Time is money except in Trucking

Truck drivers do not realize it but they work for free a lot. The rules require it, and you have to do it. A driver gets 70 hours in 8 days, and is required by law to work at least 45 minutes a day doing post trip inspections, and fueling. This time adds up to 7 and a half hours a week, or 1/10 of the 70 hours the law allows us to work in 8 days.
In addition the law requires that we only drive 11 hours a day, and not work and drive more than 14 hours a day. These rules are in the interest of safety. They do not enhance safety. In fact the end result of the 14 hour rule is that most drivers drive at least 10 hours without stopping. Some, including me, will start driving and plan to not stop until they have driven for all 11 hours. It is not safe, and it is tiring, but if I stop for a two hour nap, and to eat I cannot drive all 11 hours because of the 14 hour rule. So I, we drive without taking a break, or a nap. All in the interest of safety.
I really think that the rules should be changed. The first rule that needs to be changed is the 70 hours in 8 days. This rule was put there to make unions happy. If drivers were allowed to work every day without having to worry about going over 70 hours no one would ever cheat on their logs, and most would drive about 8 to 9 hours a day, and be able to take decent breaks too.

But as long as we allow some no driving attorney to write the rules, we will be forced to work for free, and limited in the number of hours we can work in an 8 day period. The rules were originally written when trucks were not comfortable, and were probably a lot of work to drive. Today's trucks are a lot more comfortable, and a lot safer than the trucks that were around even 20 years ago.
So time is money, unless you are a driver, the rules keep making it harder and harder to be profitable. If truck drivers wanted to get together, and they should, we could very easily get some of the rules changed. The ramifications to individual drivers would be minimal. We need to organize, not as a union, but as a single voice to demand that common sense be applied to things like, uncompensated work, driver pay, and hours of service. Right now the attorneys have gotten rich off the lack of common sense used in applying the rules. The typical tort attorney gets a jury to find against the truck driver by saying "If this driver had followed the rules his truck would not have been there to kill my client!" Never mind that his client was drunk, or that his client had driven 24 hours after working in a factory for 84 hours in seven days. Never mind that his client fell asleep at the wheel. The mere fact that the truck was there makes the truck wrong.
Almost everything costs more because attorneys have gotten rich off claiming that others caused their clients harm. Forget the fact that common sense tells you that coffee is hot, lets force stores that sell coffee to have to pay extra to print "caution hot" on the cups they sell. They of course pass that cost on to us, and the attorney made a fortune, and the poor lady that got burned by the last unlabeled cup of coffee received very little of the millions that the defendant paid out.

So any way time is money, unless you are a truck driver. Then your time is worthless. The way to get the rules changed is to comply with them. When people cannot get their groceries because the trucks that are trying to deliver them cannot legally get to the receiver because the shipper wasted 10 or 12 of the first day's 14 hours taking coffee breaks and lunch breaks instead of loading the trailer in a timely manner, things would change. But instead of logging all loading time as free work time most truck drivers show the minimum 15 minutes for loading. They do this so they can driver more, and most truck drivers do not make any money if the wheels are not rolling.
The bottom line here is that if truck drivers would just agree that the paint on the walls is one color, we could agree to follow the rules 100$ of the time. This would take about a month and the people that rely on trucks to get their products to market would start screaming. In addition if truckers would just comply with the speed limits where the states split them by 15 miles per hour between trucks and cars, those laws would be changed too. If any one has any idea how we can get truckers to decided to cooperate with each other and get stuff changed let me know.
Imagine if every truck in the country stopped for just one day, what would happen. It is scary how much of the economy truckers control. But most just want to argue that it cannot be done.
Bounce

There may be a web page replacing this blog

I am thinking about starting a web page instead of or as a replacement for this blog. As a minimum I will be setting up a discussion group for Truck Drivers soon. I would like to get some comments or inputs from folks as to what to do with it. The goal is to start getting organized. If we can agree on the color of the paint on the wall, maybe we can organize and start doing something about the way truck drivers are paid, treated, and generally disrespected.

Help me out here. Comment on what you think will help, and let me know if you have any ideas. I think that if we try we can get it so that drivers can drive at least ten hours every day, and stop having to deal with the seventy hours in eight day rule. If that change were made everyone could operate safer.

Thanks and I hope to get some input please.

Dave Talley

How to get truckers to organize

The question is how do you get truck drivers to organize? They could do it easily, and if they did they would be able to control the country. It would not take long, just 24 hours of no trucks moving anywhere and the country would realize how important truckers are. Imagine no one could get gas, milk, bread, tomatoes, potatoes, or anything else. Just 24 hours is all it would take. Or maybe if they could all agree to do the speed limit in the split speed states. Imagine California with every truck doing the speed limit. No one could ever get on the highway because the right lane would be blocked with trucks doing the speed limit. That would take about a week and they would change the law.

