Strike??? Please!!!!

"By the book" actions have worked well for many workers in a lot of industries ... the longshoreman some years back are a good example.

 

Most drivers couldn't make a living by running legal. That's sad when you think of it but it also shines a negative light on the argument that drivers are lazy and greedy.
A guy should be able to make a decent wage driving without risking fines.

Running legal would be the best solution.

If every truck can have a quallcomm installed then every truck can have an OBR installed that monitors hours and then we'll see the industry change when they cannot deliver freight the way they used to. Drivers will no longer subsidise the country by sitting in shippers/recievers and making up the lost time by lying on a log book.

Enough. Whatever a drivers point of view or opinion we all have the common understanding that it's time to "call it as it is".

 

You know, this just really ticks me off. Over in Europe, and I'm including the UK here, when the drivers don't like something, they shut the whole country down. Period. Fuel taxes too high? Blockade the fuel depots and don't let the fuel trucks out. Regulations getting to "oppressive"? 5mph rolling roadblocks on every major highway. They appear to be able to bring whole countries to a screeching halt in a matter of DAYS.

The company I work for has several brits who cannot believe how much crap we put with.

The concept of having everyone run legal is not a new one. Labor unions do it all the time... it's called "work to rule". Do what the letter of the agreements/regulations require, and NO MORE. For us, I think that would include logging on duty not driving when we are at the docks waiting to load/unload, instead of doing what we ALL do, logging line 1 or 2.

I don't want to speak for everyone on this board, or for the majority of drivers in general, but I believe that at one time or another, we have all condensed the hell out of our logs to get home, or get to the next safe place, or whatever. Some of us, I'm sure, log by the calculator as opposed to what they actually do.

There is a big difference between logging so it LOOKS legal and actually RUNNING legal. The biggest problem right now in the industry, as far as I'm concerned, is the ridiculous wait times that we spend waiting to load or unload. A perfect example of this: I arrived at a shipper a half hor early for my appointment. I was assigned a door and was told it would be a while, might as well grab a nap. 7 hours later I woke up to see the red light on, and the lot empty. The company did not ship 24/7, and the evening shift had gone home without loading me, leaving me still locked to the dock. Isn't this comparable to unlawful imprisonment??

Some of us are compensated for wait times, some companies only pay it if they can get it from the shipper/receiver, and still more say there's nothing they can do.

Perhaps we need to take a lesson from our European brothers-in-arms. If WE won't act on our OWN behalf, we have no right whatsoever to expect someone else to act ON our behalf.