Editor’s note: The Permian Basin is a vast region of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico containing the most productive oil fields in the United States. It has yielded nearly 30 billion barrels of oil and over 75 trillion cubic feet of natural gas since the first commercial well opened in the region in 1921. Billions of dollars in profits have been pumped out of the ground to the benefit of finance capitalists thousands of miles away by a small and heavily-exploited workforce of local oilfield workers and truck drivers. Our People’s World correspondent visited the region to report on efforts to organize the drivers who are essential to Big Oil’s hugely profitable natural gas fracking operations in the region.
The hot, dry days in the Permian Basin seem endless, making life hard and still. Yet, on rare days, cold, heavy air rushes down from the north, sweeping across the Llano Estacado and pouring down into the Midland Basin. Oil patch grit is whipped into a frenzy, sometimes forming a haboob that stretches 100 miles across, consuming everything in its path as it rolls forward. As a boy, I watched these dust storms bear down on our rural home, filling the northern horizon and stretching beyond sight in either direction. Relentless. Humbling. That’s basically how I understand history.
***
“Hey Brother, we’re excited to have you down!”
The voice shouting at me over the phone is Billy Randel, a veteran trucker and labor organizer with the Truckers Movement for Justice (TMJ). My earbuds are shot, so I’m shouting into my phone, which is upside down in my shirt pocket. I’m hammering down on I-20 in my 20-year-old salvage Toyota. I’m headed back to the West Texas oil patch where I grew up.
Billy’s Bronx accent stands out. He’s been a trucker for 30 years and in the labor movement for nearly 50. I’d heard whispers of organizing in the oil patch but dismissed them as more aspirational than operational—until I saw a clip of a recent action and Billy’s interview. I tracked down TMJ’s number and left a message. That afternoon, Billy called me back, and we talked for two hours about what’s happening in the Permian Basin. A couple of weeks later, he emailed me a digital leaflet announcing an Aug. 28th action to “shut down their sand mines.”
It’s ambitious, but the conditions Billy described are dire. Frac sand truckers haul the fine silica sand crucial for fracking. They pick up loads from remote facilities in the Permian Basin and deliver them to wellheads across the oil patch—rinse and repeat.
But within this simple process, big capital has chipped away at these truckers’ livelihoods. Most are owner-operators, classified as independent contractors, meaning they cover all their own overhead: truck lease, insurance, carriage lease, depreciation, taxes, and more. They’re paid by the load, not the hour, so when production bottlenecks, truckers sit idle, unpaid, sometimes for more than eight hours.
Truckers are regulated to 14 hours on the road, followed by 10 hours off, but the pressure to go “off log” or “outlaw” is intense, pushing them into grueling 18- to 24-hour shifts just to survive. Permian Basin roads are among the deadliest in the nation.
Wage theft is rampant, and conditions at both ends of the haul are unfit for human dignity. During long waits, truckers might not be allowed to leave their rigs, with no water available and a single filthy portashitter for the hundreds of drivers cycling through under the brutal Texas sun.
For these truckers, this campaign is existential, and it’s fought on some of the hardest terrain imaginable.
***
I’ve crossed the border into the Permian Basin at this point and the land has flattened out ahead of me. As I speed toward the horizon, a forest of wind turbines rises to meet me. They take on a towering scale as I draw closer, their blades slowly cutting through the air. I’ve seen these machines countless times, and they always invoke an ambiguous feeling inside me. It’s easy to see these structures for what they are—dead instruments of industry, rotating in the service of either progress or politics, depending on who you ask.
But I can’t help seeing something more in their imposing presence. The idea of taking on the powerful forces in this hard land might seem like an endeavor born of fantasy or even delusion, an act of defiance against overwhelming odds. Yet, there is something to be said in embracing such a vision, in seeing purpose where others can see only despair.
Sometimes, the battle is not just in the fight itself, but in the belief that it’s worth fighting at all.
***
This has got to be my last shot… I think to myself. I’m in the detached garage behind my old friend Jimmy Gomez’s house, shooting pool while a 15-foot human Halloween skeleton looms over us. Jimmy is pouring us tequila shots and giving me a crash course in the fracking process that has transformed the region.
“Perf, frac, plug… perf, frac, plug,” he repeats. “Each stage of fracking is the same: send the wireline down with the perf gun to create small perforations in the shale, inject the sand/water/chemical mixture to ‘fracture’ the perforations, then set a plug to hold it in place.”
I line up my shot as he continues. A Taj Mahal vinyl plays in the background. The cue ball taps the solid blue two-ball, but it spins off the bumper and across the dusty green felt. One shot too many, I think to myself.
“Wait, hang on,” I say. “When you say ‘stages,’ is that like…a time thing or what?”
“Goddammit…” Jimmy drops his head down into his left hand, holding his temples as though I had asked the stupidest question he had ever heard.
