In the wake of the passing of President Biden’s 'Bipartisan' Infrastructure Law there has been a very interesting boutique media sub-genre developing, much of it riding on taxpayer funded water skis.
From Morning Edition to Wisconsin Public Radio (the Republicans are in on it, too) to All Things Considered, our nerdy NPR American friends have been primed to accept the necessity of putting teenagers behind the wheel of Big Rigs across the nation.
In fairness, the rest of The Cathedral have all received the same memo, and diligently done their part in perpetuating the PsyOp - from The New York Times, to The CIA ... umm, CBS, to NBC 'News' … and even The Controlled Opposition at FOX, all chiming in to support the lies of the American Trucking Association.
Every single one of these pieces repeats the same old tropes about the ‘Driver Shortage’ and of the ‘danger to our Supply Chains’ if we don’t amend the rules to let those with a CDL under the age of 21 engage in interstate trucking.
Well, grab a coffee, buckle in, and come along for a ride to a much more nuanced discussion about what’s going on here than you will ever get from the above mentioned state propaganda outlets.
First off, in the interest of being open and honest about all of this - I started driving trucks before I even finished High School. I obtained my Ontario class AZ in April 1997 before graduating in June, and was working in a local capacity around Hamilton at night after school.
Did The Paddocks take a huge risk in letting me rip around Stoney Creek, Hamilton, and Toronto, before I was even finished high school? Yes …. and No.
This is going to sound elitist, and to a certain degree it is, in a way - but some people have trucking in their blood, or grew up on farms or in families whose business necessitated the use of heavy equipment. In some Canadian provinces where rural agricultural living is the norm, you can get your learner's permit at age 14, which reflects the realities of life on the farm, and the need for kids to get out there and start driving early.
In Foul Year of Our Lord 2023, however, these exceptions are very exceptional, and a significant number of American teenagers are forgoing a modern right of passage to freedom of movement (and necessary step to becoming a trucker).
Per the Washington Post -
60 percent of American 18-year-olds had a driver’s license in 2021, down from 80 percent in 1983, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration. In that same period, the number of 16-year-olds with licenses dropped from 46 percent to 25 percent.
If you can stomach the usual mandatory nods to identity politics, and various drivel which gives ammunition to Grumpy Old Guys like me to start laughing about snowflakes, the article is quite a fascinating look at being a certain kind of Suburbanoid Teenager.
This particular passage jumped out at me, given my recent review of a book which documents the troubling rise of surveillance technology forced on at least one portion of the motoring public.
Many kids have also mentioned feeling unnerved by the fact that their parents can track their every move, von Staden says, using apps like Life360 that let parents see how fast a kid is driving, if their gas is getting low, if they had to brake too quickly, or if they picked up their phone while the car was in motion.
It’s easy to pick on The Kids, but if the above passage is any indication, at some point, the parents are largely to blame. One of the main reasons that a teenager gets their drivers license and either begs, borrows, or buys a (very used) car is to GET THE HELL AWAY FROM MOM AND DAD.
Kids, if your parents want to play Sauron and install a Palantir into your phone, maybe it’s time to run away and join the circus.
Back to the argument I’m trying to make here, which is that the number of 18 year olds who are capable of operating an 80,000 pound piece of equipment on public roads is quite small, and the push to try and convince more of this tiny minority into becoming Over The Road truckers at such a young age has many problems with it.
First off is the trucking industry’s ass backwards approach to bringing in new drivers.
Almost every CDL Mill in the country is set up to take someone with ZERO experience behind the wheel of a truck, and in a few short weeks, set them off over the road, with no practice working locally, or even a hint of care or concern about how these new drivers are going to perform, running coast to coast with such a minimal amount of training or experience.
In many other countries, an implicit, if not on paper, or even recognized as such, quasi-apprenticeship program is enforced by their respective DOT having graduated licensing regimes for Big Trucks.
