Sofia D. | Oppressed Nationalities Commission of the American Party of Labor—

[Nota del editor: Haga clic aquí para leer este artículo en inglés.]

Sean Duffy, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation under Trump, signed the “Enforcing Commonsense Rules Of The Road For America’s Truck Drivers” Order on May 20, 2025, which re-introduces harsher penalties for “non-proficient” English speaking drivers. Duffy and Trump, under the pretext of “increasing road safety”, are pursuing an anti-immigrant, chauvinist, and anti-Chicano policy in a large-scale attempt to reduce training costs for trucking companies, and drive the remaining workers harder. This policy is an attempt to appease large corporations as the capitalist-imperialist system steadily slips towards crisis.

The “danger” to road safety comes not from the worker’s diverse linguistic and national backgrounds, but rather from the ongoing, and now intensifying policy of national oppression, (i.e. of the Chicano nations and immigrant communities), which the U.S. capitalist-imperialist class has consistently pursued. It is this national oppression which discourages and even punishes national minorities and oppressed nations in the U.S. from pursuing English education; it is this national oppression which refuses to provide and update road signage to the vernacular languages of a particular region of the U.S. Further: the real danger to road safety comes from the over-working and exhaustion of truck drivers, which blunts the awareness (and yes, second-language capacity) of first and second-language English speakers alike.

Another rationalization Duffy uses for this order is the “need to communicate with traffic officers and the general public”; once again we must ask – why are American nationals who pursue jobs in public safety not required to be proficient in the vernacular languages of their locality? And why is the general public not educated in each other’s languages, which would more easily facilitate their assimilation to each other on an equal basis? The answer, of course, is that this would be an “unprofitable investment”, not to mention the unity it would encourage among the working class. 

The order is already raising concerns among national minorities and immigrant communities, especially Punjabi speakers, who have recently entered more frequently into the truck-driving profession. Punjabi speakers are often proficient in Indian English, which is often profiled by speakers of more “standard” dialects as being “worse English”, despite the dialects being largely mutually intelligible. This type of profiling raises further concerns about the status of other minority and national dialects: African American English and Chicano English appearing as obvious candidates for discrimination.

In theory, it is reasonable to expect that transportation workers must be able to communicate with each other, safety officials, and the general public in order to do their job. But the goal of this order is not, in fact, to encourage this communication; rather, it is to demagogically appeal to racist and chauvinist sentiments to take cost-saving measures which will intensify the oppression and exploitation of all truck-drivers, and specifically resign many national minorities to the ever-growing “reserve army of labor”, which, next year, will be turned around to again convince the remaining truck drivers that “immigrants are trying to steal their jobs”, when, in fact, the capitalists are stealing their jobs, and forcing the leftovers to work more for less pay. 

As long as the capitalists maintain political power, and control of the labor and trade unions, which become more-and-more everyday  the open instruments of the dictatorship of capital, there can be no solution to “the language problem”. In the immediate struggle, workers of all nations must unite and reject these profiteering, racist, and chauvinist measures. But the immediate solution is not enough to destroy and uproot racist and national oppression. For that: the workers must turn to revolution, with their own party and organizations they must seize political power, and launch a full-on assault on the private ownership of corporations, and the capitalist organizations and institutions of national oppression which support them. 

Workers of the world, unite!

No to corner-cutting!

Linguistic education is the right of the working class!

Categories: U.S. News