Opinion: Trouble in River City
ruck Driver
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At our nation’s seaports, where most of the freight
On our nation’s highways, skyrocketing diesel costs, insurance costs and cost of living increases are combining with declining freight rates as trucking companies push and shove each other in a frantic race for the bottom.
Trucking executives are forced to tighten up, to offer customers more incentives and push their drivers harder while keeping costs down. It is becoming commonplace for trucking companies to haul freight at a loss simply to maintain their customer base.
Drivers, who are paid either on a percentage or mileage basis, are being forced to put in more and more unpaid hours in order to placate shippers and receivers. With as many as 40 hours per week given over to “wait” time, drivers do whatever they must to achieve the maximum miles each day. This includes logbook falsification to the point that the driver’s logbook is now commonly referred to as a “comic book.” Trucking company executives are aware of this fact but choose to turn a blind eye to it in the name of “productivity.”
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The strangest part of this situation is that the trucking companies and their various associations refuse to recognize the problem. To most of them, it is simply a matter of too much government regulation. In reality, a cancer has formed and is now spreading out of control throughout the trucking industry, the industry that keeps this country moving.
The federal government recently stepped into the cancer ward with a large injection called “hours-of-service reform.” Like “The Music Man,” this injection supposedly will give an instrument to all players, keep them out of trouble and keep them safe and rested.
These reforms will no more take care of the “trouble” than an aspirin relieves the pain of the terminally ill.
As an over-the-road trucker with 17 years seat time, I must say that I wish the new hours of service would work. They could go a long way toward safer highways and a more humane work environment for truckers. However unless this injection is bolstered with many other “reforms,” the government is spitting into the wind.
Since most drivers today are paid by the mile, reforming the HOS regulations as proposed would seriously injure the take-home pay these drivers are literally dying for. Unless and until such reform is coupled with a repeal of trucking’s exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act and drivers are paid a living hourly wage, no such reform will be welcomed by any driver with a family to feed.
But there is more.
Since industry deregulation and the resulting astronomical increase in the number of trucking companies competing for the nation’s freight, rates have, at best, remained flat. In the face of skyrocketing fuel costs, out-of-control health insurance costs, workman’s comp, liability insurance, taxes, tolls, labor, etc., the profit margin in trucking has almost vanished.
We, as an industry, need to rethink the way we do business. We need to make hard choices in the allocation of rolling stock and drivers. For example, can we continue to afford to provide free labor to our customers in return for starvation rates? Can we afford to have our drivers and equipment idle for hours without just compensation?
Rates must come up. Indeed, the entire means of arriving at them need to be rethought. Consumers must be ready to pay more. If producers can raise their prices to offset fluctuations in the market, why isn’t the trucking industry smart enough to do the same?
The answer until now has been the unbending wall of competition.
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This is as it should be. Call it Capitalism.
Since 1983, Mr. Bourrie of Washington, Maine, has driven for Pottle’s Transportation, Family Dollar Stores and Crowe Rope Co.
