Swift apparently didn't pay any of their drivers this Friday..

Make lease op scams illegal and stop giving out government grants for each "student" that gets a CDL. Boom, overnight the megas will vanish.

Industry would be a million times better off and starry eyed sobs will stop getting financially obliterated by crooked ATA powerhouse scam companies like Swift/Knight/Prime/JB/Schneider/et al.

 

Decent in theory but the government decided in 1980 it should be a free for all race to the bottom. And that’s what it’s been ever since. And you can’t really say that trucking in general is moving toward monopolies when it’s a small percentage that have a sizeable number of trucks. Most carriers are still single or low number fleets.

The problem is the super low barrier to entry more so than fleets with a lot of trucks. What’s it take, 3 weeks to get a license? If that? You say drivers should be compensated better. Why? It’s not difficult at all to drive a truck down the road. It takes basically nothing to get a CDL. How many threads have we seen here by new drivers that damage stuff and act like it’s no big deal. Why should they be compensated better? Wages for driving aren’t a flat line. If you want more money then figure out what you need to do to go get it. Expecting anything the government would do to be a benefit is slightly foolish, after all, what got us to this point started 45 years ago because it was “too difficult” to start a trucking company and the rates were too high and it was costing the American people too much money.

 

It actually had a lot more to do with breaking the power and influence of the Teamsters and the Mafia.

 

I agree the low barrier to entry is a huge problem. But if companies were much smaller, the chances of an under trained driver getting released into the wild should go down. Thus less accidents and ultimately safer roads. And yes you’re definitely right about expectating anything the government does to be helpful. That ain’t ever gonna happen. And yes they want low shipping rates, as low as possible. Otherwise true inflation would be much worse because literally everything would be more expensive overnight if they didn’t artificially control freight rates thru their various tactics.

 

They couldn’t say that publicly so it was the old “lower costs for the consumers” excuse.

 

The deregulation of trucking and airlines did not spring out of someone's mind after 1 night's dream. It is well documented in academic & university sources. It was meant to lower the cost to consumers of trucking & airline services & increase flexibility of creating routes based on demand and not the 2-10 year process under the govt regulators.

Deregulation has been a roaring success & achieved its intended goals. It was never meant to bring lifetime cushy union trucking jobs to everyone that couldn't keep another job. It was meant to bring lower shipping costs to all industries.

 

Yes and no,,shipping rates kept in check however the end result is the daily carnage we have experienced for decades on our highways due to 3 for a dollar drivers

 

The govt is responsible, or not, for enforcing the same safety rules before or after deregulation. The airlines were deregulated and are in the process of replacing their older workforce and is maintaining their govt safety standards. When 4 flip-flops tailgate each other into a ditch it has nothing to do with deregulation in 1979. It has to do with people forging insurance paperwork, people making fake IDs, and people creating ghost drivers and manipulating ELDs.

 

The issue with deregulation that has gotten us to this point is the fact that anyone with $300 and a down payment on their insurance can be a carrier. And it doesn’t matter how saturated the market is, people can still get authority if they want.