Can a company mandate using sleeper status during 10 Hour Break

I think you misread my post.

 

(ii) Time spent resting in a sleeper berth; or

you missed this... no point set match.

Have to read the ENTIRE regulation, not just one or two lines of it.

 

have to read the entire regulation, not just one line.

 

Time spent resting in the sleeper berth is not time spent attending a cmv -- hazmat regs are very very clear on this...

 

Not being a trucker, what you say makes sense to me but couldn't it become an issue if involved in any sort of legal action? Especially if you are physically in the truck?

 

Well I can't really imagine a scenario where a driver who is inside a truck parked at a shipper (or parked anywhere else) could end up being involved in a legal action. I'm not saying there aren't any scenarios, just that I can't imagine any. Which is to say that if any do exist, they'd be EXTREMELY rare.

But beyond that, here is a dirty little secret regarding logbooks. We think of them as being signed legal documents and technically they are. But they're not at all like other legal documents because legally speaking, they can never be used to protect you, they can only be used to hurt you.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Lets say an officer pulls you behind the scale he says the reason he pulled you in is because there was a hit and run by someone in a truck with your company's name on it two hours ago in a town 70 miles southwest of the scale house.

So lets say the officer looks at your logbook and it shows that two hours ago you were in that same town 70 miles southwest of the scale house. The officer has you step out of the truck, slaps cuffs on you and reads you your rights. Proof positive enough you could have been the guy to warrant taking you into custody pending further investigation.

Now instead lets say the officer looks at your logbook and it shows that two hours ago you were in a town 70 miles southeast of the scale house. Does the office you let you go? Nope. The officer says he's going to hold you until one of the witness' they have can be brought to the scale house and say whether or not you were the driver they saw in the hit and run. He doesn't have enough to slap the cuffs on you and take you in. But he's not going to let you go either until he absolutely has to.

At that point you remember that you bought a hotdog while you were stopped in that town two hours ago and you still have the register receipt. You show the officer the receipt which is not signed by anyone but has the address of the store on it and a time stamp and therefore, just like your logbook, shows you to have been nowhere near the town where the hit and run took place at the time of the crime. The officer looks at it, hands it back to you and says you're free to go.

So now you know the dirty little secret of logbooks. Your logbook is a signed legal document that can and will serve as evidence when it corroborates suspicion of guilt. And it is a completely worthless piece of paper with writing on it when it disproves suspicion of guilt.

 

What sort of legal action? The truck is on private property and is not moving, so what liability is there? This is during my 14.

During my 10 hour break, I log, at the very least, 8 hours in the sleeper berth.

 

Not to GP, but one off the top of my head...

Three days later you get in a wreck, and get sued. Lawyer who is suing notes that if you would have logged it as on-duty 3 days ago (all every stop in the last 7 days) you would have been out of hours on the 70 hour clock, therefor it's the drivers fault for even being there when legally he should not have been. Or some such BS like that anyway...

-Steven

 

Off the top of your? That's pretty deep. I see what you are saying, but that is very unlikely. I pull a flatbed, I have enough ON-DUTY time at shipper/recievers. I am not staying ON-DUTY when I am doing nothing job related. I am ON-DUTY any time I am doing anything job related.

I could see that scenario for drivers that never reset because they log so much OFF-DUTY time.

I drive M-F. Sometimes I start on Sunday and sometimes I get home on Saturday, but I have a 34 hour resart every weekend at home.

 

Think of it in terms of a jury of your peers, none of whom have ever driven a truck or hold a CDL. If you are involved in an accident leading to a personal injury lawsuit, your logs will be brought into evidence. Let's say over the previous 6 month period, you have logged the majority of your HOS break time on line 1, only showing a few hours in the sleeper.

The jury could assume from that you're not sleeping, but goofing off awake in the truck stop, at a casino, or whatever, i.e., you're choosing not to get adequate rest. Put into that light, you're now a tired, irresponsible truck driver. Remember the screw job the press did to the Walmart driver involved in the Tracey Morgan accident? His logs showed he was within the HOS limits, but that doesn't mean the public would agree he was being safe from an interpretation of his logs taken from their uninformed viewpoint.

Check out the web pages of personal injury attorneys specializing in truck crashes. They will use your logs to screw you over, justified or not. Its to your advantage to log an adequate amount of time in the sleeper... that's probably what the OPs carrier wants... to protect themselves as well.