A Voice for Truckers Moves On
Friend to me and friend to all Truckers, Rachel Premack, moves on from FreightWaves. She really leaves some big shoes to fill!
Truckers and the trucking media are having to bid farewell to a wonderful young woman this past week, who has emerged as a great voice for drivers over the past few years in a media landscape that typically overlooks those of us who ‘Do The Work.’
Rachel Premack, editorial director at FreightWaves, has announced she is moving on to other projects, and will be taking leave of her great reporting on the industry.
I’ve known Rachel since she began reporting on the trucking business for Business Insider, and was one of those drivers who sent her an email about a piece on the ELD mandate she wrote; we have been friends ever since.
Over the years, Rachel has reported on nearly every angle in the trucking business, and was always keen to hear from drivers as much as she would hear from the management side of things, which is a crucial tendency sorely lacking in much of today’s journalism, where reporters are in an elitist club who view the working class as exotic animals at best, and political enemies at worst. Rachel is a throwback to a time when reporters were mostly drawn from the working class, rather than elite institutions which overproduce so many useless eaters.
Her boss at FreightWaves, Craig Fuller, is to be commended for recognizing Rachel’s talents and applying them at his media outlet. My Uncle Chris, one of Canada’s OG Freight Brokers, always said that one of the best skills that anyone could possess is the ability to see talent and skill in others, and then have it applied in the right place. Mr Fuller certainly embodied that when he hired Rachel.
I have often quoted Rachel’s work here at this Substack, and she was the second guest on my podcast, Voice Of GO(r)D, which you can listen to here -
Rachel and her then fiancé (and now husband, LUCKY GUY!) Allen drove up to Ithaca from NYC so Rachel could go trucking with me, and like a trooper, she was bright eyed and bushy tailed when I picked her up at 4am to take her out for a day of hauling logs.
To her credit, she only fell asleep in the passenger seat once.
We recorded some of our chat in the truck, which makes up the first part of the podcast - check it out, it is a great example of on the ground interactions between the student and the studied (in both directions).
In honor of Rachel’s moving on to new ventures, and also in honor of the fact that her last two pieces at FreightWaves are absolute bangers that y’all should read, I’m going to share both of them here, with added commentary from me.
First up, a great piece which should have been named “Trucks are getting dumber” -
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/trucks-are-getting-smarter-and-truck-drivers-arent-happy-about-it
Regular readers of this Substack will know that I am extremely skeptical of tech as replacement for well trained and well compensated humans; our overlords would rather have poorly trained and poor quality humans at the wheel, so as to continue the downward spiral of both wages and respect offered to our once beknighted occupation. Thank God people like Rachel get it.
From the article -
So-called advanced driver-assistance systems have become ubiquitous in trucks over the past 10 years, said Suman Narayanan, director of engineering of Dailmer Trucks North America’s Automated Technology Group. These technologies monitor if a driver is abiding by lane markings, keeping appropriate distance from the vehicle ahead and other key driving activities. Narayanan said the technologies have the “potential to mitigate accidents,” but they are “not a replacement for highly attentive and well-trained driver.”
Bummer that the industry and the government continue making policies which chase out all of the high-quality, attentive, and well trained drivers.
Couldn’t be the effects of a massive corporate welfare program, could it? Why have people who know what they are doing behind the wheel when you could sweep welfare cases off the street and turn them into ‘truckers’ instead?
“You see a lot of fleets installing cameras,” said Annette Sandberg, a transportation safety consultant and former administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. “A part of it is, ‘Listen, you still have to be paying attention.’ Let’s say a car spins out in a lane beside you and all of the sudden it’s in front of you. From a fleet perspective, while they expect the system to catch that, they also want to see that the driver is doing everything they can to avoid that . … They still expect the driver to be able to understand and address that appropriately.”
That’s the ticket, force drivers to be surveilled 24/7, that will fix all of our problems!
Oh no?
Cornell Sociologist and fellow friend to Truckers, Karen Levy, wrote an entire book length thesis on how surveillance tech DOESN’T WORK, and, to my mind, makes people like me, with 27 years of experience on the road, not want to truck anymore.
ICYMI, here is my review of Levy’s book, Data Driven - Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, and if you want some audio candy, you can hear me discuss this great book with Levy herself on my podcast -
Back to Rachel’s article -
Some of that increased surveillance is required by federal regulations; since 2018, trucks are required to be outfitted with an ELD that ensures drivers are hewing to hours-of-service laws. Interestingly, since that mandate, fatal crashes involving large trucks have actually increased. Speeding violations have also increased during that time.
