A Senate Committee on Trucking, Attracting The Kids to The Job, and 'Driver Inc' Obfuscations, and an update on A Texas Crash
Reliable and Reality Based Commentary to help navigate The Smokescreens
It’s been a busy few weeks in the world of administrators and Professional Managerial Class nerds lying to the public about what’s going on with the trucking industry, a repeated pattern that goes back many decades and is reflective of the distance between the rulers and the workers who actually get things done, and likewise reflective of the necessary messaging meant to make sure the former never have to pay the latter what they are really worth. That’s why I am here, and that’s why you are reading this, because the subscribers of Autonomous Truck(er)s and listeners to the Voice Of GO(r)D podcast are part of a wider tribe we might call ‘The Real Ones’, properly skeptical, curious, and unwilling to take any shit from bipedal swine.
Driver Inc
A recent news story highlighted two of the worst organizations in Canada, together - the CBC, and the Canadian Trucking Alliance, neither of whom are ever going to tell you the truth about much of anything.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/driver-inc-scam-drives-truck-industry-crisis-1.7569716
Some selections -
The national voice of the trucking industry in Canada is renewing calls for the federal government to pump the brakes on what it says is a $1-billion scam.
The scam, which the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) has coined "Driver Inc.", occurs when companies incorrectly classify drivers as independent contractors, instead of employees to save money on payroll taxes.
"We believe that in some parts of Canada at least a third of the companies and the drivers are participating in this, and it's hurting us twofold as a society," said Stephen Laskowski, CTA president and CEO.
"Those are taxes that aren't going into our [economy], and on the flip side of it, it's about a 30 per cent advantage in the marketplace."
Laskowski described Driver Inc. as a tax evasion scheme and says some trucking companies are purposely misclassifying drivers to save money. He says drivers also lose labour protections including fair pay, overtime and vacation pay, as well as health and safety protections.
In 2021, the government made it illegal for federally regulated employers to misclassify employees, and added penalties for non-compliance.
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Companies target newcomers
Driver Karanveer Singh agrees there's a lack of enforcement against companies that break the law.
Singh came to Canada from India's northern Punjab state as an international student when he was 18 years old.
"I'm trying to chase the Canadian dream," he said.
But Singh's journey took a detour shortly after he got his commercial trucking licence. He said the first two companies he worked for misclassified him as an incorporated driver, and also never paid him.
Singh was able to prove to the Canadian Labour Board that he had been misclassified and the companies were ordered to pay what he was owed.
While he was able to collect from one of the companies, Singh said it's unlikely he'll ever see the nearly $40,000 owed by the second company.
"Until the government enforces it, it is useless," he said, referring to the court order. "These companies, they know what they are doing…. Most of the time they will find new immigrants, new truck drivers to target because they are so easy to target because every new immigrant is desperate for a job."
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Part of the CTA's solution involves lifting a moratorium on assessing penalties for failing to complete the fees for service box of the T4A tax slip.
Laskowski said that would help the CRA identify and audit companies that rely heavily on incorporated drivers.
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The owner of Kriska Transportation Group in Prescott, Ont., is also urging the federal government to act, saying the Driver Inc. model is driving companies that do comply with tax regulations out of business.
The unfairness makes owner Mark Seymour's blood pressure rise.
"It's widely known, it's not a dirty little secret. It's out of control," he said.
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Phil and Francie Langevin own P.A. Langevin Transport in Carleton Place, Ont., and say they, too, worry about the future.
"There's so much wrong with this industry right now," Phil Langevin said, adding he suspects the companies that operate under the Driver Inc. model are so focused on profits that they also let safety standards slip.
"These issues are falling through the cracks, and the next time you're driving on a highway with a transport truck beside you I want you to look at it and I want you to wonder how safe am I, really," Francie Langevin said.
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Singh said in his experience, that assessment is true. He recalled being trained by a very inexperienced driver who got them into trouble at the Port Huron border crossing.
"He hit the concrete wall over there at the border, and I was so surprised. Like, this is supposed to be my trainer and he just like damaged the truck," Singh said.
