A bipartisan bill in the House, introduced by Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich, hopes to “repeal the motor carrier overtime exemption in the Fair Labor Standards Act, allowing truck drivers to be compensated for all the hours they work.” Currently drivers who spend many hours a day just waiting to pick up or deliver cargo aren’t paid for those hours; this bill is hoping to address that issue and, in turn, keep more drivers in the workforce. Read more...
A truck driver and passenger are hospitalized after their tractor trailer broke through a metal fence on the Fulton Street bridge in Atlanta. Traffic had to be “shut down while crews worked to remove the broken fence and the ramps from Interstate 20 to the southbound lanes of the connector.” The driver is currently in serious condition as investigators are trying to piece together the incident. Read more…
Though flatbed trucks are the most widely used open-deck trailers in the industry, recent deaths have renewed safety concerns for flatbed driving. While devices known as headache racks, often made of aluminum or steel, used to be required to protect drivers from shifting loads, this is no longer the case. These open-deck trailers are often hauling a variety of commodities such as “steel, rebars, steel coils, lumbar, construction materials, military equipment, machinery and other heavy goods.” Read more…
Economic fallout is exacerbating as “Texas Governor Greg Abbot moved incrementally to roll back new inspection rules for commercial trucks entering from Mexico, with some companies saying they aren’t able to fulfill orders because trucks are stuck in multi-mile backups at a number of entry points.” Many companies are bemoaning the fact that the added inspections have already cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention the smaller paychecks for all the loaders who have had trucks failing to show up. Read more…
Guest host and mega movie star Jake Gyllenhaal poked fun at truck drivers and truck stops on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live which aired on April 9th. Gyllenhaal, along with Saturday Night Live cast Cecily Strong, lampooned everything from drivers having to often pee in a bottle while on the job to the many stories of the fabled “ghost trucker” that many truckers have claimed to encounter. Read more…
While truck driver training programs help applicants find positions amongst the nation’s biggest freight haulers, quitting during these courses can often have severe repercussions. Despite the fact many of these programs fail to deliver the compensation and working conditions they promise, “drivers who quit early can be pursued by debt collectors and blacklisted by other companies in the industry, making it difficult for them to find a new job.” Read more...
Despite the claim of a driver shortage due to the pandemic, professor Jason Miller claims that they just don’t want to drive for mega carriers anymore. With many claiming that the mega carriers treat them poorly and pay them peanuts, some are becoming owner operators themselves or going to work for smaller carriers. Miller goes on to share BLD data “which shows that the average size of US trucking establishments plummeted from 10.6 employees at the end of 2019 to 9.4 employees in the third quarter of 2021.. Read more…
President Joe Biden addressed multiple important issues facing the trucking industry as part of an update on his Trucking Action Plan (TAP), including ensuring female driver safety from sexual predators and the lack of safe parking for big rigs. The plan initially launched last December by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and U.S. Department of Transportation was to “increase the supply of truck drivers by creating new pathways into the profession, cutting red tape to expand high quality training… and laying the foundation for improving job quality to keep people in the profession.” Read more…
Though preliminary numbers might change in the next two months, a two year streak of trucking employment growth has come to an end, “perhaps indicating the economy hitting the brakes after unprecedented consumer demand.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 5,000 trucking jobs were lost in March, which “marks the first month-to-month decrease since April 2020, when the start of the pandemic wiped out nearly 80,000 trucking jobs.” Read more…
With long stretches away from home and family already making truck driving jobs less than desirable, low pay has compounded the trucker shortage even further. As drivers around the country “quit their jobs en masse, the trucking industry needs an estimated 80,000 more drivers to operate optimally. That’s a historic high, according to the American Trucking Associations.” Many believe that the only way to fix this issue, as with many other industries across the pandemic-stricken economy, is to re-evaluate wages and benefits for these applicants. Read more…
