Opinion: The View From the Road
b>By Dan Schobert
i>Co-Owner
ointours LLC
To begin with, it is increasingly clear that there is no shortage of men and women with truck-driving skills. Rather, we are running short on people with driving skills who are willing to work under the prevailing conditions in the trucking industry. Consider that:
• Despite the hours-of-service rules, drivers often find they are expected to log incorrectly to get more driving time. When I was an OTR driver, I often logged 15 minutes for unloading 40,000 pounds of product from my trailer. This is, of course, impossible, but it seemed to pass inspection when logs were checked.
• Drivers often find they are expected to participate in loading and unloading. Food warehouses in particular expect drivers to unload their trucks or pay out of their own pockets for lumpers, or dock workers, to do the work for them.
• The phrase “off duty” is meaningless for many OTR drivers. Even while resting in the truck’s sleeper berth, the driver is, in effect, the guardian of the truck and its cargo. He would be expected to wake up and go into action if someone tried to break into the trailer.
Or consider this far-fetched but possible off-duty scenario: A driver is at a truck stop far from home and looking at another weekend away from his family. He decides that his off-duty time is his to use — so he drives the truck home. Come Monday morning, he calls in and the dispatcher wonders why he is in Georgia when his truck is supposed to be in Oklahoma. His off-duty time might be his own, but I doubt he would work for that company much longer.
Hours of service not withstanding, the adage of “wheels that turn, earn” still applies. In the mind of his employer, a driver is only working when the truck is rolling and making money. The driver is told where to go and when. If he does anything else, he will lose his job.
Many OTR drivers are caught in a sort of mental trap in which they do not see themselves as the 24/7 workers they truly are, but rather as on-the-road versions of the worker who clocks into his office or factory job, works all day and then goes home. Even though drivers are not paid commensurate with the around-the-clock hours they put in, they are paid substantially more than day workers with the same training and job experience.
This comes home to roost when drivers decide to throw in the towel and consider other types of jobs. Working that 24/7 and earning a paycheck that sometimes approaches $1,000 a week, the driver who wants to try something else will probably find it next to impossible to land an eight-hour-weekday job with similar pay.
Also, look around and notice how, in other industries, a person has the opportunity to move up the ladder. That is not true of trucking. Unless a driver has done something to improve his skills in other fields, he will continue to be a driver. Moreover, there is little, if any, vertical movement in trucking. The majority of the workforce is out on the road. Unless he is an owner-operator who starts his own business, the average driver does not wind up company president.
To be fair, there are trucking industry jobs that do not involve driving. Dispatchers, sales representatives, mechanics and managers are examples, but the field work is done away from the shop.
It is also true that some drivers have been able to move into other positions, but not very often. I wish someone would investigate and find out how many men and women with industry desk jobs moved into those offices after being drivers for any length of time. My guess is that there are very few.
What does this have to do with the driver shortage? The simple truth is that potential drivers can see these things happening early on and be discouraged from becoming career drivers — a job where the money is good, but not commensurate with the time actually put in, and where there are no real opportunities to climb the ladder to positions with a better ratio of hours to pay.
This is not to say that trucking is not a job of honor. There are many fine men and women behind the steering wheels of countless trucks across the land. However, it is also the case that there are important issues not being addressed as the industry considers strategies for enticing qualified men and women to become professional drivers.
The writer is a former longhaul truck driver who now operates a bus company in Plover, Wis., with his wife.
This opinion piece appears in the Dec. 19-26 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.
14524