On his next trip, Singh said he was asked to be the trainer.
"They did not [tell] me a single thing and just gave me a new training driver for me to train," he said. "They want their stuff delivered, they want their job done.
"I think when these companies are allowed to operate, Canadians are not safe," he said.
Where even to begin with all of this …
First off, it ought be known to readers that CTA President Stephen Laskowski is a past donor to The Liberal Party and a known supporter of the Tyrant and Criminal former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, so we know already what side of the street he is on, and it is not that of the average working man, nevermind truckers. He also publicly smeared The Freedom Convoy by insinuating that it was illegal when an Ontario Superior Court Judge ruled the Ottawa portion of it was and a later ruling called Trudeau’s crackdown ‘unjustified and unreasonable’. Laskowski is a bootlicker who ended his missive just telling people to abandon their bodily sovereignty and ‘get vaccinated’ for a marginally effective virus that was only ever a threat to the old or the obese (maybe the CTAs members are completely staffed by the stereotypical fat trucker - I wouldn’t know, as I typically avoid working for corporate trucking companies) who deserved targeted protection and treatment, not the shutdown of society. That the CBC talks to this cretin at all and credulously accepts what he says is a testament to their function as a state propaganda operation that ought not be trusted.
Laskowski and the CTA have been complaining about Driver Inc for years, and they almost always focus on the tax revenue being lost, rather than on any reasons why people might feel that taxation is a bit too high and this model is a way for truckers and their employers to avoid paying so many. What a good little Liberal! I hope Stephen gets patted on the head by the people he donates too.
In the CBC piece, they never tell you who it is that engages in Driver Inc; but if you read between the lines, it is pretty obvious.
Speaking with a Mr Karanveer Singh, we are told how he came to Canada as a student, and later got into trucking. Maybe Mr Singh obtained his license through one of the fraudulent truck driving schools run by his fellow Punjabis, which are a rampant problem in Canada, so much so that the CBC felt compelled to finally say something about it last year. He eventually found himself as a ‘self employed’ driver in one of these dodgy Driver Inc arrangements, and was defrauded of a large sum of his pay.
Funny how they don’t name the companies, nor what size they are, nor where they are located, nor whom they are run by. The same thing happens in the documentary on the truck driver ‘schools’ where the CBC again never tells you who, but it can be inferred from the spoken accents of everyone involved. Gee, I wonder why they would try not to discuss the who … might make for some uncomfortable questions, like why it is that a recent immigrant group has bragged about parasitizing itself on an entire industry to the detriment of the locals who built it.
We know who isn’t doing this, and that is the membership of the Canadian Trucking Alliance, a veritable who’s who of Canadian Mega Fleets who are generally some of the most anti-competitive and corporatist douchebags around, and whose provincial affiliate, The Ontario Trucking Association, likewise headed by Laskowski, were the folks who brought us the speed limiter mandate back in 2009. Quelle surprise!
So you have to ask yourself WHO IS RUNNING DRIVER INC?
How are the new Punjabi entrants to the industry able to undercut everyone else?
We know that many of them are guilty of indenturing their own to trucks, and putting them out with such little training that we get disasters like the Humboldt Tragedy - why wouldn’t they use yet another available scammy model in order to acquire further market share? Indeed, who needs to pay those pesky payroll taxes or overtime or benefits! While Laskowski and the CTA do have a point that this model allows dangerous and dodgy carriers to operate in ways that legitimate companies do not, they do us all a disservice by failing to identify the guilty parties, which might lead us to better and more effective solutions than Laskowski’s proposed penalties and audits, which are a rearguard action that is attempting to chase the horses already intentionally let out of the barn.
While the dissembling and obfuscation of paid propagandists and shills like Stephen Laskowski are allowed to stand in for the concerns of an entire industry, the Canadian Trucking Business will continue its long path to perdition, where there will only be two types of trucking companies left operating. It will either be those run by gangsters recently arrived to the country, who have no skin in the game of an industry they did not build and to which they bear no loyalty, or those run by Laskowski’s membership, often owned by investment funds, or the families of the Laurentian Elite who run the Liberal Party of Canada, who likewise have shown they have no loyalty to the Canadians they Lord over, and whom they treat with barely concealed contempt and typical Canadian passive aggressiveness.
