Comment on Desiree’s Article “WHY I DO THIS”
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DESIREE’S STRORY OF HER HOSTILE TRAINING ENVIRONMENT
PUBLISHED APRIL 28TH, 2009
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Trucker Desiree is truly is a special person and we are lucky to have her in the trucking industry.
And let me tell you why. If people do not speak up, problems will just get swept under the rug and never corrected. This, in my opinion seldom works. Look at the Roman Catholic Church, who had a problem with certain priest molesting children. Even when complaints were made, they covered it up and re-assigned the priests elsewhere. Maybe they figured the priest would repent, who knows. But it did not work in this situation. Only when the force of the law was applied was it eventually corrected. And only thanks to those who were willing to step forward and tell their story. If they had not done so, does anyone doubt that a certain bad priest would not still be abusing children? This has nothing to do with not liking the church but, flawed individuals within their holy organization, and the process the church followed.
As for the nay sayers I will not respond to them since I feel that is what they want. To disrupt every ones agenda, interfere with there projects they do not agree with, etc etc. These irrational critics I theorize, are possibly following some slavish teacot philosophy or whatever to rationalize their behavior or thoughts, and vent their frustrations over negative experiences they themselves had to overcome and did nothing to correct it except insist they next batch of newcomers experience the same poor treatment. A sort off truckers ritual of hazing. The newcomers running the gauntlet of poor industry practices. If they make it, then they get to ridicule the next batch of students running through the system. This seems to give some old timers a emotional catharsis. Thus the culture of blame the driver is re-enforced.
Drivers who suffer abuses and did nothing to correct the problem become jaded and disenfranchised. Problems cannot get fixed if people at all levels are not held accountable, told about the problem or worse yet just keep preaching some idealistic unrealistic vision of what a great experience it all is.
And I have some sympathy for some middle managers who are stuck in the middle of all of this. They have no real authority to fix any of the problems middle management may encounter. Their job is to implement upper management and the owners directives on achieving profit goals, expense goals etc. and I am aware drivers can be crass and rude. And drivers almost always make the mistake of thinking that a driver manger has authority to fix any problems he may want fixed, since that is the only person in management the driver may feel comfortable talking to.
It is important to note here that neither Desiree or I are not talking about the usual run of the mill problems drivers encounter. Rather more like problems my ex student told me about when his dispatcher told him to constantly run illegal overweight loads. Or cases where dispatchers were calling up drivers in the middle of the night during their break and telling them to run an illegal loads as I favor to the planner, and I’ll back you up with a good load on the next run.
One company I encountered 15 years ago even had dispatchers pay their drivers $25 bonus for running the scales and even helped their drivers do the mapping around the scales! This was all done in the name of serving the customer’s needs. And any solutions should focus on still serving these customer needs profitably for the trucking company, but with cooperation from everybody, including customers. Sometimes in my opinion, upper management and owners just make sure that drivers are the only ones who can get blamed, and or take the full responsibility, get the points on their CDL and pays the cost or fines, while management takes no responsibility.
I am well aware that middle managers can be just like drivers, good decent people just trying to cope with the system as the rest of us. Often they are caught in the middle between upper managements’ performance demands and the drivers who they must get to meet those goals. To the good managers, I have nothing against them. It truly takes brains to make it all work. I have seen their corporate email boxes and they are stuffed full of memos and reference document, directives, goals to meet, etc etc. It literally seems to me more items than one can even read, let alone execute well.
These people cannot fix serious problems by themselves. For that you need the help of the owners and upper management and feedback from the field on what is working and what is not. Everyone should work together across job classifications to fix serious problems while maintaining profits, and preserving as good a working environment as possible.
Like Desiree, I encountered mostly indifferent management as I worked as an over the road trainer for Swift Transportation several years ago. And I can confirm as a trainer, that like Desiree said, some of my students with felonies like to brag about their shameful shortcomings with the law, weather it was murder trials, selling drugs, embezzlement, helping Al Queda if the bribe money was right (I actually reported this student to the FBI), etc. It is no wonder like Desiree I have encountered angry, hostile, frustrated people making all kinds of threats.
Desiree said above, some students don’t belong behind the wheel of a tractor, well I had a student with some type of narcolepsy, and he wasn’t even qualified to drive a car, let alone a truck. It took me two weeks to get him off the truck as I wouldn’t let him drive because his body would freeze into a light coma every so often behind the wheel and I had to shake him slightly to get him out of his comma.
Desiree said students just think erroneously, if they just work hard they will be ok. Again I had a student, who after training worked 14 hrs a day running short runs, grossing only $75.00/day. Plus the company often gave him illegal overweight loads. He quit when he got a long haul out of state run that was illegally overweight. He told me management treated him like a dog.
Desiree states the driver shortage is false, and I concur. I am a stock investor, and I read annual reports of reports of companies. In one of Swifts reports, they proudly state when asked by a stock analyst of the driver shortage: we have no driver shortage we can fill all our needs. We keep 15% trainers on staff at all times.
