The Peoples Journal

I wandered into the room still upset that my name had somehow been dropped from the list of speakers waiting my chance to address the representatives of the FMCSA on the subject of “Hours of Service.”  The meeting had already resumed.  “Remember you are addressing Anne Ferro and the leadership of the office that single handedly could begin the process of restoring our trade to normalcy.” I kept repeating to myself.   I waited and soon they were allowing me to speak.

My comments can be seen at http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/dot/100326/ I start speaking about 9 minutes into the video!

You can judge for yourself if I was able to articulate my ideas. My main concern from the session is the response again of either deliberately mis-stating what I was suggesting, or being so poor myself at public speaking that they failed to get the point I was trying to make.

The problem simply stated is the tremendous unpaid waiting time many members of this industry actually spend working but never get paid for.  This load of unpaid labor is born by working long hours and pretending they are all the work done, even by hiding some of those hours in order to gain even more productive hours because once you justify hiding hours why not go for as much gain as you can the perception being no one really expects truth in logging when they ask you to hide the unpaid hours.

The solution does not as the council general suggested in grabbing power and regulating pay, the solution is in stopping the hiding of unpaid work and allowing the market forces to determine what a legal running driver should expect for his legal hours production.  This solution is possible not only inside the authority the FMCSA is now exercising, it is much simpler than most other answers to the fraudulent logging now prevalent in the industry.

15 minutes on duty not driving to unload 44 thousand pounds at a distribution center.  GET REAL, it takes 15 minutes to check in to the place, time also to wait on the unloading clerk get assigned a window, get actually unloaded, and then wait again for the clerk to get your signed bills then leave the dock and check out of the facility. Yet I would wager my truck that today thousands of drivers logged 15 minutes to unload at a distribution center, or a grocery warehouse.

The FMCSA cannot mandate pay for the actual 2 or 3 or more hours most drivers spend logging off duty while they unload at these places, BUT they can stop them from logging off duty and thereby put reality back into logging and allow the market to determine how drivers will be paid for this.

This is the elephant ignored by the FMCSA in its constant push to make rules about hours of service, the possibly 30 percent of all times drivers spend actually doing a job they do not get paid for. This could be solved with a simple interpretation statement on the subject of the definition of OFF DUTY.

Of course the carriers who profit from the enhanced production of the truck from the “fabricated logs” don’t want this definition interpreted. So off goes the government chasing rainbows and white rabbits while the elephant grazes on the cemeteries of buried drivers who die early from obesity because the rest they claim to have gotten never existed.

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