Driver Inc? How about Corporate Propaganda Inc?
How Do We Get The Kids to Play With Our Trucks?
The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) just released a doozy of a paper called ‘Evolving Truck Driver Demographics: Issues and Opportunities’ which seeks to understand why they are having such a hard time attracting the youths and various other demographics to trucking. ATRI are a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Trucking Association, and though they occasionally do some decent enough research, are paid by the ATA to ferment their own farts at strength; one wishes these guys were just cokeheads like the suits of yore, but 2025 is a weird time.
You can go to ATRIs website or download the pdf right here.
Their introduction poses some fair enough questions and outlines the purpose of the paper. Spoiler Alert - they did not consult with me or anyone like me, because of course they didn’t. I do not ferment nor transmit the correct gases.
There is a running debate as to whether the trucking industry is truly experiencing an economist’s definition of a truck driver “shortage,” with some arguing that rudimentary changes to pay, work-life balance and industry image will generate a large infusion of truck drivers. These arguments ignore the technical and regulatory barriers to entry that have been well documented. During moderate to strong economies, nearly every motor carrier will decline profitable revenue loads due to a lack of truck drivers; this reality creates a “de facto” driver shortage that is not easily addressed by motor carriers alone. The truck driver shortage commonly prevails in the for-hire sector with Class 8 tractor-trailers / over-the-road (OTR) / nonlocal drivers.
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Understanding which demographics are underrepresented within this workforce will help fleets refine their recruitment and retention strategies to ensure longterm sustainability.
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With younger drivers entering the industry, and older drivers exiting, trucking has undergone significant demographic changes. The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) has conducted research on select driver demographics, examining topics such as the aging driver population, differences between owner-operators (OOs) / independent contractors (ICs) and employee drivers, integrating younger drivers into the workforce, and strategies to recruit and retain women truck drivers.
The Methodology section discusses how they went about the research, who they surveyed, and various technical aspects of how they go about their work.
Some interesting choices of language indicate that wokeism still infects the spreadsheet brains who would rather ask every other question except those which might lead to productive answers that actually solve the problem.
Insights and resources on underrepresented communities that might navigate into trucking careers.
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Racial Diversity
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The second phase of this research identifies viable pathways that can lead to promising careers. After analyzing multiple pathways identified through secondary research and a literature review, two pathways were chosen for expanded research, representing population groups that may be underrepresented in trucking opportunities: former foster youth and justice involved individuals
The term “justice-involved” has emerged in recent years as a more humanizing alternative to labels like “inmate,” “criminal,” “prisoner,” “convict,” “felon,” or “offender.”16 It broadly refers to individuals who have had contact with the criminal justice system — whether they are currently or were previously incarcerated, on probation or parole, or involved in diversion programs or pretrial supervision.
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People of Color (POC) Pathway – Not Selected While some industries and companies have implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to increase POC participation in their respective workforce, truck driving has been and continues to be a racially diverse workforce (Figure 17).
Yes, yes indeed, trucking has a very racially diverse workforce - we are dealing with a Truckstop of Babel type situation which has Balkanized a once High-Trust and socially cohesive working culture that has now been completely obliterated.
Way to go, everyone.
Perhaps ATRI ought do a study comparing life in prison to life in the cab of a truck, which share some similarities, especially if the truck involved is part of a ‘lease operator’ arrangement. Maybe they could go deep on the question of why so many trucking companies rely on ex-convicts for labor - not that ex-cons don’t deserve a second chance, but why it is that group is specifically targeted - what does it say about trucking? That would be a moment of honest clarity.
People Experiencing Homelessness Pathway – Not Selected
There are many technical reasons that homeless individuals are not a logical pathway for truck driver employment, including challenges in the recruitment and onboarding process.
Interesting how they want to discriminate against the homeless while the government floods the zone with people from other countries. ATRI also kinda misses that most people’s understanding of what ‘homeless’ actually means includes an awful lot of truckers who have nowhere else to live but their trucks, thus fitting the definition already.
