Life on the Road - Trucking News Blog

I have always said that there is no such thing as a driver shortage! If the trucking companies in this country paid a driver what they are worth, I.E. a higher wage to compensate for time spent away from home, There would be plenty of drivers out there. Thousands upon thousands of drivers, myself included, have left the trucking industry because the compensation for spending the vast majority of our time away from home and our loved ones, was in no shape form or fashion enough. Ruined health, marriages, and relationships with children were not worth the wages earned for sacrificing all the above. So when I hear that there is all this corruption dealing with Illegals driving trucks, it didn’t surprise me. Its just another eppisode in the ongoing drama of screw the American Trucker. But I’m not bitter!

Actually Linda, the scales on I-35 don’t come into play. Remember, the majority of these inspections are done on border trucks operating under OP-2 authority. And anything earlier than 6 months prior are all border fleet truck under OP-2

These inspections are done by the inspection station/scales which are at each commercial border crossing. In Texas, they are also done by the troopers in the pickups and Yukons, at random on the side of the roadway or in pullouts specific to this purpose.

True, I have not put them into Excel yet, but looking at random samplings of companies in the cross border program, I am not seeing an abnormal trend.

But you know, the issue of bringing foriegn drivers into this country is nothing new nor the method and scams used.

I recall 30 odd years ago when I was starting in this business with BJ McAdams in Little Rock Arkansas, him, Glenn Brothers and others were importing the Aussies and Kiwi’s back then. So this deal is nothing new, at least to those of us who have been around awhile.

And as I recall, back then, when we were running for 10 cents a mile (and actually making money) the imported labor didn’t hurt us any.

Another case in point. In 2000, I had a truck leased on with Celadon when they came up with the brilliant idea of “Jaguar”!

They established the company using old company trucks and hired Mexican nationals to drive them from the border to the terminals, drop and hook and return south. All for 18 cents a mile. This experiment lasted about a year until the Mexican drivers got smart and demanded equal pay, and as I recall, successfully sued Celadon over the issue.

Those of us, owner operators and company drivers, were in an uproar. Same issues. It was going to lower our miles, lower our wages, etc. and you know what? Nothing happened. The program faded into obscurity.

Now, Jaguar is operating south of the border and cross border. Things have a way of working themselves out.

In order to see the pattern on the inspections, you have to download it into excel and ’sort’ according to inspection record number. What struck me was that there’s no way you can inspect eight trucks a total of over 1000 times in a two month period. When you find over 40 sequentially-numbered inspections done on these specific trucks in a one-two day period, ya gotta wonder if anybody ever left their air conditioned office. I bet if I go thru and check the individual records on these inspections I wont find ANY violations. That sure does change the percentages when and if 40% are phony, doesnt it?

The problem is, it’s not a level playing field when these things happen-and I believe they happen frequently in this industry. It’s not a matter of Trinity or any other company-it’s matter of lying to the American people and Congress. And it shows just how deep the corruption goes-they make a big stink over prosecuting one lawyer for visa fraud and we’re supposed to thing everything’s fixed now….

If these guys actually DID get inspected that many times, I bet they drive up to the scale and automatically bend over-it’s impossible to comprehend. I’ve made plenty of runs down to our Laredo yard and the scale on I-35 north has only been open once I can recall. They must have all been down inspecting Trinity-and all using the same inspection book. So the whole thing’s just crazy.

Because of State data variations, FMCSA cautions those who seek to use the SafeStat data analysis system in ways not intended by FMCSA. Please be aware that use of SafeStat for purposes other than identifying and prioritizing carriers for FMCSA and state safety improvement and enforcement programs may produce unintended results and not be suitable for certain uses.

Missed the deadline above

Yeah Linda, I found it after thinking about it. I have never paid any attention to the SafeStat! Me bad!

I am still not seeing where a thousand inspections were done on 8 trucks in a two month period though.

What I am seeing is increased enforcement of the english language rule, and rather aggressive enforcement at that. There needs to be a standard set and not just left up to the officers discretion.

I am also seeing items that don’t make any sense. Brake adjustment problem on roadside stops in Texas. Texas DPS troopers do not get under the trucks on the roadside. At best, it is a level 2 walk around.

I’m seeing airline problems. Probably the umbilicals bouncing off the deck plate. This is a common “excuse” in Texas by DPS to pull over a truck for inspection as is a “mud flap flapping”! Yep, I got a warning ticket for that one time from a DPS trooper.

I really don’t see any reason why FMCSA would pad the stats in the manner you suggest. It is too obvious and a rather stupid move.

