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