Rolling along … this was supposed to be about The Kids.
According to 2023 government data, the average age for truck drivers is 47 years old, compared to an average age of 42 for the rest of the U.S. labor force, making truck drivers older and closer to the average retirement age of 67.30 The retirement of older truck drivers presents both a workforce challenge and a strategic opportunity for the industry to broaden recruitment efforts. By tapping into younger individuals, the industry can build a sustainable driver population.
There are four primary “generations” in the trucking industry workforce:
• Baby Boomers (born 1946 – 1964);
• Generation X (born 1965 – 1980);
• Millennials (born 1981 – 1995); and
• Generation Z (born 1996 – 2010)
While members of the Silent Generation (born 1928 – 1945) are still present, they make up only a small fraction of the workforce today.
Generation X represents 40.8 percent of truck drivers – the most represented generation (Figure 2). As the 20.7 percent of the driver workforce represented by Baby Boomers move toward retirement, the industry must continue to find strategies to connect with both Millennial drivers (30.7%) and Generation Z drivers (7.5%), given that these two generational cohorts comprised 52.6 percent of the total U.S. labor force in 2023.
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Despite the 2.0 percentage point increase in younger truck drivers since 2008, the driver workforce trails far behind the distribution of the U.S. labor force. Nearly 35 percent of the U.S. labor force is younger than 35 years old, compared to only 20.4 percent of truck drivers.
Now we are getting to the good stuff, The Work, the questions … and the missed or obfuscated answers. Also interesting timing, given that Chris Spear of the ATA, in testimony discussed further down in this piece, is continuing to push the idea of removing the interstate restriction on under 21 year old CDL holders.
ATRIs statement about the age composition of truckers, and specifically that only 20.4% are under the age of 35, is going to become a much bigger topic of conversation in the near future, especially as the promises of the automated truck pimps are shown to be fraudulent and much more misleading than previously thought.
After going through a few pages of ATRI discussing how they can get more women behind the wheel, which includes some discussion of poaching school bus drivers, based on the fact that occupation leans heavily female and they already have a somewhat easily upgradeable CDL, ATRI then spends over half a dozen pages discussing the idea of recruiting teens who are aging out of foster care (WTF?!?!?!?) or juvenile corrections.
PHASE II – PATHWAYS INTO TRUCK DRIVING CAREERS
Pathway I – Former Foster Youth
Pathway II – Justice-Involved People
Just before they get into the specific details of these two groups, ATRI gives away the game with this passage here -
The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a federal law that ensures access to education and essential services for students experiencing housing instability, including those in foster care, is a critical resource.78 This legislation helps schools maintain consistent engagement with vulnerable youth, enabling outreach from external partners – including trucking employers – through social workers, McKinney-Vento liaisons, and career counselors.
Remember, ATRI are a subsidiary of the American Trucking Association, most of whose members either operate or hire drivers out of the CDL Mills we all know and love, and whose operations are financed by taxpayer money through various subsidies, grants, and workplace training programs. Why not stick their nose further into the trough by diverting money for the homeless into their truck driving schools?
Colleague, friend, fellow Substacker, and two time guest of my podcast Danielle Chaffin and host behind the maybe danielle’s thoughts Substack has some specific concerns about this idea of recruiting those who have just left foster care into the cab of a truck.
She has quite a bit to say, as a matter of fact, so let me hand the mic to her.
According to the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), foster youth may be a “solution” to the so-called truck driver shortage. As a former social worker, I read this study and wanted to throw my computer through the window.
● 81% of males who age out of foster care are arrested within six years.
● 59% are convicted of at least one crime.
These kids aren’t statistics. They’re survivors of trauma, instability, and broken systems. I’ve worked with some of the greatest and brightest. I’ve also worked with deeply traumatized, dangerous kids who would rather sit in prison than follow a basic rule. These kids are complex. They’ve been through hell.
And all of this takes a toll.