Australia and New Zealand, for example, have a one year minimum experience requirement before letting you advance to the next license - you must have at least one year car driving experience before you can apply for a ‘rigid’ license, which is to say ‘straight truck’ in North America; and then you must have a straight truck license for one year before you may apply for a semi-truck license which allows you to drive an ‘18 wheeler’.
The obvious benefit here is that before anyone hooks up to a 53 foot trailer and heads from Tennessee up to Alaska, they would have had, at very least, one year of driving a dump truck or local delivery unit, before being turned loose on the interstate with a much larger piece of equipment, heading into God knows what conditions, or getting tangled up in metropolitan traffic with 80,000 pounds.
Unfortunately, this very pragmatic approach to gradual experience requirements to advance in licensing, and your career as a driver, is a bridge too far for Mega Carriers, as represented by our friends at The American Trucking Association. Most members of the ATA have based their entire recruitment system around the government subsidizing CDL Mills, who grab what Karl Marx referred to as the Lumpenproletariat right off the street and claim to turn them into ‘Truckers’.
The ‘Apprenticeship’ Program forwarded by the FMCSA under this new bill from the Biden Administration contains no such minimum requirements between years of experience or types of equipment, but merely papers over the interstate age restrictions.
At least one Mega Carrier CEO, however, sees the problems with this idea, and stands as the rule proving exception to C Suite Soft-Hands being more than happy to offload the externalities of a constant flow of less-safe new drivers onto the motoring public.
“The idea of bringing 18-year-old drivers in, I think is a horrific idea for a multitude of reasons,” Jackson told attendees at the Truckload Carriers Association here on Monday.
“But if you happen to believe that to oversupply the industry would be a great thing to do, and the impact that would be on the stability of pricing and the stability of wages for drivers … if you think that’s all a good thing, then I would say we’re grossly underestimating the unintended consequences to oversupply, and what that does to rates, and what that kind of a driver would do for safety.”
Well, I have a few suggestions to help with improving driver safety, retention, and making life for everyone involved in trucking a little bit easier, even if these suggestions would be rejected by every member of the ATA, and probably even Mr Jackson above.
First off, we need to cut off the public money being used to subsidize truck driver training programs, full-stop. Every grant, every giveaway, every dollar issued directly to someone going to a CDL school, takes money from the taxpayer and uses it to fund driver churn, which artificially depresses drivers wages, and leads to the exodus of experienced drivers from the industry. To the CEOs and shareholders, to every manager at a trucking company in America (and Canada) - it’s (supposedly) a free market, baby - the government is not here to help you with your own internal labor issues. Get off the taxpayer tit and figure out how to solve your own retention problems, you filthy welfare case slimebags.
Next, the state must reform the licensing system so as to prevent this constant flow of poorly trained ‘drivers’ from being allowed on the roads. The Australian/Kiwi model where one year of experience is required between levels of commercial drivers license works really well for them, and would help to ensure that those who eventually drive an 18 wheeler across the country have had an adequate amount of practice beforehand.
That said, for those entering the industry with relevant experience farming, or operating heavy equipment, or who have a family history in trucking and have years of experience with trucks, if not exactly behind the wheel, accommodations and exceptions should be made. Not unlike our friends in Alberta who issue learner’s permits to 14 year olds, if you have certifiable experience on the farm or somewhere else, that should be recognized and you should be exempted from minimum time intervals.
Third, and to address the 18 year old interstate restriction - yes, preventing 18 year olds from crossing state lines is stupid, especially if they service an area along state borders. Imagine an 18 year old trucker working for a company in Omaha, Nebraska. It is perfectly legal for them to drive 450 miles to the other end of the state, but not over the river to Council Bluffs, Iowa, which is a couple of miles away.
This restriction should follow the same limit for being exempt from using an ELD - 150 air miles - close enough that you can be helped without too much effort by your home terminal, but not impinging you from servicing geographically adjacent areas.
Keeping you close to home helps with your mental state as well; remember, 18 year olds haven’t got much in the way of life experience, nevermind driving experience. Being thrown off the deep end to go out over the road, with all of which that entails, is maybe not the best idea for kids who have barely finished high school.
