Analysis Trucking’s Window of Opportunity The coming restructuring of US motor carrier logistics “If you got it, a truck brought it.” In this concise manner did Jimmy Hoffa once characterize the economic significance of the trucking industry and the potential power that could result from organizing it. According to the US Census and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, of the roughly $18 trillion worth of commodities transported in the United States in 2022, about $14 trillion traveled by truck at some point. Highways are the primary circulatory system of the American economy, with rail, water, and air transportation playing only subsidiary roles. As Hoffa well understood, the ubiquity of trucking since its emergence in the early twentieth century has offered great structural power to the truckers and warehouse workers in that industry. Making good use of secondary boycotts, made illegal with the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act in 1947, as well as tactics of more straightforward illegality, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) achieved roughly 90 percent union density in long-haul trucking by the 1950s. Hoffa proudly told Life magazine in 1959 that, if he wanted to, he could “bring a major portion of U.S. transportation—and thus the entire economy—to a halt.” Yet by 1994, when Teamsters president Ron Carey called a strike against all of the companies covered under the National Master Freight Agreement, the Los Angeles Times noted that “the public hardly noticed.” (The strike was more effective than the Times implies, but the resulting contract was a mixed bag.) Hoffa had used Teamster power to organize the National Master Freight Agreement in 1964, but in 1980 Congress deregulated trucking, breaking the union’s role in regulating the industry and ushering in an era of rapidly declining union density in the sector that matched the declining