Between 50% and 80% of children in foster care meet the criteria for a mental health disorder. Trauma doesn’t just leave emotional scars. It literally reshapes the brain. It impacts memory, impulse control, emotional regulation, and decision-making.
To outsiders, their behaviors can look irrational or rebellious. But those are often survival mechanisms. Natural responses to deeply abnormal circumstances.
Is this really the population we should be recruiting into one of the most dangerous, isolating, and high-burnout jobs in America? Because ATRI seems to think so. Sure, some of them want structure. Some want independence. But how many dream of becoming truck drivers? Probably a very, very small percentage.
And that matters. Because pushing them toward an industry plagued by burnout, misclassification, and financial abuse isn’t “empowerment.” It’s a predatory workforce placement disguised as an opportunity.
There Is No Driver Shortage.
Just a Shortage of American Drivers Willing to Be Exploited. The industry loves to scream “shortage” from every rooftop. However, what we actually have is a shortage of American drivers willing to work in the very sad current state of transportation.
That’s not a labor shortage. That’s a labor refusal. And the solution isn’t exploiting vulnerable populations. It’s fixing the system that pushes good drivers out.
“Half of Aged-Out Foster Youth Don’t Have Income.”
Yes… Because They’re in College
One of the justifications cited is that “half of foster youth who age out don’t have income within four years.”
● Nearly every U.S. state offers tuition waivers and scholarships for foster youth. Many of these young people are pursuing education, as they were told to do.
ATRI’s interpretation: they're jobless and ripe for exploitation.
Reality: they’re full-time students.
ATRI’s Foster Youth Proposal Is Exploitative and Ethically Bankrupt
Foster youth are not workforce solutions. They’re not raw labor to plug into your broken business model. And yet, ATRI floats the idea anyway, completely ignoring the massive ethical red flags.
Let me be very, very clear. Lying to kids, ones who have already been fed a lifetime of lies, isn’t just wrong. It’s evil. I'm infuriated that this income statement was added to the ATRI study.
Is it possible to make this much? Maybe.
Is it the average? Absolutely not.
These Youth Are at High Risk for Predatory Exploitation
The ATRI report conveniently omits the fact that foster youth are disproportionately vulnerable to:
● Predatory recruitment
● Lease-purchase scams
● Forced misclassification as independent contractors
● Financial manipulation and abuse
These kids don’t need another rigged system selling them the “American dream” while quietly draining their paychecks and autonomy. This Isn’t Empowerment. It’s Economic Targeting
Let’s not sugarcoat it. This isn’t about empowerment. It’s about cheap labor:
● Labor that won’t push back
● Labor that doesn’t know its rights
● Labor that won’t unionize or job-hop because it has nowhere else to go
Call it what it is — calculated exploitation of a legal adult but developmentally vulnerable population.
ATRI Already Knew This Was a Bad Idea… In 2017
In 2017, ATRI published research citing the risks of underdeveloped cognitive function, impulsivity, and trauma-related challenges among young commercial drivers. And yet now, they propose recruiting foster youth, who are statistically more likely to suffer from those exact impairments.
That’s not oversight. That’s willful ignorance.
The Industry Needs Reform. Not a New Class of Disposables.
Until the trucking industry addresses its core problems: churn, burnout, abuse, and unsafe working conditions, it has no business dragging foster youth into its mess.
This isn’t a workforce development strategy. It’s a PR stunt with bodies attached.
And, One More Thing: “Justice-Involved People” ATRI also suggests another “solution”: recruiting so-called “justice-involved individuals.”*
Yes. That’s sanitized language for people with criminal convictions. It’s not necessarily wrong to offer second chances, but when it’s paired with exploitative conditions and zero reform, it becomes a pipeline of desperation, not opportunity.
*That’s liberal tear language for a person with a history of criminal behavior and charges.
The trucking industry doesn’t need more bodies - it needs reform. And until it gets serious about fixing itself, it needs to stop targeting America’s most vulnerable youth to prop up its broken economy.
Thank you, Danielle.
What is interesting about this ATRI report, like so many other things in life, are the things they don’t discuss, as if certain issues are not only off the table for discussion, but assumed to be permanent or intractable, perhaps requiring too much effort to solve, or might generate uncomfortable questions they would rather not answer.
