Visibilising the gritty realities of truck driving work in the UK

Abstract

This article introduces Josephine (Jo) Noon, a woman truck driver in her early 40s. Speaking as a woman in a male-dominated occupation, a recent entrant into the UK’s truck driving workforce and with experience driving in the UK and Europe, Jo’s account disrupts common misconceptions about truck driving and truck drivers. The article contributes to sociological debates at the intersections of mobility and labour by drawing attention to how spatial mobility itself constitutes work for mobile logistics workers and becomes a site of surplus extraction for capital. We highlight the less explored material, embodied realities of occupational auto-mobilities, and the physical infrastructures necessary for the daily social reproduction of mobile workers, foregrounding their affective, generative effects for worker wellbeing and retention. The article ends with a provocation: that truck driver shortages be read as a ‘refusal’ by drivers to continue labouring under exploitative logistics capital and uncaring state actors.