The Old Lion of Truckers' Moverment for Justice - Billy Randall
- Ohio Valley Allies
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
The Truckers Who Keep America Running Are Done Being Treated as Disposable
How a Bronx-born labor organizer and a national coalition of truck drivers are forcing the federal government to confront the oil and gas industry’s hazmat violations.
By Stuart Day
On January 23, 2025, something unprecedented happened: truck drivers—supported by Earthjustice and Ohio Valley Allies—formally petitioned the U.S. Department of Transportation to "enforce its own damn laws" around the transport of oil and gas waste.
Not new laws. Not new regulations. Just basic enforcement of the hazmat rules already on the books.
You can read the petition here: https://earthjustice.org/press/2025/truckers-petition-feds-to-enforce-hazmat-rules-on-oil-and-gas-waste
And if you want to understand why this moment matters, you have to understand the man at the center of it: Billy Randall, a lifelong labor organizer, labor justice advocate, and founder of Truckers Movement for Justice.
This is his story—and why truckers across the country are drawing a line in the sand.
Who Is Billy Randall?
Most activists start in their 20s or 30s.Billy started at 21, on a picket line with the United Farm Workers under César Chávez and Dolores Huerta.
He didn’t come from privilege. He came from the Bronx, raised in working-class neighborhoods where you learned early that power only changes when people stand together.
Billy cut his teeth in the labor movement when it was still dangerous—when the Mafia backed agricultural interests in New York, when beatings on picket lines were expected, not surprising. He’s been jailed multiple times for civil disobedience. He’s marched in the streets during Vietnam. He’s buried friends who never made it home from organizing drives.
And for nearly five decades, he’s driven trucks—local, long-haul, freight, and specialized transport—getting a front-row seat to what the industry has become:
More hours
Less pay
No overtime
No transparency
No safety
No bathrooms
No respect
Billy founded Truckers Movement for Justice because, in his own words:
“Workers have lost power over their lives. If we don’t take it back, our kids and grandkids have no future.”
He’s not exaggerating. The fracking industry has turned truckers into an invisible hazmat workforce—handling radioactive brine, silica sand dust, and explosive fluids often benignly labled as “water.”
Most truckers don’t even know what’s inside the tank.
And that’s the point.
A Hidden Crisis: The Oil & Gas Waste Nobody Wants to Talk About
Let’s be brutally honest: the fracking industry runs on secrecy and shortcuts.
Truckers carry:
Silica sand that causes silicosis—black lung for the modern era.
Brine wastewater loaded with benzene, radium, heavy metals, and carcinogenic volatile organics.
Frack chemicals that aren’t disclosed to workers or communities.
Radioactive sludge buried in “land farms,” dumped in rural communities, or hauled by untrained drivers.
And yet the companies classify much of this material as non-hazardous because the federal government - through a series of exemptions - allows them to.
Not because it’s safe. But because calling it “hazardous” would cost them more money.
They would have to pay and train their drivers and waste management workers as hazmat workers, facilities and trucks would have to be better outfitted, insurance premiums would sky-rocket, truck routes would be tightly controlled, accidents would require far more extensive cleanup, and a lot of what happens regularly in the oil and gas industry would create situations requiring long term environmental mitigation and health coverage for injured workers.
Truckers know better. They know what burns their skin, what makes their eyes water, what soaks into their clothes. They know the smell.
Billy calls it “the onion problem”—every layer you peel back reveals something worse beneath it.
And he’s right. Out west in the Permian Basin, nearly half of the trucks inspected during DOT blitzes are found out of service—brakes failing, steering failures, bald tires—while hauling waste marked as harmless “water" through towns and on highways.
It's not just the brine. It's the dust — silica dust from frack sand behaves like asbestos in the lungs, and the radioactive isotopes found in fracking waste bind to clay, soil, and metal particles. Drivers bring that dust home on their clothes to their families. Drivers breathe it in for 70+ hours a week. Drivers crash on rural roads because their brakes failed under loads they were never told were hazardous.
This isn’t an accident. It’s how the system is designed
Why This Petition Matters
Oil and gas waste gets a federal loophole that keeps it from being labeled as ‘hazardous,’ but that loophole doesn’t automatically apply to the Department of Transportation. DOT has its own hazmat rules — and in theory, a lot of this waste qualifies. The issue is simple: DOT hasn’t been enforcing those rules on this industry. Now, For the first time ever, truckers, environmental lawyers, and community activists have joined forces to force the federal government to act.