Whether you are a young person, recently out of prison, a woman, or any of the other target demographics that the ATA is plumbing for fresh new recruits to abuse, underpay, and eventually cast to the side, like so many hundreds of thousands of people who go through this cycle every single year, you may have the same questions I do which ATRI did not address anywhere in this report, not even once.
ATRI failed to consider that perhaps recently freed convicts, and those who are likewise constantly under the eye of state, such as foster kids, might not want to drive a truck which has an ELD and a driver facing camera in it. Why is it that ATRI just assumes that people will accept the surveillance state into their lives, especially after they had just left this shit behind? Kids aren’t stupid, and this is part of the reason Biden’s fake ‘apprenticeship program’ failed, as they tried to insert a drive facing camera requirement into it, and interest in the program dropped off immediately. People don’t want to be treated like criminals or liabilities, and until ATRI and the ATA and the retards who run the companies they represent get this through their dense fucking heads, their recruitment problems will continue. Spear even acknowledged this in the testimony we will discuss below … although being a Bureaucrat and a Spreadhseet Brain, Spear thought the problem was timing, and not the evil Eye of Sauron being cast on new recruits.
Ignore the human element at your own peril.
Shifting Gears: Issues Impacting the Trucking and Commercial Bus Industries in the U.S.
This past Tuesday, July 22, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, or more specifically, the Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Freight, Pipelines, and Safety, held a hearing on the trucking and bus businesses, and heard from four big names in advocacy across these two industries -
Chris Spear, President and Chief Executive Officer, American Trucking Associations
Lewie Pugh, Executive Vice President, Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association
Fred Ferguson, President and Chief Executive Officer, American Bus Association
Sean O’Brien, General President, International Brotherhood of Teamsters
This Substack doesn’t know much of anything about the Bus and Coach business, so I won’t be highlighting any of Mr Ferguson’s testimony. As I am mostly sympatico with Mr Pugh and Mr O’Brien, I will briefly highlight some of their testimony, and then will hone the anti-aircraft guns in on Spear’s bloated and putrid carcass.
Lewie Pugh is the executive VP of OOIDA and a previous guest of my podcast, and an all-around good guy - you can listen to that podcast right here
His testimony was fairly substantive, and hit many of the usual notes OOIDA can be expected to weigh in on. You can read all of Lewie’s testimony here -
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/9B1EF7F2-DB30-4A08-9844-DC9F237282D5
I wish OOIDA would just come out and say, like myself and the brave souls at American Truckers United have, that North America is not a work camp for insourced labor to be dumped into by the forces of Global Homogeneity.
I understand the requirements of ‘RealPolitik’ and that the spreadsheet brained caste have been programmed to view any materialist discussion of protecting North American workers against the forces of Globalism as somehow ‘racist’, but at some point we need to be more forceful in pushing back against these people and their program of leveling the world into a much lower standard of living by taking it out of the hides of the North American working class.
Lewie did highlight the problem of self certification of ELDs, even if he could not say, due to RealPolitik, that the gangsters who abuse ELDs are almost all based in Eastern Europe or the Balkans and that this is but one of many loopholes those people use to undercut American truckers. As regards the dumping of insourced labor into the US trucking market, Lewie did support the idea of investigating the proliferation of Non-Domiciled CDLs, again riding the coat tails of ATU who took the risk of talking about this first, and that is great. Many states appear to have co-operated with Biden in flooding the market with migrants and refugees and all kinds of people who are not American and more importantly, not trained and safe and vetted truckers, and I am glad to know that OOIDA supports cleaning that huge mess up. Good.