But you’ve put me onto something here which I appreciate and I am going to study it further and see if any trends emerge.

Contrary to what some might think, I also want this program to proceed in a safe manner. Living down here, I see evidence that it can and how the Mexico based carriers operate in Mexico, and I can assure you, they don’t operate in the reckless and unsafe manner as some would suggest.

You also need to keep in mind, that stats older than 6 months are not valid in making any determination about the cross border program.

Too many have tried to convince the general public that the border fleet is in fact what will be used in line haul operations in the US, and this is simply not the truth.

I will add this little caveat which appears on the Safestat site.

That’s exactly my point, Wayne. It’s worse than no enforcement, it’s deliberate non-enforcement. I think it’s intentional and the point I was making to Porter regarding Trinity was the Feds are ignoring and altering their own data.After just so long, you have to see it as deliberate.

We cant do anything about forcing enforcement as we dont know who/where this fraud is happening. The FedGov does-or can find out, as they have employment data they can check against visa data and CDL data. They choose not to do that. I guess the question is, how do we force them to enforce their own rules?

As for Porter’s question as to where I got my data, the link to SafeStats is: http://ai.volpe.dot.gov/SafeStat/disclaimer.asp?RedirectedURL=/SafeStat/SafeStatMain.asp Every carrier under DOT jurisdiction is supposed to be there. You put in the name and can get driver and vehicle statistics and actual inspection reports (carriers have had accident data removed-said it drove their insurance costs up-lol). All he has to do is download the data into Excel and start looking at the numbers-any time the DOT tells me they inspected a total of eight trucks over a thousand times in a two-month period, I gotta question it. Obviously, nobody in this company got their hands on a few inspection books and sat around filling them out-this came from somewhere within the DOT.Somebody’s either following orders or bucking for head of the DOT after Mary Peters moves on to be the gov of Arizona.The whole thing is highly political and I dont quite know what the answer is. But I sure dont want to just give up and let them screw us all over. How do we fight back effectively?

The point of the original post was that the illegal driver problem is NOT connected to the Mexican driver/truck issue. But it’s too easy to shift the blame to the people instead of the companies that think they can get away with this.

Between this lawyer/representative and his kind along with all of the CDL school corruption and the buying of CDL’s, a few Mexican trucks are the least of our worries.

The people that are caught are caught because they did something stupid or sheer luck. They’re not being caught because of enforcement, because there isn’t any.

I guess I did misunderstand the point. My apologies.

I don’t know about California, but the illegals crossing the border, getting a PO box in Laredo and a CDL is not possible. Too many checks and balances with the Texas DPS.

I would be interested if you would send me the link to where you downloaded these facts about Trinity. They are indeed a multi national corporation headquartered in Dallas Texas.

And having experience with the Texas DPS practically every week, I find it odd that if these defects do in fact exist, that the trucks are still running.

The trucks in question are road units used by Trinity US and retired to cross border work. And Trinity does have excellent maintenance facilities in Eagle Pass Texas. The whole thing smells a little rotten

Speaking of wages. Another misconception that has been put across is the low wages of the Mexican trucker. And it is a sly manner in which this is done. We’ve heard the 13 cent a mile deal and this is partially true.. Except!

In Mexico, driver are paid by the kilometer. A kilometer is 1.6 miles.Actual wages are closer to 21 cents per mile plus the per diem of $20 dollars most of the long haul drivers receive. True, not up to US standards, but this has nothing to do with bringing Mexican drivers, sans trucks into the US. These mega carriers can do this now providing they can prove a need. This is how all the Kiwi’s were brought in.

What people don’t realize is we do things a bit differently here on the border. Families and people are intertwined on both sides and yes, wages are a little less than in other regions of the country. Myself, I earn .38 per mile plus $75 per stop and $100 per night layover. I could earn more elsewhere in the country, but for what.

There is nothing going on here that is going to depress wages for American truckers unless those truckers let it happen. With the driver shortage there is no reason for a driver to stay with a company who wants to play games.

For the rest, they need to concentrate on solving the problems facing the industry, the least of which is Mexican trucks.

You misunderstood what I said, Porter: I was referring to the drivers-who live here-and pull out of the ports of Long Beach and La, NOT the cross-border truckers. Their take-home pay is about $60/day, too…NOT a decent wage in California and a situation that depresses the wage of all of us who have to pay U.S. prices for everything. Their standard of living is substandard for Ca and a national shame. In Ca, it’s Hispanic-in Chicago, it’s Russians, Poles and Bosnians-same difference: because of their quasi-illegal status, they work for less and depress everybody’s wages.

