Editorial: An Earful From Shippers

In case the Department of Transportation didn’t get the message in the first seven field hearings on its ill-conceived plan to revise trucking’s work rules, it got another earful last week.

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It was the shipper community that led the charge against DOT’s hours-of-service proposal at the eighth, and supposedly final, hearing, held at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

An official from a meat distribution company in Nebraska warned the regulators that his firm’s $75 million-a-year freight bill could rise by as much as $50 million if the new rules are implemented.

His numbers include increased costs from his freight carriers as well as spoilage of his fresh beef and pork, which he said was likely to occur while drivers were forced to take two consecutive days off, as required by the proposed rules.

“This is fresh meat we are producing,” said Perry Bourne of IBP Transportation. “This is truly just-in-time delivery.”

Another shipping official estimated that the new rules would increase his firm’s transportation costs by 25%. “DOT is not taking into account the billions of dollars in savings from just-in-time delivery that would be affected by this rule,” said Willie Johnson of Marriott Distribution Services.

Greer Woodruff, an official at J.B. Hunt Transport, told the hearing audience that it took this long for shippers to respond to the rules because it took most fleets at least two months to fully assess the costs associated with the proposal. The rules were unveiled at the end of April.

Now that the shippers are seeing the numbers, they’ve joined the battle to stop the rulemaking now. And now they’re making another just-in-time delivery.

The House and Senate conferees are expected to set their schedule for consideration of the transportation spending bill this week.

Now that all sides have been heard from, we hope that the conferees will agree to accept the Senate’s version of the bill, which would impose a moratorium on DOT’s finalization of its rule for at least one year.

Only when the Clinton administration’s frantic drive to enact an hours rule is officially thwarted, we believe, will DOT sit back down at the drawing board and craft a rule we can all live — and work — with.