Fourth, all of the above should be factored into a registered ‘apprenticeship’ type program, where at minimum, two years of verifiable training, including the graduation from smaller trucks to larger, from working local to hitting the road, are taken into account. The United States Department of Labor will not grant the title of ‘skilled labor’ to any job which does not have at a minimum 2 years of verifiable training involved. Building a program where you spend 2 years in training and local trucking, under the watchful eye of your employer, and not being stressed out from living away from home, before being allowed to go OTR, would satisfy this requirement, thus granting the job title ‘Truck Driver’ skilled labor recognition.
It goes without saying that this recognition would go a long way towards correcting the abysmal wages some truckers are paid.
And finally, though these particular issues are outside the purview of the development of a training program, a couple of practices must be investigated and crushed by the government, with extreme prejudice.
In this fantastic examination of the decline of government services, and the inherent corruption of California’s One Party State, philosopher (and fellow Substacker) Matthew B Crawford brings up an issue which faces the DOT and DMV across North America.
In 2022, the Department of Justice indicted 20 California DMV employees who “helped put unqualified commercial drivers who operated large commercial vehicles on highways despite the drivers not passing their written and driving tests”. Employees would accept bribes to enter fraudulent scores for those who did not pass their tests and in some cases had not even taken the test. Various trucking schools looked for DMV employees that they could bribe so students that failed or were unqualified could get their licences. According to the DOJ, “hundreds of fraudulent commercial driver license permits and licenses were issued as a part of these schemes”.
Scams like this have been going on for years, including this particularly egregious example from Alberta, from way back in 2005.
Calgary police have shut down a city driving school they say has issued hundreds of bogus Class 1 licenses to drivers from across the country.
Speaking of Canada, the legitimate truck driving schools aren’t exactly producing stellar performers.
… it won’t cost much time or money to become a transport truck driver – in some cases less than two weeks.
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In 2018, the Humboldt Broncos bus tragedy cast a dark shadow on Canada’s trucking industry. An inexperienced driver named Jaskirat Sidhu, well educated with a commerce degree, had picked up a trucking job with very limited training. He was looking for a way to earn extra money to support his wife going back to school.
On one of his first solo trips, carrying a massive double load, he ran a stop sign causing a horrific collision resulting in the loss of 16 lives and 13 injuries -- all tied to the Humboldt Broncos Hockey Club.
A ‘massive double load’ - what they mean here is that this poor bastard Mr Sidhu was sent out on the highway, with less than one month of experience, to drive a truck pulling a set of Super Bs the same length and weight as this unit here, which I used to haul fuel in Northern Alberta.
There’s a town in Saskatchewan who will probably never recover from this tragedy, and it is plain for anyone to see that the licensing system, such as there is one, failed Mr Sidhu, and everyone in the town of Humboldt.
While we are in Canada, there is one more scam that must be investigated, everyone involved prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and this practice brought to an end.
Would you believe me if I told you that Human Trafficking is not just the purview of those seeking to make money from young women forced into prostitution, but an intrinsic component to the operation of many trucking companies?
You better believe it.
Mr. Singh, who comes from Amritsar, in northwestern India, had never experienced ice or snow. He’d never considered being a truck driver, either, but Canadian immigration consultants told him that getting experience in trucking could help him qualify for permanent residency. So, a year ago, he got a licence and found a company to work for in Surrey, B.C.
———
A Globe and Mail investigation has discovered that young foreign nationals like Mr. Singh are routinely steered into trucking by some immigration consultants, in collaboration with particular trucking firms. Both take cash payoffs from recruits in exchange for jobs – even though that practice is illegal.
That has spawned an entrenched, lucrative and dangerous immigration scheme, centred in Surrey, that is exploiting newcomers and putting lives at risk across the country.
In audio recordings obtained by The Globe, consultants told one international student a trucking job costs $35,000 to $55,000 – an astonishing sum for aspiring immigrants, who often borrow the money to pay the fee.