We’ve had a serious problem with drivers who come across the border, rent a post office box and pick up a CDL in Texas, Arizona, etc for years. True, they may have a U.S. CDL, but if they work for U.S. wages and live in Mexico, they’re willing to take reduced rates because they can afford to and that affects all of our bottom lines. This is what skews the entire industry’s wage structure and drives it down. Allowing an illegal driver to run freight I could have run increases HIS standard of living, sure-but it lowers mine, because he earned the wage and I didn’t. Carriers love it-they can get away with paying him less and increasing their profits. Personally, I object to that!

As for the SafeStats record-particularly on Trinity Industries (which I believe is division of a U.S.-based company, if my research is right), I checked those stats right after the approvals came out and again after OOIDA’s complaint-guess what? They had changed-drastically. As I’m the kind of person that wants to know what happened, I downloaded the entire record to excel and started cross-checking. It appears SOMEBODY has added a whole bunch of phony inspection records in there-many in numerical sequence-to add to the total of inspections, therefore driving the entire percentage down to the level it shows today. I’m also cross-checking the record against individual inspection reports and cant believe how this company can continually run trucks with bad/chafed brake lines and cracked frame rails and missing leaf springs and tires with threads showing as noted on the individual reports and NOT be put OOS. There are also some other very strange things showing up that I’m not ready to talk about until I do some further checking. Looks to me like border business as usual-and now, somebody’s in contempt of Congress for doctoring the records. Now that Trinity’s withdrawn their application to run the US, they say they never intend to do anything other than run border cartage-maybe they didn’t. It’s obvious from the inspection reports the trucks they’re running are cartage-quality. I don’t doubt the company is just a pawn in the whole game of reducing standards and wages thru this cross-border program.

You’re defending the wrong issue here, Porter: the issue is reduced wages-everybody’s wages. I think you’re going to find out you’ve been biting yourself in the butt on this. Allowing foreign drivers to run more freight in the U.S. under these conditions does nothing but drive wages and quality of work life down for everybody. It inflates the profit margins for the big stockholders only because they lowered our wages and Government has a political interest in making the economy look good by doing so. We’ve been lied to for years that NAFTA would improve the standard of living for the people of Mexico-and it may have for a very few. The vast majority is no better and many are worse off-and it lowers our standard of living: not an acceptable situation for most Americans. And, if I’m expected to follow all the rules, regulations and laws, then everybody needs to be following the same rules-and that includes legal immigration status and legal CDL’s. Then, we have a leg to stand on in getting a decent living wage. We’re not the ’stakeholders’ who are being considered in this game-the big-money guys are with their paid lobbyists and their contrived ‘driver shortage’. If they succeed in doing what they’re obviously trying to do here, do you think this is going to raise the working standards for Mexican drivers? Hardly-wages, like water, flows to the lowest level. Any gains for them would be temporary-and the next push would be to lower theirs once the Big $$ guys had total control of the wage market. Most of the Mexican trucking industry knows this and that’s why they’re protesting it, too-they stand to lose their livelihood also.

Porter, you know the dollar you earned in the U.S. goes a helluva lot farther in Nuevo Laredo than it would in Peoria. If this situation continues much longer, you’re eventually going to lose that monetary advantage as wages go down. If we can force this issue to be done strictly according to law and all regulations to be followed (AND keep U.S. drivers’ wages at a reasonable level throughout the process) then wages COULD even out between the U.S. and Mexican drivers-and they’d be making as much as we are, because there wont be an unfair advantage of using Mexican drivers over U.S.drivers. But this isn’t an issue one can take to court and expect to win, same as we cant prove these U.S.carriers are lying about the so-called driver shortage. Crooked lawyers and phony immigration schemes have to be fought on a one-to-one basis, same as CDL fraud. The only issue where the cards aren’t already stacked against us is the safety issue. That’s why I believe the Teamsters and OOIDA are right-they’re fighting the only legal battles they can on the only ground that’s available to them and where they can get the biggest bang for their buck. That’s why they have my support.

And you’re right on the illegal CDLs and port truckers, Wayne…it’ll be interesting how they get around that little mess on the background checks for the TWIC cards. Somehow, I think the TWIC card program is going to have some major rule changes or a ‘grandfather clause’ show up.

I think the port she means is like Long Beach and LA. With the new port credentials, it’s going to be hard to be an illegal immigrant. An illegal CDL holder, that may be a different story.

I don’t know how much drivers are making coming out of the port, but they’re in the news and now with the extra cost to pay for the background checks and now the Calif EPA crap, I’m sure it’s going to be a lot less now.