This coalition includes:
Truckers Movement for Justice
Earthjustice
Ohio Valley Allies
Local groups across Appalachia and the Southwest
Their petition demands basic things like:
Proper hazmat labeling
Proper hazmat training
Proper routing on safe roads
Proper protective gear
Proper compensation for dangerous work
Proper disclosure of what’s in the tanks
Nothing radical. Just enforcing the rules the DOT already wrote.
And the feds know the petition is legitimate—because they haven’t dismissed it. In private conversations, DOT officials have said, bluntly:
“You’re right.”
Everyone who pays attention to this field knows the oil and gas industry has been breaking the rules for years. Everyone knows regulators have looked the other way. And everyone knows it’s going to blow up—literally or politically—if nothing changes.
Billy puts it simply:
“Truck drivers have always carried this country on our backs. We won’t carry its toxic secrets anymore.”
Why Truckers Are the Key to Stopping Oil & Gas Abuse
Environmentalists have long warned about fracking’s pollution. Communities have begged for help. Scientists have documented the radioactive waste problem for years.
But industries and regulators have largely ignored these groups.
But trucker represent a keystone of the entire infrastructure that makes the industry run. Can they afford to ignore them?
If truckers coordinated and refused to keep subjecting themselves to these risks without having a real stake at the table, the industry would be in serious trouble. The sheer volume of sand, chemicals, and waste needed to frack makes it impossible for operations to continue without truck driver
The coalition forming right now—between workers and environmental justice groups—is the most powerful thing the oil and gas industry has faced in decades.
Billy calls it “the meeting of the two great movements”—labor and environmental justice.
The last time that happened at scale was the 1960s.
And it changed the country.
Why Billy Is Fighting Now
Billy is in his 60s.He jokes that he’s “an old lion sitting in the bushes.”
But he’s dead serious about his mission:
“Before I have another heart attack from these damn cigarettes, I want to know my grandchildren have a future.”
He’s not doing this for himself. He’s doing it for the drivers who don’t have a union behind them. For the communities drinking contaminated water. For workers breathing in radioactive dust. For the families who’ve buried a trucker who didn’t make it home.
He’s doing it because no one else will.
He plants the tree whose shade he will never sit under—so others might rest easier.
A Line Has Been Drawn
Truckers across the country are waking up to the reality that they’ve been exploited, endangered, and lied to.
For the first time, the people carrying the toxic burden of America’s energy system are saying:
Enough.
Billy says it best:
“There’s a wildfire in the bushes. There’s a storm coming. You can climb on the trailer and ride with us, or you can stand on the roadside and wave as we pass. We’re not stopping.”
Citations and Resources:
Silica / Frac Sand Exposure
Worker Exposure to Silica During Hydraulic Fracturing (Hazard Alert – NIOSH/OSHA)2012
Radioactive Oil & Gas Waste Imported to Texas
South Texas Company Wants to Import Radioactive Oilfield Waste From Abroad2016 https://www.desmog.com/2021/04/22/lotus-llc-radioactive-fracking-waste-disposal-texas/
Odessa / West Texas Water Quality Context
City of Odessa – 2023 Water Quality Report (PWS No. TX0680002)2023
Permian Basin Trucking Safety / Out-of-Service Rates
More than 500 trucks taken out of service in Texas blitz2024
Oak Flat / Resolution Copper Project
Oak Flat copper mine on sacred Apache land gets another look from Biden administration2023
Central States Pension Fund & BlackRock
Pension Fund Update – Central States Pension Fund (TeamCare Summit Presentation)2022https://myteamcare.org/-/media/TeamCare/Files/Other-Documents/TeamCare-Summit/pension-fund-update.pdf
Amazon Institutional Ownership (Big Three Asset Managers)
Amazon (company) – Ownership Structure (Institutional Holdings Table)2023https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon(Scroll to “Shareholders” section; cites Nasdaq/Yahoo Finance institutional ownership data.)
Teamsters Amazon Division (Active Amazon Organizing Campaign)
Amazon Division – International Brotherhood of Teamsters2025https://teamster.org/divisions/amazon-division/
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