As trucks become more advanced, the surveillance of drivers will likely increase. That makes some drivers question why the technology is getting introduced in the first place.
“About half of our fleet is new enough to have these ‘safety’ features,” truck driver Benjamin Reed, who drives for a family-owned fleet based in Wisconsin, wrote in an email. “My experience (and that of my colleagues) has been that these systems are quirky, unreliable, and unpredictable, regardless of who manufactured them or what type of vehicle they’re installed in. I believe that the recent push to replace competence with computers is a very bad idea.”
Someone buy Mr Reed a beer.
As for me, not a chance I ever go back on the road in a truck equipped with any of this garbage. It ain’t happening.
Rachel’s final piece for FreightWaves speaks to a long running industry wide practice which involves truck drivers working for free - an expectation that is so baked into the cake of our supply chains that entities such as the American Trucking Association appear to exist entirely to make sure that truckers continue to work for nothing as a permanent fixture of the business.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/the-surprising-reasons-why-truck-drivers-wait-hours-unpaid
Detention time, as it’s called, is a bizarre feature of being a trucker. Few outside of trucking know about this aggravating waste of time. Per FreightWaves SONAR data, truck drivers spend an average of 119 minutes per pickup or drop-off waiting to be loaded or unloaded. Drivers are expected to wait for free during the first two hours of detention, and then receive hourly pay for any additional hour.
If that seems absurdly inefficient, it is. A 2018 study from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General found that truck drivers lose $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion in earnings because of detention time. What’s more, each 15-minute increase in detention increases the average expected crash rate by 6.2%. Detention isn’t just frustrating for drivers; it’s potentially dangerous.
In addition to this study, I quote one from MIT quite regularly which finds that 40% of America’s trucking fleet is stuck in detention at any given time, and it should be no surprise to anyone that the vast majority of this time goes unpaid to the driver, and that detention plays a significant role in unsafe driving and truck accidents.
A key proposal in correcting this problem is removing the exemption which prevents truckers from being paid mandatory overtime as most other workers are entitled to; making sitting trucks more expensive would incentivize companies to utilize their time more efficiently, which would offset the cost of paying truckers correctly after 80 years of treating them like second class citizens.
Of course, the usual suspects howl like banshees at the thought of truckers being paid for their time in the same way most other workers are.
So, I chatted with two former executives from the food and beverage world to learn more — Rob Haddock and Ben Richey. They’re the guys who used to get calls from truck drivers asking why on earth they can’t get out of their warehouses more quickly. The reasons boil down to this:
Warehouses need to hire more workers.
Warehouses are extremely out of date.
3. Big brands aren’t falling all over themselves to address either issue.
While I think the problem is likely a little more complicated, and isn’t necessarily contained to warehouses or distribution centers, a dictum that has served me well over the years in avoiding my time being abused is this -
Do not pull trailers equipped with doors.
I think Rachel chose a great subject for her last piece at FreightWaves; it might give those Gong-hitting NerdBros something to think about, rather than viewing trucks as an abstraction, numbers on a screen denuded of any humanity or meaning.
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Rachel is a great writer and exudes a legitimate concern for the people who keep our economy moving, and we are all in her debt for the great work she has done in writing about the business. I wish her nothing but the best in her next endeavor, and hope she comes back to covering the trucking industry again someday.
You can follow Rachel on Twitter, and if any of her work pops up again, I’ll be sure to post it here.
Great tribute. She was a reporter who actually, you know, reported. She’s done the industry a service by helping her circle of general business reporters understand trucking and logistics at a time when their bosses were telling them to make sense of it. That stuff will live on, because there will always be a reporter assigned to cover some narrative about a driver shortage, invasive tech, cargo theft, the plight of the owner-operator, etc., and looking for a place to start. That reporter will turn to Google and Rachel’s work will be a great springboard.
And you’re right to call out Craig, who, for a while, gave Rachel the time and budget to go out on the road. There are really good journalists in trucking—fucking awesome people—who aren’t given the bandwidth to hang with a truck logger for a couple of days. When they do travel, it’s to a new-product reveal or a trade show because their publisher thinks it’s good for advertising. And when they write up their story, usually around midnight in their hotel room, they need to submit companion video, photos, social copy, and a podcast. FreightWaves and Craig are hardly paragons of virtue here, but in this one instance they gave a talented and uniquely connected reporter a platform. It paid off for both sides.
Good on you for doing a ride-along, BTW. I can’t tell you how valuable that is.