I own a small fleet of trucks and have been in trucking since the mid-80s. I think it is time we finally stand up and say no more! We not only have the power to cripple this country in the form of a shutdown, but also with all our numbers we are a lot of voters that could carry some major weight. I don’t understand why we all sit back and just keep letting the government cram more and more regulations and rules, which keep taking more and more out of our pockets, right down our throats.
We have always gotten the short end of the stick on logbooks, when it is the shippers and receivers that hold us up for hours, the end result being when a carrier gets audited, they are the ones who gets the fines, not the shippers and receivers. The shippers and receivers will never be made responsible because they contribute to the campaign funds.
Electronic logs will cause the small trucking companies to be deemed unreliable when we get held up for hours and can’t make our scheduled delivery until 1 p.m. when we should have been there at 8 a.m., then further miss our reload because they quit loading at 2 p.m. A large company will just send another truck in to make the pickup. This would be like a normal person being told they will get paid to work Monday but not Tuesday, and that would result in them finding a new job.
Not to mention the fortune the companies that manufacture the electronic logs will make while the extremely small profit margin that the truck owners make will be gone. Also, the law trying to get all CDL holders to take a sleep-test study is a racket, and will make the sleep industry millions, likewise the companies that make the CPAP machines that people will have to have.
My company has not had one missed pickup or late delivery in eight years — there aren’t very many companies large or small that can say that. But we do not have any more money to pay for these laws and regulations foisted upon us by a government that does not have a clue about trucking and the issues we deal with on a daily basis to make the country tick. It only took three days for the public contacting the Congress about the air traffic controllers on furlough (which was a manufactured crisis) to get them back to work with the delays at airports. Imagine what we could accomplish in less time than that if for once we all stuck together and let our voices be heard on what we will accept and what we will not. –Robert Steele, St. Augustine, Fla.
