Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

Did you ever notice how much bad news comes in December? I first started to notice this when I saw an article suggesting the best time to do layoffs and terminations was immediately before the Christmas holidays. Of course, an underlying theme throughout the article was how to control employees through intimidation and it was felt that terminating people at Christmas time, in traditional Ebenezer Scrooge style really demoralized the rest of the staff to straighten up and bow properly to their ‘betters’. The public reason would be that terminating and laying off people immediately before a holiday break or even on Friday afternoon kept them from finding out about the dastardly deed so they didn’t have a chance to get together and talk about it over the weekend.

Maybe that’s the idea behind FMCSA publishing their latest rules on Driver Medical certification: we either wont find out about it because no self-respecting news agency would break even a major news story on a weekend when the favored talking airhead wasn’t there to get ‘face-time’ over it. And this one would be very minor in the view of most of the public. Or, it’s the FMCSA’s idea of a special Christmas treat for their most unfavored subjects, us! Talk about coal in your stocking!

States Will Downgrade CDL without Medical Certification

The new regulation, to be implemented by 2011, orders all states to set up a system to keep track of driver’s medical status and, if they don’t get proof of a new physical within 15 days of certificate expiration, to “downgrade” the CDL to a non-commercial license within 60 days. There are some good things that managed to get into this regulation. This removes the carriers from access to the long form, something they have abused with impunity for many years. We can thank OOIDA for that. But there are still some real problems with this regulation that most drivers wont realize until it happens to them.

Because the states have to act individually on this, I can bet it will be a very long time before it happens. That gives us plenty of time to annoy our congress people about the whole situation. I started by faxing my Michigan Secretary of State to make sure they knew about this latest ‘unfunded mandate’. Since I write officials constantly (I’m thinking about a small woodstove to burn their form letters to cut heating costs), I expected little in the way of a true answer.

Imagine my surprise when I actually got a reply, a real one. The form letter for this issue probably isn’t made up yet. The representative of the Sec of State assured me that they would re-instate a CDL without additional testing, up to one year after it expired or was ‘downgraded’. That’s something of a relief on that score, I could just envision us all ending up having to start over. At least under Michigan’s understanding of the law, you can be sick or injured and unfit for service for up to a year before you cant simply show a valid DOT physical to reinstate your CDL . That could still be really too bad for someone who was badly injured in an accident as recuperation from those things often takes more than a year. They were also careful to point out that they would never classify a downgrade as anything resembling a suspension, although I suspect most major carriers will still see it that way. In an effort to mollify this obviously overwrought taxpayer, they assured me they always keep a past CDL on their records forever. It still sounds like a god-awful mess to me and a very expensive and complicated solution to what is likely not a real problem.

Assignment: Annoy your Secretary of State!

It never hurts to write a letter or send a fax to your elected officials. Sometimes, sending them a heads-up before an issue becomes a hot potato can instill your objections in their little pointy heads before they’re faced with having to actually DO something about it. That never hurts. This is trucker PsyOps at it’s most fundamental, you are more likely to remember something the first time you hear about it rather than the 1000th time. If they get a wary feeling in the pit of their stomach a couple of years down the line over the new CDL regs they’re being expected to implement, they probably won’t remember all the exact particulars of why they have that queasy feeling but they’ll remember something of your objections. I doubt at this point any of them have a dog in this fight and it WILL cost the individual states money, which upsets the taxpayers. . like you! So, remind them that the mean ole nasty Feds are again making new rules that will cost money they don’t have.
No reason to let the powerful special-interests be the only Scrooge on the block!