Jimmy and I had met when we were both a couple of oil patch punk rock teenagers. I eventually left for the big city to chase dreams of class struggle and revolution. Jimmy stayed, transitioning from nights spent huffing gold spray paint and fist-fighting in apartment courtyards to days working as a lineman. He took to the work and combined with his smarts, talent, and no-bullshit sensibilities, he rose through the oil field ranks as a master electrician.
“No, it’s fine. I forget you’re a civilian,” Jimmy says as his head pops back up to face me. “Each ‘perf, frac, plug’ cycle represents a ‘stage.’ The stages stack up the well, from the bottom up to the wellhead at the top.”
“Ok, so the ‘stages’ are like ‘levels,” I respond.
Now it’s Jimmy’s turn to crouch over his shot. His arm swings, there’s a crack, and the 12-ball thuds into a side pocket and rattles down into the table’s depths. He pops back up.
“Sure, basically,” he nods, then grabs my tablet and sketches a rough diagram. “Once you reach the top of the well, you run coil tubing down to drill out the plugs. As soon as you do, the emulsion of crude, natural gas, and water comes fast—you better be ready to capture it.”
Jimmy grabs the bottle of Cazadores and pours me another shot, but I leave it sitting on the side table for now.
“Here’s the kicker about these frac sand haulers,” he says, leaning in. “The sand. Cannot. Stop. If you run out of sand while fracking, you’re fired. Everybody is fired. The well’s dead, abandoned. The company just lost millions because you’re a fucking idiot.”
The stakes for TMJ’s campaign snap into focus.
“So, if these truckers organize, they can shut down the entire production process and cost the oil companies millions?”
Jimmy nods.
“Exactly. Now take that fucking shot.”
***
It’s about 11 a.m., and I’m standing in the dusty lot at the entrance to the Covia Sand facility outside Kermit, Texas. Billy has introduced me to his local counterpart, Oscar Lobo, and they’ve invited me to join them as they leaflet the truckers streaming in and out.
I’m using the brim of my cowboy hat to block the glare on Oscar’s phone as he shows me an X-ray. “See this fracture? That’s my pelvis, bro!” Oscar points out a clear fracture running down the right side of his pelvis, also involving two vertebrae at the bottom of his spine.
“It snapped the top of my femur too,” he adds, dropping the phone. “They had to put a rod there, and that’s why I use this fuckin’ cane.” He lifts his cane slightly and waggles it for emphasis.
Oscar has been trucking since he was 18, and about a year ago, he got hit by a truck, leading to these injuries. Billy is almost doting, repeatedly encouraging Oscar to rest lest he aggravate his condition. True to the West Texas way, Oscar deflects the concern and continues passing out leaflets.
Oscar has lived in Odessa for the past 11 years with his wife, Jasmine, and their three boys. Jasmine is a trucker, too, and both are leaders in TMJ, getting involved around the time of Oscar’s injury.
Both he and Billy have apologized for the flakiness of other truckers, but I’m neither disappointed nor surprised. Labor organizing is a fickle business, especially in the oil patch.
Oscar says the lack of turnout is more about fear than fickleness, though. Since he and Jasmine joined TMJ, they’ve organized an impressive contingent of truckers, which invited repression and retaliation.
“Our first action was nine months ago, leafleting 5F,” he tells me. 5F is a kind of Uber for truckers. “We had 20 truckers show up, and they fired 29, even those just in the WhatsApp group.”
Still, Oscar and TMJ kept pushing. The video I saw was from their July action; Halliburton was the target. Afterwards, those workers didn’t get fired, but several saw their hours cut.
Given this environment, I was surprised by the positive reception they received at Covia Sand. Countless drivers—Cuban, Mexican, Salvadorian, Nigerian, Black, white, and more—stopped to grab a leaflet and talk with Oscar or Billy. All shared the same grievances, though in different languages and accents.
I pointed out the positive reception. “They support what we’re doing, but the problem is turning that support into action,” Oscar replied.
Such is the eternal conundrum of every organizer. But Oscar assured me TMJ wouldn’t be discouraged. The stakes were too high.
“I’ve got a wife and kids, but this still means so much to me. I always think if I don’t do it, then who will?”
***
I’m at my computer, hacking out this article when my phone buzzes. Jimmy has texted that a couple of sand haulers “flipped a truck and clipped another sand hauler on 302.”
“It’s crazy,” he writes. “These poor guys are getting killed in these wrecks.” And they’re killing others, too. The energy companies profit while the public and workers die.
A little later, my phone buzzes again. This time it’s Billy, sending me a leaflet for their next action on Sept. 18th, far from the oil patch, in downtown Manhattan. The target? BlackRock, invested in several sand production companies.
“Now we hit the head of the snake!!!” he writes.
Billy has never doubted why we fight against giants.
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