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Menace of safety: Reshaping trucking proves to be tricky job for Americans

There has been an ongoing war against trucking in the western world in favour or railways, barges and short sea - anything in fact, but those noisy, smelly do what they like, when they like, ubiquitous masculine brutish things called trucks that pollute the world.

Females make up 47 per cent of American workers, yet only make up six per cent of truck drivers. Movies such as "Every Which Way But Loose", "Smokey and the Bandit", "Breaker! Breaker!" and "White Line Fever" glorify trucking and the freedom of the open road.

While most appealing to adventurous young men, it is an industry that excludes everyone else and unsettles the settled society it serves - irritating unions, health and safety lobbyists, local industry protectionists, feminists, environmentalists and regulators.

Jointly and severally, these forces have ganged up on trucking, first on the west coast of the North America five years ago when trucks beyond a certain age were banned from the docks for allegedly causing too much pollution - whether they were or not.

Whether they were or not, became an unexamined assumption when any hostile report came to hand, it was thought adequate enough to ban whatever the authorities wanted to ban.

Even barefaced lies could be told to support a supposedly good cause. In May 2015, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) was accused by the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association (PMSA) of exaggerating diesel pollution by 340 per cent, and knowingly, passing a tough clean-air regulations based on data they knew to be false. This was exposed by the San Francisco Chronicle, and wrung an apology from CARB chairwoman Mary Nichols.

Big business and big unions discovered they could profit from the eco-craze if they targeted small operators, be they independent truckers or smaller shipping lines. As the big companies could afford the meet the rising and increasingly onerous environmental compliance costs, they would be compensated by driving smaller concerns out of business and thus enlarging their own market share.

The unions, principally the Brotherhood of Teamsters in trucking, who already supported regulators and environmentalists, would reduce the small independent truckers, mostly-owner-operators, by putting them out of business, and pushing them as drivers into the arms larger operators as employees, and who would inevitably join the union.

To speed things along, the Teamsters ran a parallel campaign against specific companies using independent truckers. Teamsters staged publicity-seeking mini-strikes at marine terminal and company marshalling yards and filed suits with local labour tribunals California to deploy independent drivers, working under contracts, in a drive to reclassify them as employees, with employee benefits.

The Harbour Trucking Association (HTA), which represents the interests of trucking companies that service the ports of Southern California, said most of the independent operators did not wish to be re-classified and wished to remain as they were.

Moreover, the HTA wanted the Teamster pickets moved away from the port complex. The strikers, which started protesting at the truck yards of the individual trucking companies involved, threatened to move to the port if demands were not met.

"When they start to have demonstrations at the terminals it impacts the wider community," said HTA executive director Weston LaBar, adding that the Teamsters set a bad precedent targeting certain companies and holding demonstrations at the marine complex when there were not enough police prevent pickets disrupting normal activities.

But state labour tribunals tended to agree with the Teamsters. The California Labour Commissioner once awarded US$855,285 to four port and rail drivers working for XPO Logistics' subsidiary XPO Cartage.

Other allegedly misclassified drivers filed suits against employers, making wage and hour claims with the California Division of Labour Standards Enforcement (DLSE).

Additionally, in Los Angeles Superior Court, the ruling denying XPO's petition to compel these four recent drivers' cases to arbitration was based in part on finding sufficient evidence that the drivers were employees, not independent contractors.

While this was going on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) hatched its Hours of Service (HOS) restrictions, which limits the number of hours drivers can drive, without overnight rest on pain of severe fines.

The regulations, say long-haul truckers, dispatchers and fleet managers, are flawed because the rules don't allow the flexibility that trucking needs to function. They are also dangerous as drivers race against the clock to a destination before their allotted time has run out.

"In 30 years and four million miles of safe driving, I’ve never seen anything make our industry as dangerous as the 14-hour rule,” said one driver in response to a survey by Stamford, Connecticut's trucking journal, Fleet Owner.

Too many things, truckers say, are beyond drivers’ control, but still that 14-hour clock ticks down.

 “When we have to wait for the receiver to unload the trailer, they take a long time - like four to five hours. That’s time we lose to drive. So now you have a problem: you will be in violation for driving beyond the 14-hour limit to find somewhere to park,” said one of the drivers polled.

To enforce the compulsory rest periods is spy-in-the cab technology, or the electronic logging device (ELD). At this point there is a division in the ranks of truckers, roughly represented by the big operators in the American Trucking Associations (ATA) and the small operators in the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA).

Not surprisingly, the OOIDA wants no part of the ELD and also deeply resents paying for another federal unfunded mandate. But the ATA, on the other hand, likes it because it is a way of stopping the smaller operator, from literally "going the extra mile" because they are forbidden by law to do so.

But where big and small are reunited is in the matter of the 14-hour rule. Regulations require drivers to log only 11-hours on the road after 10-consecutive hours of rest. This creates a situation where truckers must closely monitor which loads they may take and which to refuse.

A driver is allowed an off-duty break of up to two hours which could extend his on-duty time to a maximum of 14 hours. That gets complicated however when the trucker wants to complete his trip without a true overnight stop.

For example, a driver in Southern California logs in at 7am and makes his first run picking up a chassis at an offsite location. He heads to the Port of LA, picks up an import container for delivery to a warehouse in Mira Loma. He exchanges the load and returns an empty to the port. Wait time in and out of the port, drive times and load transfers take him three hours.

It’s now 11am. He gets a call to pick up an export load in Bakersfield moving out of Long Beach. Bakersfield is 138 miles from Long Beach, a two-hour 19-minute drive. So, he goes to pick up an empty.

Drive time, waiting in the gate queue and load out takes an hour and a half; it’s now 12:35pm. Traffic is building so it takes him three hours and 45 minutes to reach the warehouse and load out. It is now 4:20pm. Our driver gets back on the road and it takes him three hours and 15 minutes to return the load to the port.

He spends 45 minutes getting into the terminal and another half an hour to drop the container and leave the facility. Back in his depot at 9:25 at night he has been on the road for 14 hours and 25 minutes.

Given what we know, our trucker would assess whether the Bakersfield was worth it.

The small time operators of the OOIDA have cheered the recent introduction of something called the REST Act, which would go some way to mitigate the enormities of the Hours of Service mess, but is hardly a cure-all. Even if it were passed.

For some reason truckers' plight has not aroused the anti-regulatory spirit that is alive in the White House and animates the political base of the Trump administration. Maybe it as case of a situation that must be allowed to fester into a crisis proportion before any sweeping measure can be taken to rectify it in toto.

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U.S. Trade Specialists