The High Cost of Cheap Safetyism

When you punish the adults, the children run rampant.

There’s a common salutation expressed amongst truckers when departing each others company, or ending a phone conversation -

”Alright buddy, have a SAFE ONE …”

”Be SAFE out there.”

”Take it easy, STAY SAFE …”

Given that truckers in America are engaged in one of the deadliest jobs in the country you can understand why this particular idiom has lodged itself in our vernacular.

Unfortunately, the notion of ‘Safety’ has been elevated to a Moral Good in and of itself, across nearly every area of society, and has become a ubiquitous Thought Terminating Cliché, such that I wince every time I hear this from one of my fellow Road Warriors.

The problem here for me, and something I want my fellow drivers (and all the rest of you) to understand, is that this cliché, as repeated by us to each other, is masking one of the deepest rots in the trucking industry, and basically all other labor situations throughout most industries - that we are now managed by a class of people whose primary function is to justify our treatment, as if children, to divert attention from policies and economic models which favor enriching the managers and investors over those of us who Do The Work, and in the process, make our highways much less SAFE than what their rhetoric would claim.

If you like, and have the time, I went deep on this rot with the wonderful Oliver Bateman on he and Aimee Therese’s excellent podcast, What's Left?

And again with Penn State Sociologist and author of "The Big Rig - Trucking and The Decline of The American Dream", Steve Viscelli, whom I cited in the first episode, and will cite continuously until the trucking industry changes how it trains and treats it’s drivers, also on What’s Left?

The TL;dr version of the problem is related to a widespread meme, an utter falsehood that has been propagated for nearly four decades now - The 'Truck Driver Shortage'.

This falsehood is one of the reasons behind what many refer to as ‘CDL Mills’, or what I call The CDL Mill Corporate Welfare Scam, where Large Legacy Carriers go begging to the government to finance these schools where they grab any somewhat sentient biped off the street and turn them into a ‘trucker’. In the above podcasts I describe in finer detail what’s going on here, but the short version is that instead of paying truckers a decent wage and treating them like humans, many within the trucking business would rather keep churning through new people, paying them less, and passing the costs on to society.

The costs you say?

In 2019, 5005 people were killed and 159,000 injured in truck crashes across The USA
and a significant amount of these crashes can be attributed to lack of skill and inexperience.

I could take a tangent here and discuss how Large Carriers self insure as a way to hedge against all the new people they are continually hiring, but I’ll leave you a quote from the linked ambulance chasers which sums it up quite nicely -

But not all efforts to save money are noble. Because they aren’t beholden to an insurance company, these businesses can hire inexperienced drivers and pay them less. Trucking companies who insure through a third party often prefer to hire employees who have years of experience and a good driving record, proving they can safely maneuver big rigs on the road.

Another trick which Large Carriers and many other industries employ to divert you from the inherent flaws of their operating philosophy, is to have entire Health, Safety, and Compliance departments lord over the poor bastards who work for them. Monthly safety meetings, mandatory Hi-Viz vests and other useless safety paraphernelia, various ‘Online Training’ videos better suited for 6 year olds - these are merely a small selection of maternalistic nonsense that these demons use to mask the rot, and the problem is, we let them do it to us. Is that vest going to save you from the fact you actually don’t know how to drive? Will the latest meeting do anything about the fact that you don’t get paid for an ungodly amount of waiting time, and that this actually increases the chance you will be involved in an accident?

I’ve been out on the road for over 25 years, and have worked for more than a few trucking companies, some with hundreds of trucks, and many with less than a handful. The nice thing about the smaller operators is that they do not have dozens of PMC wannabes, who, having failed to obtain an actual PMC (Professional Managerial Class) job, are instead relegated to managing blue collars like me, whom they often loathe and haven’t the good graces to at least be honest about it.

Many others are speaking from the fringes on the scourge of Safetyism, most notably and adeptly the philosopher Matthew B Crawford, in his fantastic book "Why We Drive - Towards A Philosophy Of The Open Road", which you all should go out and read, immediately.

Crawford has written elsewhere on Safetyism, especially in the wake of The Wuhan Plague Overreaction, and this piece in UnHerd sums it up much better than I could.

As for my fellow truckers, I want you to think long and hard about the internalization of the ‘Safety Dialogue’ that is forced on us by our employers and the wider zeitgeist in general. It is beyond obvious now that they don’t really mean it - if they were legitimately concerned about safety for you and I and everyone else on the road, it means they would pay us more, keep the old guys around, maternalize to us less, and incentivize your success in a myriad of ways - more and higher safe driving bonuses, fuel mileage bonuses, paying us for every hour worked, paying us overtime, and fundamentally altering the program of how new truckers are trained before unleashing them on the motoring public.

We can all see what’s going on out on the highway, and we all know the causes.

Yes, we need to be safe out there - but it’s not because we are not safe.

It is because they are not really interested in your safety, AT ALL.

Have a Safe One?

Nah, I’ll have a skeptical, aware, and experienced one, thanks.