Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/649008
Voices 4 | Overdrive | March 2016 Kudos came quickly for Texas-based reader Gary Carlisle's opinion piece, published on OverdriveOnline.com in December, calling for returning rest/ run flexibility by fixing the 14-hour rule. Carlisle argued the 14-hour clock's advent near the middle of the last decade "totally destroyed the pos- sibility that safety could be achieved through the hours of service. Can you imagine how anyone could come up with such a plan? That if you penalize an experienced truck driver for taking a nap, it will make him safer?" "The effect of making the hours of service more and more rigid is completely lost on those who write regulation, and on a lot of these folks who try to direct trucking around," noted frequent commenter Safetygirl. She pointed to the Tracy Morgan incident. When the crash occurred, the Walmart driver was "within his hours of service on state-of-the-art electronic logs" but was "driving tired because he was attempting to comply with his hours of service without losing a day of drive time during his work week." Pressure to maximize daily drive time within the 14-hour window of on-duty time is a bigger issue, many argue. Whether that pressure comes from the driver himself, a dispatcher or other company representatives, it's a direct result of the rule, comment- ers argued. Many hope for a return to split-sleeper flexibility, with rest periods that can extend the duty day. "I never could understand how increasing driving time and giving no time for rest was safer," noted Norman Ott. "The only thing the 14-hour rule did was make it easier on enforce- ment. I would like to see [more] split-sleeper [possibilities] with the 34-hour restart. E-logs must make auditing a lot easier. No wonder FMCSA wants them." The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration at least seems to have listened to such complaints. It's prepar- ing to do a split sleep study that could underpin a return to greater sleeper flexibility. (See "Advances in technology point toward hours relief," p. 39.) Carlisle's comments on the erosion of middle-class skilled labor also struck a nerve. Michigan-based owner-operator Ron Zinn noted the tough situation for the nation's skilled laborers who once got their due compensation. "The world was made by hammer swing- ers," he said. "They got the lion's share of the money because they were the ones doing the work. When the hammer swinger went home and got asked, 'What'd you do today?', he could say, 'I did all these things, swinging the hammer.' " The offshoring of so much industry before and after the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free- trade policy measures left, in Zinn's view, "only one thing to attack in America – labor. Free trade annihilat- ed the $30/hour worker." Regulating us 'out of business' " The serious issue for the American economy is government enabling of the selloff of the major manufacturing segments to foreign countries, eliminating a large part of the blue-collar skilled labor in America. That leaves the transportation business the only one they have failed to be able to export. It appears they are hell-bent on regulating it out of business. " — Gary Carlisle, writing on the need for greater hours of service flexibility Max Heine