She states students are not prepared for the long hours, and I also can confirm that. I tried to convince my own cousin to come out with me on the truck BEFORE he went through a community college truck training program; but, he didn’t. Then I tried training him before he saw what it was really like, he lasted only two weeks, and then he said “ This wasn’t anything like I thought it would be. This is too much.”
So sadly I can confirm many of the things Desiree has stated because I also have them observed first hand myself. For example trainers who never allow their students to back and then they falsified their backing charts. And poor management orientation, conveniently skipping any information that might upset the students before they get on the training trucks.
And I found management was not receptive to ideas for improvement. Even relatively minor suggestions were often met with a tone of annoyance. For example often I had students reluctant to want to do backing. I sought out one student coordinator, Dari, an exception to this, I am not interested in your problems management. She would happily work with me on encouraging the students to do backing practice.
Often students wanted to please management, and were highly impressionable by their thoughts .
So the simple act of Dari encouraging them in this area actually worked very well and was a tremendous help. But unfortunately she got bad treatment from management when she also tried to make suggestions for improvement and left the company very frustrated also claiming she was being treated like a dog, by a Memphis training department head . (Later this same department head said we could spend three days doing orientation but we aren’t.) Darie even thought the office were she worked was bugged and we would talk outside her office at places that we believed could not likely be bugged. The point being here that management was not receptive to ideas or improving the program.
Without working on improving problem areas, they just magnify and pile up. The best systems adapt to solve problems, not ignore them. This is how evolution works. I say if evolution did not work this way, correcting problems, their would be no life on earth, it would all be extinct from inability to adapt to and solve problems.
Trucking corporations, unfortunately think they have better, more perfect ideas that need no further refinement. With the help of corporate controlled media, like the trucking shows on Sirius radio, they easily and craftily guide truck show groupies toward their way of thinking on issues like hiring felons, which is a cheap source of labor for their trucking sponsors. That is why I boycott Sirius radio and ask you to do the same. They do not come up with solutions, they just rationalize poor industry practices.
If Mark Willis ( D J on Sirius trucking show) or the Chairman of Sirius radio, Joe Clayton had to work 24/7 with hostile convicted felons. Such as the ones who would threatened to beat me up, slit my throat, etc; then I think they would work together on programs to find and suggest better solutions.
You see the main person in charge at large Corporations is the Chariman of the board in this case Joseph Clayton, who previously was not a good due diligence director at Global Crossings which imploded from accounting scandals.
So it is not hard to believe his irresponsible setup at Sirius radio, allows a 100% corporate sponsored and influenced show like Mark Willis show to call itself a trucker’s type show.
His apologist, economic, rationalizations allow for corporate social media to continue to create a veil of excuses and happy talk of how they are trying to help drivers. And this provides cover for hostile training programs, like the one Desiree encountered to flourish and even to be justified and never corrected.
I have no doubt mark Willis subscribes to a tcot type mentality and that drives his relentless corporate sponsorship of his programs, without any counter arguments from the other groups or political perspectives, such as you would get from a 24/7 union channel. Such a channel I feel would create great debates and derive better solutions than great quotes from Mark Willis like “Well these felons did really pay their debt to society didn’t they?”
Better more truthful programming can be found here at http://askthetrucker.com & truthintrucking.com. All the other Sirius programming can be replaced 10 fold on the iphone. So until Sirius radio has a 24/7 union channel, I suggest a total boycott of all Sirius channels, and their stock siri and the stock of liberty media, (LCAPA), their new controlling sugar daddy, and any of their network shows.
I also suggest Allen Smith of http://askthetrucker.com recreate alternatives to all the Sirius channels on his website through internet radio links to make Sirius radio totally irrelevant to truckers needs. Otherwise we will never get real solutions and good legislation passed.
Besides filing grievences and complaints to various authorities, it seems to me legislation is ultimately the solution to solve the problems like Desiree and I encountered. For new legislation, here are a few ideas:
1) Require trucking academies to make full disclosures, (similar to cigarette label warnings), to students on things like the trucking death rate is age 62, the trucking turnover rate is 120%, the owner operator failure rate is 90%, types of health diseases truckers get and at what percentage rates, the typical workweek for a trucker is often 14 hr days, 70 hrs a week. ; your otr training may also be 70 hr weeks. List all the types of unpaid work: fueling, drop and hook, taking the truck for repairs, etc etc
2) At the very least, felony record disclosures to trainers and team students with extra pay for working with them. This will draw volunteers for these type of people, who are more work. This type of solution is called capitalism.
3) Create legal liability for shippers who ship overweight loads so they can be sued in civil court. Also pass on part of any overweight fines to shippers. Once this happens you will see a whole lot more shippers install scales onsite, or give you maps to he nearest scale, rework the loads with no hassle etc
This is how we must start to think as truckers, how do we solve the problem? What good solutions can we come up with? What type of legislation is needed to fix the problem? Can a profitable solution be found? etc,. etc.
So make no mistake, the only other people to be held accountable for these hostile truck training environments are the owners of these truck training schools, and trucking firms. Some of whom are going to solve the problem by importing Mexican drivers under NAFTA.
My name nis Damian, co-founder of this blog, and I thank you for taking the time to read this article.
