Trucking Industry is Largely Deaf to a Drivers Realities

This post was printed in the February 2020 edition of Today's Trucking
February 2020 is the twenty first anniversary of my first trip as a long haul trucker. Having accumulated approximately 4.5 million safe collision free kilometres over that time I remain passionate about what I do but I’m having a difficult time coming up with a positive spin on those 21 years in terms of the relationship between “drivers” and the “trucking industry”.
The independence, the freedom, and the money, all appealed to me when my eye first turned towards trucking in the late summer of 1998. I could be my own boss. Those things continue to hold true for me today. But one of the things I quickly learned about the trucking business was that information flowed from the top down and if you wanted to express your ideas and objectively criticize anything based on your firsthand experience it was truly an uphill battle. Basically the cost of your independence and freedom was shut up and follow the rules. The rules were inflexible and remain so.
When I was indoctrinated as a driver in 1999 I was taught how to manage my driver logbook to maximize my income. This education came from my fellow drivers after I had earned my AZ (class 1) licence. There was a ministry way and there was an industry way. It was a dance we all learned and everybody was content. You didn’t want to rock the boat because the system worked. When I first joined this industry safety & compliance was more about dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s than anything else. Individual common sense within the driver pool was the primary factor that insured public and personal safety.  The rules could be bent but you didn’t want to get caught bending them. That was my first lasting impression.
Drivers today continue to be managed from the top down. I’m not talking about the relationship drivers have with their individual carriers. We can work for progressive carriers that care for us, listen to our concerns, and treat us accordingly, but the industry as a whole remains largely deaf to the realities a driver faces everyday on the open road and the way that experience affects us on a personal level.
I recognise this is my opinion but it is not hearsay. You only have to reflect on issues that affect drivers directly to see how little has changed over the past 2 decades. Hours of service, drug & alcohol testing, and CVSA inspections are three specific areas that are constantly trumpeted by the industry as controls to improve safety. In fact the only real change over the past 20 years is the increased enforcement levels. We now have electronic logging devices and speed limiters along with a new clearinghouse this year for U.S. drug and alcohol testing. There is no limit to the amount of money that can be spent to put systems of best practices in place to protect organizations from liability but there remains a complete lack of investment in individual drivers. The reality is that safety rests in the hands of individual drivers.
Drivers continue to do battle with a lifestyle that brings with it a high level of personal risk with little opportunity of influencing change over a system that proclaims to have their best interest at front of mind.
I was listening to a radio program about Albert Einstein on one of my trips around Christmas time and it opened with this quote. “The same problem can’t be solved by the conscience that created it.”  - AE
That quotation sums up where we are at this point in time within the trucking industry. We are doing the same things with greater intensity to solve the same problems that have existed over many decades. The message from drivers is straightforward. It’s not working.