Lewie also addressed minimum training standards, which is great, but my position has always been pretty straightforward - every single CDL Mill in the country must operate on its own funding and have every penny of taxpayer money cut off completely. It is not the taxpayers job to finance the production of ever more poor quality drivers in a market with lower freight volumes and an over-capacity of shit-bird and piss-poor quality carriers greenlit by the Biden Administration and their ‘Trucking Task Force’. I’m also a big fan of importing the Australian graduated truck licensing system here (with exceptions carved out for rural drivers/those with family business experience/talent/farmers etc) as that would greatly increase the safety of our roads through forcing more training time on potential drivers, and utterly destroy the easy and immediate insourcing of foreign labor. Everyone says they want better drivers and safer highways; a graduated licensing system would deliver more of that than any other weasel program meant to placate the membership of the ATA.
Get er done.
On to Sean O’Brien, General President of The International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Before we discuss Mr O’Brien’s testimony, I want to let my readers know that Mr O’Brien and myself have both published articles at a number of the same outlets - Compact Magazine, Commonplace (the new website of American Compass) and Newsweek, on the subject of trucking. I have written positively about Mr O’Brien’s speech at the RNC last year for the American Conservative, and I have extended an invite to Mr O’Brien to come on my podcast, and, more importantly, for the Teamsters to have their say in my book. I have interacted several times via email with the Teamsters media team, and even had a lengthy phone discussion with them. A member of that team is even a regular reader of this Substack, BUT, they have since ghosted me and stopped answering my emails.
I’ve been told by others that O’Brien keeps a tight leash on official Teamsters Communications, and for whatever reason, they view any discussion with me as a liability or of potential negative consequence, even though I am not one of these firebreathing AM Radio Boomer Conservative reflexively anti-union jerks. I am ambivalent and open minded about them, though not necessarily sympatico with how they roll. Apparently that’s not good enough; their loss.
Mr. O’Brien’s testimony, contra Lewie Pugh and Chris Spear’s, was short, only 8 pages long, concise, and to the point. They say brevity is the soul of wit, and Mr O’Brien, in his own way, exemplifies that greatly.
His testimony can be read here.
Due to Mr O’Brien’s brevity and concision, I don’t have much to add to his testimony, nor to criticize too greatly - we are sympatico on the main issues, such as the fiction of a shortage of drivers, that the lease operator model is predatory, washes too many people out and needs to be destroyed or significantly altered, and that autonomous truck manufacturers are getting away with far too much and their claims to offering increased safety over human operators require much more scrutiny and government oversight. I’m typically libertarian about these things but the marketing put out by the robo-truck system manufacturers, as I have written about extensively, is misleading, and quite frankly, they are lying to us while telling only the truth to their investors.
Oh what a tangled web we weave
when first we practice
to deceive
There are a number of items Mr O’Brien and the Teamsters have been very quiet about, which I think may be the reason they are cagey about speaking with me. They have said nothing, absolutely nothing about the massive increase in issue of Non-Domiciled CDLs, nor the flooding of the driver market by Biden’s 2021 Trucking Task Force. Are they afraid of annoying the Democrats? Of sounding ‘Racist’?
O’Brien swears like a sailor in nearly every interview he gives, and comes off like he doesn’t give a fuck about what anyone thinks of him. Why the silence on this issue, which is deafening, given the legacy he inherited from Jimmy Hoffa, who would have had none of this insourced labor bullshit?
Even the Overdrive Magazine guys have finally weighed in on the Non-Domicile CDL problem, and they are liberals to a fault.
What’s the matter, Sean? What are you afraid of?
Maybe the companies whose employees the Teamsters represent don’t hire all of these insourced recent arrivals, and good for them. That doesn’t mean O’Brien’s membership don’t have to tangle with them, and they are a goddamned menace on our highways and have killed hundreds of innocent motorists. O’Brien highlighted Amazon and their rampant abuse of subcontractors - he must know that it is these very companies who insource labor, and that insourced labor is part of the reason O’Brien can’t organize Amazon employees.
Seriously, Mr O’Brien, its time to put on your Big Boy pants and call it like it is - the North American trucker, of whom a substantial (though small) percentage are represented by your Union, is getting f_cked by Globalist corporate swine who would rather insource illiterate and unvetted migrants here to suppress everyone’s wages than pay market rates for high quality, safe, and well trained local truckers.
Speak up, man.
And now, on to the biggest huckster and welfare queen in the trucking business, Chris Spear, President and CEO of the American Trucking Association.
