On 28 April, after a six-week strike and a failed attempt to disperse them using force, more than 60 truck drivers from Georgia and Uzbekistan finally left their picket off a German motorway, and headed home with their wage arrears paid in full.

More and more truck drivers from post-Soviet countries are filling up vacancies in the European logistics industry. This spring’s historic strike marked the first time they had engaged in industrial action on such a wide – or successful – scale.

The drivers had gathered to protest after being paid less than the €80 a day [£69] they had been promised in job adverts, their wages being chipped off by overpriced services, and fines imposed by their employers. In some cases, drivers were receiving monthly payments of just a few hundred euros despite working ten to 12 hours a day. Each of them were owed different amounts, which they wrote with adhesive tape on their trucks.

The drivers had been employed by a consortium of three Polish companies – LukMaz, AgMaz, and Imperia – all owned by the family of Lukas Mazur, a wealthy businessman. The consortium, which can count on a fleet of more than 900 trucks, works in the supply chain of major corporations including Ikea and Volkswagen.

I spent a number of days with the group in a parking lot on the motorway near Gräfenhausen, a small town close to Frankfurt am Main. They had gathered their trucks there, filling up at the service station as needed. They had been fired at the start of the strike, and were counting on the company’s trucks as their sole leverage against their employer. They had been sleeping in those trucks for months, as it is common for companies to provide insufficient facilities for drivers to rest at the weekend. Many migrant drivers end up living in their trucks for long periods of time.

The strikers were an eclectic group. When I arrived in Gräfenhausen there were around 50 Georgians and 11 Uzbekistani drivers.

“We are being treated like sheep,” said Irakli*, a driver from Georgia in his mid-40s.

While they usually interacted with their compatriots in Georgian or Uzbek, the strikers used Russian as a lingua franca during their meetings. Yet it was clear that after so many days spent together, they had learned to understand each other with just one look.

We spoke in “restaurants”, as they called them: three makeshift common areas carved out in the trailers of the trucks, where they ate and spent time together.

Life in the parking lot went on against the steady sound of the traffic on the autobahn, a motorway that rumbles like a swollen river. There, vehicles flow to move around the products we consume every day.

Backdrop to the first strike

For these Georgian and Uzbekistani migrant workers, driving had been seen as a possible route out of economic stagnation in their own country.

Instead, they found themselves routinely being paid a month late and receiving less than they had been promised.

Mazur, the beneficiary of the companies, told the press that his practices were within the boundaries of Polish law, and that the drivers had all signed contracts allowing it. From their side, the workers claimed that the contracts were written only in Polish, which for them was a foreign language. The announcement that the company would no longer pay workers during weekends was the final straw.

“We stopped the trucks not only for the money,” said Alisher*, a veteran haulier who began his career at the wheels of Red Army trucks. “We stopped out of self-respect. This is not a way to treat people.”

Drivers were angered, too, when they discovered Mazur had been posting pictures of his expensive new car on social media even while withholding their wages.

This was the backdrop to their first attempt to hold a strike in Italy’s northern city of Vipiteno in mid-March. The strike failed, in part because the workers had little experience of industrial action and lacked connections with local trade unions.

Mazur spoke to the workers and convinced some of them to go back to work, promising their overdue wages would be paid. Strikers in Gräfenhausen told me this didn’t happen, although the company reduced prices for its overcrowded dormitory.

Sherzod*, a young Uzbek with prior experience driving trucks at Russian mining sites, said the company had started to take chunks of his paychecks from the beginning.

“They provided me with documents, and for big money,” he said. “They deducted €900 [£776] so that I could obtain a code 95 [an EU truck driving licence], and €100 [£86] for the residence permit. For the first few days, we lived in the company’s dormitory and they charged us €30 [£26] per night. Four in one room, no kitchen.”

The drivers also complained about the heavy fines they were charged for real or supposed damages to the vehicles or delays in delivery.

“They told me that I was receiving lower pay because I was in their debt,” said Sherzod.

Rustamjon*, who worked as a truck driver in Uzbekistan for many years before finding Imperia’s job ad, said that one Monday he had found a hole in his fuel tank: he had been robbed. “When I came back to Poland a few days later they said it was my fault: ‘Why do we even pay you on weekends? Why did you sleep?’” The firm deducted €750 [£647] from Rustamjon’s wages for the missing fuel and a new tank. Other workers told me that they, too, felt fines imposed on them were arbitrary.

