A Sit-Down With a Grassroots Movement: American Truckers United and the Fight Nobody Planned For

A Sit-Down With a Grassroots Movement: American Truckers United and the Fight Nobody Planned For

Adam Wingfield

Thu, January 8, 2026 at 3:44 PM UTC

6 min read

truck drivers in parking lot — (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

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Some of the loudest conversations in trucking right now aren’t coming from policy rooms, conference stages, or trade group press releases. They’re coming from drivers, fleet owners, and industry veterans who feel like something fundamental shifted — and nobody warned them it was coming.

That’s why this episode of The Long Haul was different on purpose.

I sat down with Harvey Beech, co-founder of American Truckers United, not to pick sides or trade slogans, but to pull apart the assumptions that have defined trucking for decades and ask a harder question: Is this still a cycle — or did the rules change underneath us?

Harvey isn’t a social media personality who discovered trucking during COVID. He’s a third-generation industry lifer who grew up on terminal floors, built and ran fleets, watched legacy carriers rise and fall, and is now watching an industry he loves strain under pressures that feel unfamiliar — and permanent.

Born Into Trucking, Not Introduced to It

Harvey’s story doesn’t start with a CDL school brochure. It starts in 1981, with two trucks in Arkansas hauling air freight during an oil boom. His parents built a business that evolved with the economy — Target store deliveries, GE freight, paper mills, retail distribution. He grew up washing trailers at 12 years old, working in the shop in high school, and later helping operate fleets that scaled into the hundreds.

This matters, because his frustration isn’t theoretical. It’s not political theater. It’s lived experience — and a long memory of how trucking used to function.

When I asked what feels fundamentally different today compared to the late ’90s, Harvey didn’t say “harder.” He said “less relational.”

From Relationships to Transactions

For decades, trucking ran on trust. Relationships mattered. Carriers bent over backward for customers, because long-term partnerships paid off. Trailer pools, lane commitments, handshake understandings — those weren’t favors, they were strategy.

Harvey built his career on that mindset.

But post-COVID, something shifted. Freight became hyper-transactional. Technology flooded the market with “what the rate should be” data, and relationships took a back seat to algorithms and short-term savings. Social distancing didn’t just change how people stood in line — it changed how businesses interacted.

And once that behavior was trained, it didn’t disappear.

Wages, Miles, and the Pressure Nobody Talks About Honestly

One of the most consistent themes in the conversation was wages — not as a talking point, but as a math problem.

Harvey made a blunt comparison that hit home: skilled trades like electricians, HVAC techs, and master mechanics have seen wage growth over the last decade. Long-haul drivers, especially in dry van and reefer, largely haven’t — despite increasing regulation, responsibility, and risk.

Trucking’s low barrier to entry has always worked against seasoned drivers. When rates rise, capacity floods in. When capacity floods in, wages stall or fall. That cycle is familiar.

What isn’t familiar is the scale of pressure added over the last few years.

Miles have been taken away. Length of haul has shrunk. Overhead hasn’t. Drivers are spreading fixed costs across fewer miles, and that stress shows up everywhere — turnover, morale, safety, and pay.

“This Isn’t a Cycle”

At some point in 2023, Harvey and his partner Shannon realized something uncomfortable: this didn’t feel like a downturn that would self-correct.

They weren’t watching a normal freight cycle. They were watching structural change.

Networks they had built over decades were dismantled as customers pushed freight into spot markets. Drop trailer commitments evaporated quarter to quarter. Average length of haul collapsed from ~800 miles to the low 500s — a no-man’s land that doesn’t work for drivers or carriers.

When long-haul becomes medium-haul without short-haul efficiency, nobody wins.

Two Standards, One Industry

One of the hardest parts of the conversation — and the part that has driven much of American Truckers United’s momentum — is the perception of uneven enforcement.

Harvey was clear about one thing: this isn’t about blaming the person behind the wheel. It’s about systems.

When some carriers operate under strict audits, insurance scrutiny, and enforcement, while others exploit gaps across multiple MC numbers, offshore offices, log manipulation, and inconsistent licensing standards, the playing field stops being competitive.

Inspection histories get diluted. Accident data gets fragmented. Liability becomes a shell game.

And the carriers playing by the rules are the ones absorbing the cost.

The Birth of a Grassroots Movement

American Truckers United didn’t start as a media brand or a political operation. It started as two operators realizing they were watching generational businesses bleed out — and that nobody upstream was slowing it down.

What changed everything was the realization that this wasn’t isolated. It was systemic.

From state-level CDL decisions to federal policy memos drivers never saw, from trade groups advocating positions that many carriers didn’t recognize as representing them, to enforcement gaps that rewarded scale over compliance — the pieces added up.

When their efforts were blocked locally, the fight moved outward. Social media amplified it. Then statehouses listened. Then other states followed.

And suddenly, what started in Arkansas was shaping national conversations.

The Equipment Bubble Nobody Wants to Talk About

One of the most revealing parts of the conversation had nothing to do with policy — it was about trucks.

Used equipment prices during 2020–2022 didn’t just rise. They detached from reality.

Harvey described OEMs and finance arms selling trucks at inflated prices, financing them aggressively, and then quietly deferring payments en masse when the math stopped working. Unlike 2008, repossessions never came at scale — not because the loans were healthy, but because enforcing them would expose the size of the bubble.

When 80% of a portfolio is behind, nobody wants to be the first domino.

And that distortion didn’t just hurt buyers — it propped up capacity that should have exited, prolonging the pressure on rates and wages.

A Hard Truth for Drivers

Near the end of the conversation, Harvey shared something that surprised me.

For drivers, he said, one belief needs reexamination: when things go wrong, it’s not always your dispatcher or your company.

Many operations are absorbing pressure from every direction — customers, brokers, lenders, insurers — and doing their best to shield drivers from it. That doesn’t excuse bad operators. But it does explain why frustration feels universal.

Trucking has always been hard. What’s different now is how many stressors hit at once.

Where This Leaves the Industry

This conversation wasn’t meant to make anyone comfortable. It wasn’t meant to convince everyone. It was meant to slow the noise down long enough to examine the mechanics underneath it.

Whether you agree with every conclusion or not, one thing is hard to argue: trucking is not operating under the same assumptions it did ten years ago.

And if the industry wants to find its footing again, it will require something trucking hasn’t practiced well lately — listening before reacting.

American Truckers United didn’t set out to become a movement. They responded to a vacuum.

The real question now is whether the industry fills that vacuum with clarity — or lets it keep expanding through conflict.

The post A Sit-Down With a Grassroots Movement: American Truckers United and the Fight Nobody Planned For appeared first on FreightWaves.

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