The novice drivers are often unable to decipher Canadian road signs or handle their trucks properly before being sent out on the roads. That inexperience has led to crashes and near misses, according to documented cases, as well as interviews with two dozen sources, including truck drivers, dispatchers, tow operators and industry representatives.
Indentured servitude, a de facto version of slavery in the 21st century, is alive and well in the trucking industry, and you can guess the effect this has on the rate floor by which everyone operates.
It should be noted that in 8 years as Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau has done exactly *nothing* to end this trade in brown bodies.
Perhaps he has been too busy doing the bidding of Xi Jinping.
And lest you think this crap is just a problem in Canada, think again.
Talavera was a modern-day indentured servant. And there are hundreds, likely thousands more, still on the road, hauling containers for trucking companies that move goods for America’s most beloved retailers, from Costco to Target to Home Depot.
These port truckers -- many of them poor immigrants who speak little English -- are responsible for moving almost half of the nation’s container imports out of Los Angeles’ ports. They don't deliver goods to stores. Instead they drive them short distances to warehouses and rail yards, one small step on their journey to a store near you.
A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.
Before Joe Biden and his administration think they are going to ‘Fix Supply Chains’ by expanding opportunities for 18 year olds to go out over the road, perhaps they could clean up the slavery, corporate welfare, and utterly deficient training regimes which put so many bodies into the trucking meat grinder, only for most of them to be chewed up and spit out.
And one last thing to think about before we finish - given that the number one concern around letting under 21s drive trucks is about safety and the likelihood of getting into accidents, maybe, just maybe, we should also consider the training requirements of the vast majority of people who are involved in collisions with trucks to begin with - car drivers.
But that, as they say, is another Substack.
On this side of the pond, 18-year olds have been able to drive trucks since 2009. But to be honest very few youngsters have actually taken up the opportunity. The ones I've met have seemed to be sensible and keen to learn.
However, I was talking to a recruiter the other day who told me that some of these young new passes - not necessarily teenagers, but certainly under-25s - have a terrible attitude. They come to an interviewing demanding a brand-new truck with all the bells, won't start work until 7 am, and either want to work short hours and be home every night, or want to immediately start off on long -haul work to exotic destinations. Then they storm off when they're told they can't have all this.
To the wider point about this drive to get any fool behind the wheel: I believe it has a lot to do with hierarchy and status.
We've had this massive ramp-up in academic education, to the extent we now live in an elite-educated technocracy. When it comes to working class jobs the thinking goes like this: "I have a degree, therefore I am intelligent and have a high-capacity to perform compared to those who do not. Some jobs do not require a degree, therefore we can safely give those jobs to people with a low-capacity, therefore reducing costs".
What's more; they need this to be true, on a psychological level. How can they be superior without inferiors?
The problem with this is the hard fact of supply and demand. When just 5% of kids went to university, this way of thinking may have made sense. But every year, a greater and greater proportion go on to tertiary education. In the UK, 44% of school leavers go to university. Add in the numbers who do other non-degree academic courses, and those who take a break before going to uni, and it's safe to say that about 50% of young people believe they are cognitively special.
But that's impossible; you can't have half the population in the "elite"!
What has now happened to the job market is therefore pure supply and demand: there are not enough people with practical skills - such as you need for being a truck driver - and far too many with "cognitive" or "creative" skills, who really just end up creating low-value health-and-safety notices with MS Docs.
No one wants this truth to be true. This cognitive class, and the politicians who pander too them, desperately need someone to look down on. Hence this constant drive convince us all that to get enough truck drivers, all they need do is constantly drive down the barriers to entry. If they just allow any breathing, barely-sentient creature to get behind the wheel then logistics is solved.
In my opinion it won't work, at least not long term. There will either be constant supply-chain and safety issues, or the market will snap everyone back their senses. I hope it's the latter, but I suspect we'll get more of the former for a while.
Absolutely spot on!!