But then if every one would log legal, nothing would ever get where it was supposed to be on time, and it would have the same effect as shutting down. But truckers won't do that because they are afraid of losing their jobs, and or their income. There has to be a way to get organized and get things changed. Hopefully someone will read this blog and have an idea of how to do it.

Things that Truckers should work to CHANGE

1: Hours of Service Rules as they currently are make it harder for truck drivers to make a living.

a) 11 hours of driving allowed in a 24 hour period (this one is OK but
could stand some changing).

b) A driver can only work and or drive 14 hours in a 24 hour period (this one
is just stupid. It is one of two reasons that drivers falsify their
logs. Work is poorly defined in the rules, and drivers are not compensated
for this time in any way. Work is defined as waiting at docks, loading or
unloading trailers and post trip inspections, pre trip inspections, accident
reports, repairs on the truck, waiting on hold for dispatchers to talk to
you, and on and on).

c) 70 hour rule. This one states that a driver cannot drive and work more
than 70 hours in an 8 day period. This is the one rule that causes the most
log falsification of all of them.

Truckers should work to change these rules. For safety, and for profit. If we could drive 10 hours a day every day, and be allowed to decide when and how we did that we could all make money, and there would be no need to every falsify a log page.The rule that allows a driver to reset the 70 hour clock would not be needed. Having 10 hours a day to drive would give Company drivers 550 miles a day, and Owner Operators could get about 600 to 630 miles a day in that time. So that is the rule we should focus on. Also work should be defined as all time for which a driver is compensated. In short although Inspections, Accident Reports, Phone Reporting and Loading and Unloading time should be recorded it should not be taken away from drive time. The two different times should not be mingled. They should be exclusive of each other.

That is it for today. I will try to make this blog as interactive as possible. Comments will not be moderated here, but you will have to identify yourself to comment.
Dave Talley

First an explination of why this blog is important

OK, my profile tells you that I am a truck driver, and a biker. But it does not explain why I am writing here. The American trucker is under payed, under appreciated, and under estimated. All of these things are the fault of the American Trucker.

People do not realize that without trucks and troops this nation would be lost.* People really do believe that the things they buy come from the Grocery store, or the Hardware store. They never think about the fact that it got there on a truck. Trucks are smelly, oily, road blocks. In general trucks are a nuisance. Something that is in the way. People do not realize that without trucks they would be like stray dogs. That is to say without trucks people would be naked, hungry and homeless. Unfortunately the American Trucker also does not realize this. If they did they would do something about being under payed, under appreciated, and under estimated. I once saw a T-Shirt in California. It was on a truck driver. It read "Never Underestimate the American Homo Sexual! They Vote and they are Organized!". I laughed when I read it, but then I thought it was very very correct.

This blog is titled "What color is the paint on the wall" It is a question, but it is an answer too. The problem with the American Trucker is that they are not organized, and although they vote, no one knows it. There is an old joke about truckers that is the basis for the title of this blog. It goes something like this:
"If you put five drivers in a room painted white and gave them thirty minutes to
discuss and decide what color the paint on the wall is the results would be simple. When you came back they would all be bloody, their clothes would be torn off them, and any furniture in the room would be destroyed. The drivers would not know what happened, they would deny what happened happened, and they would all five tell you the wall was painted a different color."

Funny but true. Truckers cannot decide to organize because they are too independent. I have a friend that says we are ignorant. Not stupid just ignorant. Drivers do not realize that if they would organize and get together they could change they way they are treated, and payed, and thought of.

In the 70's truckers in this country were revered by almost everyone. They were the knights of the American Highway. They were payed well and pretty much everyone knew that without trucks America would stop.
Something changed. What it was I do not know for sure. I think it was the drivers themselves that changed. The economy got bad, and people needed work. I went into the Air Force because I could not find any other kind of work. Truckers took lower pay, and put up with just about anything to feed their families and pay the bills.

I have discussed this with many many drivers. They all agree we should do something, but they do not know what to do. I think the first step is to talk about what needs to be done. So I am starting this blog. I may open a web site, but that will come later.
There are some good Organizations that truckers should join. OOIDA (Owner Operators and Independent Drivers Association is one. Road Dogs is another (Road Dogs are just friends that listen to channel 147 and 61 on Sirius/XM radio, but they talk to each other too. That is good. Getting ideas talked about is a good start.

The next post will list some of the things that I think we as drivers should do and things that we should work to change. We can make this a better profession if we change things, and we must simply change them slowly.

Dave Talley

*This saying is something Krazy Karl says a lot in the month of May, and something he has painted on the back or his pickup truck.