Killer Trucks

By Robert George

Why did trucking go from the safest to the unsafest overnight? Why did the truckers go from upper middle class to lower middle class? Why did over-the-road drivers go from the knights of the road, to minimum-wage, aggressive bullies? This book explains it all. Plus, it will take you on trips that will teach you how to keep from killing yourself, or some poor four-wheeler. It will explain to you how to become a professional driver like the author who spent sixty years on the road.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662425554

Robert George

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is also the Herbert W. Vaughan Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton. He has served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics, and was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University, and a D.Phil. from Oxford University, in addition to many honorary degrees. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal and the Honorific Medal of the Republic of Poland for the Defense of Human Rights. His books include The Clash of Orthodoxies (2002) and Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (2008)

Book preview

Scary Trucks

Are you afraid of that tractor trailer that’s tailgating you, or the one that’s alongside you? You are? Well, I don’t blame you. I happen to drive one of these semis, and I’m afraid of them too. Maybe not as much as you, but still afraid of them. After all, driving a semi is the most dangerous job you can do. Wasn’t always that way, but it is now. After reading this book, you’ll know why you’re in danger. You think that driver is a professional and knows what he is doing? Think again. He might be some guy that just got out of driving school and hasn’t got a clue.

Trucking History

Drivers working cheap, in some cases making minimum wage, eighty-five-hour weeks is the norm. Accidents and road fatalities at an all-time high. Discourteous and downright mean and aggressive truck driving is the norm. Most dangerous job? Tractor trailer driver number one. Sounds like I’m talking about today. No, I’m talking about 1939.

Things were so bad in the trucking industry in 1939, the federal government decided to regulate the industry. They set rates and routes. Trucking companies had to buy rights in order to truck. And rights were expensive, but worth it because competition was gone.

With trucking regulated, there was plenty of money available, so the teamsters, led by Jimmy Hoffa, organized and unionized the drivers. Now the well-paid drivers have to behave themselves and act like professionals. Safety becomes the number one priority. Drivers who have accidents are out and replaced.

The highways are now safe to ride on. Truckers are now middle class and looked up to.

For forty years, the highways and byways are safe, 1940 to 1980. Then, in 1980, an actor who was running for president told the country he was going to cut taxes and deregulate the trucking industry. The president that was in office at the time thought deregulation might be a good thing. That small outfits would be able to truck without rights. So, he deregulated the industry. The teamsters got mad at the president and endorsed the actor who won the election. The 1980 Motor Carrier Act took effect, and the industry was deregulated. Almost immediately, the trucking industry went back to 1939. The truckers were no longer middle class. Fathers no longer told their sons to get into trucking. Trucking went back to being dangerous.

Without regulation, the shippers cut their rates in half, so the truckers had to stop giving the drivers access to health care and pensions. They also cut their pay. Over the next twenty years, nobody was buying new trucks or giving raises to the drivers.

After 1980, truckers resorted to overloading their trucks instead of eighty thousand, they would put on ninety thousand to get more revenue. The feds put up scales along the highway and finally passed laws making the shipper liable for accidents caused from overloading, then the overloading stopped.

As the driver pay went down, so did the driver pool. The trucking companies went overseas to find drivers. Drivers from Europe and Africa thinking that they would get a better deal in the US came over. Most couldn’t speak or read English, and that caused a lot of problems. As the driver shortage grew, drivers and mechanics from South America and the Caribbean came and took over the trucking industry. That’s the way it is today.

As the driver shortage grew, drivers were needed to put in eighty-hour weeks. Many carried two logbooks and falsified both so they could work over the seventy-hour limit. The eighty-hour workweek caused a lot of bad accidents.

If you cause an accident and someone is killed, and it’s proven that you were in violation—speeding, bad brakes, falsified logs—you will go to jail for four years. Another problem deregulation caused was faulty equipment—bad brakes, bad tires. If you’re not making money, you can’t afford to fix things. This is especially true with small trucking companies.

Again, the feds had put up inspection stations at rest areas on the interstate to try and cut down on outlaw trucks. As far as the driver cheating on his logbook, the feds have come up with the electronic logging device or the ELD, which went into effect December 2017. It took thirty-eight years (1980–2018) to come up with something that