You can read his obfuscatory and mostly fact free testimony here.
Spear, the lying prick, mentions a ‘shortage of truck drivers’ at least seven different times in his testimony, and in attempting to defend the elimination of the restriction on under 21 year old drivers from operating in an interstate capacity, says -
”Self-serving factless claims that there is no driver shortage undermine the serious work of this committee.”
Perhaps Spear failed to read all the notes in ATA’s own report on this in 2019, when they admitted that there were over 10 million people with a CDL; perhaps he failed to acknowledge the 100%+ turnover at many of his members companies; perhaps he can’t admit that his members are a bunch of corporate welfare whores whose operations depend on taxpayer dollars going to support the endless stream of new bodies to replace all of those that quit.
Spear recently went after friend of this Substack and former guest of my podcast, FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller because Fuller has Chris Spears number.
Craig has likewise shown that the ATA and their decades long myth making project is a load of bunkum -
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/the-perpetual-truck-driver-shortage-is-not-real
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-trucking-embraces-alarming-turnover-rates
The existence of an entire section of FreightWaves website dedicated to bankruptcies and layoffs of American carriers belies this nonsense of a shortage - we have been in a protracted freight recession and capacity glut for 3 years, yet Spear would sit in front of Congress and lie his ass off about our industry in an effort to have the government let him and his members make it worse!
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/atas-push-for-teen-truckers-will-make-capacity-glut-worse
Like Lewie Pugh, and most normal, right thinking truckers, I’m all for ending the under 21 interstate restrictions on CDLs. It makes no sense - but neither does Spear’s unstated goal, which is to throw kids off the deep end into the long haul business without any water wings, which serves only to set many of them up for failure, and to keep driver pay down.
I don’t hear Chris Spear advocating for a graduated licensing system, or a 150 air mile radius restriction on fresh new truckers so that they can stay close to home until they get the hang of it. You can find out a great deal about what’s going on here by what industry advocates DO NOT say in as much as you can find out by what they DO.
Spear also wants us all to have our hair tested for drugs, and to continue using surveillance technology like ELDs to monitor us, as if truckers are to be assumed to be sexual predators or terrorists. Eh, if one of your recruitment vectors is prisons …
And, what do you know, Spear uses the same rhetoric as the automated truck pimps when he says that these robo-trucks would be a great way to help solve the driver shortage.
ATA believes that automated trucks will be a tool that will help improve the efficiency of freight movements and help address the persistent shortage of drivers, not replace them. Driver responsibilities may adjust over time with deployment of automated technologies, but the industry will continue to need drivers, our greatest asset.
Given that many of his biggest members, such as Hirschbach Transport, are at the forefront of replacing their human drivers while using surveillance technology that has human drivers train the robots, you ought take everything Spears says about autonomous trucks with a huge grain of salt. The man and his members stand to profit greatly from replacing truckers with robots, and I will be damned if I stand by and let this son of a bitch make our industry worse in the twilight years of the trucker, where instead of making things better on our way to pasture, he wants to hire kids out of foster homes, and transfer ex-cons from one prison cell to another, all the while handing the bill for this bull off to the taxpayer.
Get rekt you cretin.
Remember kids, the CTA and ATA and all of their state and provincial level affiliates don’t represent truckers, at all; they represent large carriers, and more importantly, those carriers clients, who want their product moved at rates which require working people to stay in the poor house, forever, and to hell with that.
Remember the horrific crash in Terrell, Texas, at the end of June which saw an entire family killed by a scummy carrier that somehow was pulling a load for the United States Postal Service?
Tanya Eiserer at WFAA in Fort Worth brings us a deep dive into that company, and the load broker who was sending them loads from USPS.
These are America’s roads when the main choices in trucking are shitbag Mega Carriers as represented by the likes of the ATA, or carriers run by gangsters and employing their insourced co-ethnic homeboys.
Be careful out there.
That’s all for now.
Work on the book continues.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you are enjoying the deep midsummer heat.
Dang, this is an EXCELLENT article!! Thank you! ❤️