Rates are crashing and fuel to the moon!

we have guys in West Texas that have Mexican CDL's or Canadian CDL's and a work permit and they've been here quite some hauling farm machinery, and stuff like that.

 

It's a thing because Big Oil needed CDL workers in the patch. They'd import workers from all over the country, do all the 'training' and 'testing' in Texas or North Dakota and get the CDL while remaining a 'resident' of the state their family still lives in. 3 weeks in the patch, fly home for a week, rinse and repeat.

Circa 2018 CR England kicked up a fuss about getting a waiver to be allowed to issue Utah CDLs to their trainees regardless of their state of residence instead of sending trainees home after passing their CDL test to get their home state to issue the license.

Or 2015ish when Chris Lofgren tried to bring South African truck drivers over on student visas. I encourage you to look into the US Chamber of Commerce statements on the use of h1-B visas since 2021.

Remember, corporate interests are at the heart of most "wtf" regulations.

 

Will it make you more or less angry to know that the drivers Schneider brought in from South Africa were able to obtain haz-mat?

I would guess that most of the non-domiciled CDLs fall into the first category, or have permanent non-resident status (like Iraqis and Afghani who worked for US occupation forces), or are green card holders. It's a guess because nobody has any real data. Right now almost everything I can find on non-domiciled cdls is coming from sources with a definite agenda.

The larger issue than non-domiciled cdls is the CDL mills that are skirting the tissue paper thin barrier of ELDT, which FMCSA isn't doing anything about, because any serious effort at enforcement is met with shrieks of "over regulation". I've been pretty consistent about this for almost the entire time I've been an "Esteemed TTR Member" - it's too easy to get a CDL and there is no real mechanism for revoking the credentials of testers that are too lax. ELDT is a smoke screen to allow corporations to continue churning through meat in the seat without the cost of actually training new drivers. If we make getting a CDL a grueling test that demonstrates true comprehension of basic knowledge and skills then all the ELP and non-domiciled CDL issues magically disappear. But that will interfere with profits, so it's not going to happen.

 

His miles, revenue, and deadhead are nearly the same as mine. I think he said he is doing 2.38 on all miles and I am doing 2.34 (ytd). I wish I could figure out a way to improve that but I can't.

Edit: I could get close to something like a 2.58 all mile rate, but revenue would go way down.

 

Revenue may or may not go down. But what would net profit do? Revenue and profit are not the same thing.