Often, their documents showed that they were on a different assignment and at a different location than the place where the company claimed a delay had taken place. But whenever they complained about this, they say, the company’s accountant ignored them.

In Vipiteno, the workers say they had the clear impression Lukas Mazur was on good terms with the local police, and felt they could have been targeted had they not dispersed.

Upon leaving the site at Vipiteno, many of those who refused to trust Mazur’s promises received the order to go back to the company’s base in Poland, where headquarters and lodgings for employees are located. Sensing they would face dismissal and be deprived of the trucks – their sole leverage against their employer – the drivers decided to regroup in Germany until their wage arrears would have been paid.

There, they managed to get in touch with an experienced trade unionist; this was a game-changer. Edwin Atema, a representative of the Federation of Dutch Trade Unions (FNV), the largest trade union in the Netherlands, and himself a former truck driver, has spent the last 14 years fighting for the rights of logistics workers.

Amazed

During their picket in Germany, the context changed, too: with the help of Atema and Faire Mobilität, a project of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) aimed at supporting migrant workers in the German labour market, a coalition of local unions and associations rapidly converged around the strikers. They provided logistical help, food donations from other workers, as well as legal and translation support.

The strikers told me they had been amazed at the solidarity shown by other workers and by the generosity of the German people.

It meant that when, on the second week of strike, Mazur arrived in Gräfenhausen with around 20 armed guards of the Rutkowski Patrul, a private security company from Poland, things panned out differently from how they had in Italy.

The group was planning to take trucks back to the company’s base. Other drivers, who were waiting in buses, likely unaware of the situation, were supposed to drive the vehicles back to Poland.

The company also brought along a film crew with the aim of filming an “intervention against drivers blocking 70 trucks”. The resulting video, which was posted on YouTube before being removed, tells a rather different story. It shows how the strikers stood up to Mazur until the German police intervened to stop the Rutkowski Patrul.

Solidarity as common language

The drivers who came together to strike had a diverse background and not much political education. Many of them learned the meaning of the word “strike” after they had already gathered in Gräfenhausen.

It was the Georgians in the group, some of whom had experience of factory strikes at home, who suggested connecting with other European trade unions.

In general, the Georgians seemed more confident that the strike could have a positive public image. “My family and friends support me striking, for sure,” said Gevorg*, who used to do factory work in Russia, Georgia, and Slovakia. “When we went on strike in Georgia, they also came to our picket in solidarity.”

The Georgians were also more likely to have told family, friends, or acquaintances about the strike, while the Uzbekistani mostly only informed their family. “I didn’t tell my family because I don’t want them to worry,” said Rustamjon*, “and I don’t see the purpose of telling my neighbours: you never know how gossip may develop.”

The Georgians, though more experienced with labour struggles, were not politically homogeneous. The people I spoke with displayed diverging political opinions and voting preferences, though these cultural, linguistic, and political differences were no obstacle during the picket.

During the week I spent with them, I witnessed several moments where the protesting drivers disagreed, but they often repeated, almost ritually, that they were standing together. Even a casual handshake was often accompanied by the word vmeste (“together”). And these were not just words: the level of mutual trust was high, even among people who hadn’t known each other before the strike.

On what would be the last night, as the companies agreed to pay, and the withheld wages started appearing in the drivers’ banks accounts, many prepared to leave, packing their luggage and food. But as time wore on it became clear one of the companies still had yet to settle up with its workers, who kept looking at their phones, nervously refreshing the webpages of their bank accounts.

The other workers decided to sleep one more night in their trucks, without dinner, instead of abandoning their comrades. They said the strike had begun based on three principles: “together”, “either everybody or nobody”, and “until the end”. They stuck to their word.

When the whole €300,000 [around £260,000] owed to the drivers had at last been paid, long and emotional farewells accompanied the departure of the drivers. Some were leaving for their home countries; others had already found new employment with different logistics firms.

The picket at the parking lot had been an island, a place of passage along the great routes of global logistics. It never ceased to be so, during these weeks, as fellow truck drivers and other motorists weaved through the two lines of parked trucks, often bringing solidarity and supplies.

After the strikers left on buses and cars, Mazur representatives mushroomed, checking and removing each truck.

The dozens of blue vehicles that had gathered for the strike had made visible the reality of logistics that is behind most of the products we consume – a reality that we rarely notice. With the strike over, that reality has again become near-invisible.

* Names have been changed