushers” of claiming “that if all positions at every level of hierarchy in every organization are not occupied by a proportion of the population that is precisely equivalent to that proportion in the general population that systemic prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) is definitely at play, and that there are perpetrators who should be limited or punished that have or are currently producing that prejudice.”
The only example I could find of Peterson critiquing corporations was him chastising CEOs for “lining up to kowtow at the D.I.E. altar.” But, similar to his critique of employment equity, what he’s critiquing isn’t really that much of a thing. Evidence shows that, in Canada, corporate EDI efforts have been largely reactive and performative. For example, the Globe and Mail has reported each year on the lack of success of the Black North Initiative which was launched in summer 2020 with the mission to get corporate Canada to Blacken up their C-suites. Little has changed in the C-suites but much has changed in the Black North Initiative’s stated mandate which is now, “..to end anti-Black systemic racism throughout all aspects of our lives by utilizing a business-first mindset.”
Why don’t Tate and Peterson critique those in corporate Canada who helped make men more insecure by causing unionization among men to fall by 16 per cent over the last 40 years according to Statistics Canada? (StatsCan says the percentage of employees who were union members in their main job fell from 38% in 1981 to 29% in 2022.)
But the more disturbing question is why do so many men uncritically consume Tate and Peterson’s content, much of which is so flawed? Could it be that what Tate and Peterson say allows them to blame anyone but them for their problems? If so, we gotta get far more effective at educating these guys on who to hate.