1099s force drivers to violate HOS.

Then of course another piece of it was that on a lot of these runs, especially driving at night, there just weren't any safe places to pull off the road. I literally had to keep going.

 

So I worked for this company all together a total of four months, and the sixth time my truck broke down (I was down in Birmingham at the time) I called my fleet manager and told him I wanted to bring the truck back to Chicago and trade it in for a better one. So he routed me back to Chicago, I parked the truck and the load in the truck lot and told them I wanted to quit and to give me back my car so I could leave, and that was that.

 

Honestly, I was just doing what I was told to do, not really thinking about the illegality of it. Mainly it was how the hell am I going to feed my child and myself today. For four months, a lot of days we went hungry.

 

I would just like to correct one thing I said about the time stamp. (That was over a year ago, so I'm working from memory here): They didn't tell me to "change" the time stamp. What they told me was put a piece of paper over it and xerox it so that it would appear as though there was no time stamp.

 

So the effect of all this, as I see it, is this is the direction the trucking industry is going: No "solo" drivers, only teams. (Keep the trucks running continually). Hire a bunch of immigrants who don't know #### and are willing to drive until they wreck. Totally automated trucking. (No human drivers.)
Any of you who give a crap about trucking as a decent livelihood better wake up. Unionize before it's too late.