The Problem with a strike and the date.

[AHarley]

The Problems with a strike are fairly simple.
1) The Date of April fools .. come on who will take us seriously if the day choosen is known all over the country as a day of jokes and pranks.
2) Without atleast 50% of O/o's , Company Drivers, and the farm drivers/owners we cant build a suffient number to do more then raise then eye brow
3) We need a leader or group of our own to represent us .. most of us like myself owner operators dont want to sign on with a union my dad would turn over in his grave if i thought about joining one.
4)We need to decide on a single problem and by what i have read here our main problem is fuel .. rates are not great either but i could deal with the rates if i did not have to spend 1100 to 1300 to fuel my star car.

[Wiseguywireless]

If the big companies would go along. then we would get somewhere. but they would just love us to loose business.
They are hungry to pick it up

[HarleyRider]

I'm not a driver, but I would support a trucker shut down.
I think ALL drivers should get together, pick a date sometime in the future, say 3 months so you can stock up, and on that date, park your trucks. If you have a load, deliver it, you don't want to go to jail, and "they" might resort to that if you don't make you last delivery, then park it.

If drivers want to stop paying out the nose for fuel and make a decent living, they need to get together and do something about it.

Over 65% of all goods travel over the road.

If all drivers parked their rigs, it wouldn’t take long before the nation demanded that something be done. It might take a couple of weeks, but IT WOULD HAPPEN.

The government would be forced to do something. They wouldn’t and couldn’t afford to let the nation come to a stand still, which would happen if there were no trucks on the road.

The oil companies would be forced to do something. They wouldn’t be selling thousands of gallons of fuel a day. The surplus would become overwhelming. THE COST OF DIESEL WOULD COME DOWN.

The fuel companies make BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PROFIT every quarter. They are SHIPPING MILLIONS OF GALLONS of fuel to foreign countries because the profit margin is higher.

GET TOGETHER, PICK A DATE, AND PARK IT.

[sandradee]

I Am a Trucker and owner and Company and I , We, Us are on Strike. The cost of Fuel Plus The Taxes (ie. 2290,federal , fuel, permits, ss, medicare, ect.) have left nothing to pay the mortage, electric, or buy food, and all of us know it is too hard to try to eat in a truckstop where the food has a 200 percent mark-up and it most of the time makes you sick and /or is very unhealthy. I am for us all.

Yesterday my neighbor called me to say his mother heard on the news PUBLIX announced it was shutting down its trucks Tuesday.

I have been up this morning watching every news channel I can and The Local Traffic reports are not as they normally are, in Orlando at this time of the morn on Monday the expressways and interstates should be full of trucks delivering for Monday, I spotted 2 fuel trucks and 1 dry van.

[OVERSIZE-AG]

I am on the road now, 750 miles from home, and I do plan on striking if it happens. Is there a website I can go to and find out how many trucks may be participating in this?

[JetBote]

Are you guys delirious? I'm a long time driver and currently racking up 10 years with this company and that's irrelevant.
Anybody that went out and bought a truck and became an O/O in the last 2 years put yourself into this position and you can thank any fool that said buying a truck is the shtt. If you would have done your homework, you would have known this was a losing battle and getting worse.
With that being said, the oo's are crying for help and are losing big money. Oo's constantly berate and belittle co drivers. Now, these same dummies want everyone to stand with them? For what reason? Things are slow out here as it is right now. You want us to strike to help the oo when they treat everyone like ####? Are you kidding? 50,000 oo's go out, there are 50,000 more loads available. Sorry, but that's the truth. You guys want to #### on us, until you need help and you think we are going to come running? Yeah right. There is no morale out here. Convince me otherwise, folks. But for now, I'm still trucking.

[MtnMadness]

This isn't about o/o's vs. company drivers. This strike is about helping this country, not just truckers. EVERYTHING moves on a truck, and what effects truckers, effects the country. If the cost of trucking doubles, then the cost of the goods goes even higher, and it snowballs from there. Big companies may be the last in line to feel the impact, but, if you'll remember the 1979 -1980 strikes, there were several big companies that went belly up, and they didn't strike. It's too bad it has to come to this, but the people of this country have got to stand up. This government is supposed to do as we say, and we've gotten away from that. The taxes are too high, and oil companies are gouging their prices, taking advantage of the people's silence for too long.

[dieselhound]

Originally Posted by JetBote

Are you guys delirious? I'm a long time driver and currently racking up 10 years with this company and that's irrelevant.
Anybody that went out and bought a truck and became an O/O in the last 2 years put yourself into this position and you can thank any fool that said buying a truck is the shtt. If you would have done your homework, you would have known this was a losing battle and getting worse.
With that being said, the oo's are crying for help and are losing big money. Oo's constantly berate and belittle co drivers. Now, these same dummies want everyone to stand with them? For what reason? Things are slow out here as it is right now. You want us to strike to help the oo when they treat everyone like ####? Are you kidding? 50,000 oo's go out, there are 50,000 more loads available. Sorry, but that's the truth. You guys want to #### on us, until you need help and you think we are going to come running? Yeah right. There is no morale out here. Convince me otherwise, folks. But for now, I'm still trucking.

There's no convincing needed. You don't want to better the industry as a whole. You are only worried about your own personal agenda. You will keep trucking because YOUR company will tell you that's what you HAVE to do. Good Luck!

[Whitelinefever]

The feds say that 90% of all class 8 trucks in the US are owned by fleets of 6 or less....just look at the doors on trucks and I gurantee you'll see names you've never seen before or will again....it can be done if there's some unity...however,fuel isnt so much the problem as is the brokers...all they have to do is put up $1000 on a $10,000 bond....book freight cheaper than the next broker,take their 30% and drive their beamer home!As gfar as the company "competition"? I laugh.....they HAVE to keep their trucks rolling in fear of losing their drivers...taking freight at ANY rate....if their driver sits too long...then he/she will simply get another job...don't be fooled by the big company bluffs and b/s "or drivers get all the fuel surcharge"...lol big deal when they're only making 90cents a mile..but instead of knocking our fellow drivers who are in a "sharecropping" situation AKA "leasing to own" we should help to educate them on what their CPM is and what it means...good luck too us all!

[JetBote]

Originally Posted by dieselhound

There's no convincing needed. You don't want to better the industry as a whole. You are only worried about your own personal agenda. You will keep trucking because YOUR company will tell you that's what you HAVE to do. Good Luck!

You couldn't be more wrong. I would love to see a positive change. I would love to see unity. I would love to see respectable drivers. I would love to see some comraderie. Where is this Utopia? Probably hundreds of years away. We have language and culture barriers in many areas between drivers. We have the largest uneducated workforce in the nation. The immaturity on the radio only helps to prove that. The image is lack luster. The oo's don't care about the trash haulers that don't care about tankers that don't care about oversized that don't care about freight haulers that don't care about oo's. You get the picture. My company hasn't said shtt about the strike either way. We have 300 trucks, and they're not worried at this point. No personal agenda here.

Just out of curiousity, with my medical freight, if I strike and people die as a result of not having this, who is going to take the blame? Sure as hell isn't going to be some self centered oo, now is it? What if your kid needed this?