Truckers Tikka Masala
A Recipe for Highway Disaster
- Before we begin, it ought to be noted by my readers that this essay has been in the works for quite some time, and significant portions had been written before the Christmas H-1B Twitter War of 2024. The timing of this epic online conflagration was beyond my ken, but its certainly fortuitous. Given the subject matter explored here, and the resonances with some of the people involved in this massive Twitter fight, I would certainly be remiss to not offer thanks to God for overlooking the foolishness of people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at this time, and for His Grace in allowing them to show us what they are really about. Even more fortuitous coming a few weeks after my open letter to the DOGE, which now seems like they will ignore.
On a windswept corner in the center of the Canadian Prairie, a haunting roadside memorial has weathered 6 years of the elements, the sun of northern summer and its likewise dark and cold winters, and the winds which blow all year. Crosses and hockey jerseys stand as sentinels, an analog to the crosses ‘row on row’ one might see in a similar field in Belgium or France, though the battle which the jerseys of these young men mark is purely economic, and the shots fired are silent and mostly unremarked on.
On April 6, 2018, the lives of 16 people were snuffed out, and the heart and soul of a nation brought low. Contrary to the official story, I would submit to you that they were not killed by Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, who has been illegitimately ascribed the title of ‘truck driver’, as he was likewise illegitimately permitted entry to a country that did not require his ‘services’. No, Mr Sidhu, like the 16 young lives he ended, is himself a sacrifice of the decisions of the worst people on Planet Earth, the Canadian Ruling Class, who continue to snuff out lives across North America in conjunction with their colleagues in the United States, whom are likewise guilty of the same crimes. Mr Sidhu made the rather unfortunate decision to appeal deportation orders from a country that does not want him; Canadians, unfortunately, are emasculated and powerless in the face of the forces which brought him here in the first place, and are unable to deport or depose those forces.
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Back in October, our friends at the CBC, on the show Marketplace engaged in some performative and not very deep ‘journalism’ in an obvious attempt to sweep a major problem under the rug. “Truck Driving Schools Exposed” was a short, 20 minute ‘exposé’ that was supposedly getting to the bottom of questions that are on the minds of basically everyone in Canada, and have been for some time.
Why are truckers so dangerous? Why so many accidents? What happened to the ‘Knights of the Road?’
As can be expected of any mainstream propaganda in Foul Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Four, certain answers, those obvious or perhaps requiring a little further investigation, are absolutely off the table for consideration. Whether for reasons of compliance with strictures of Wokedom™️, or protecting the economic interests of the Ruling Class, or even the propagation of more questions about why every level of our government has been totally “Enshittified” and is impervious to reform, the CBC are just not going to get to the bottom of this, even though the numerous questions they don’t bother to ask in their own presentation are impossible to ignore.
Hop in with me and let’s go for a drive; don’t worry about your seatbelt, stay comfy. I’ve never been involved in a collision, and the Safetyism enthusiasts will once again be proven frauds by the end of this essay.
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In 1971, then Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, whose bastard son was gestating and soon to be born at the end of the year, made a policy announcement which was, at the time, seen to be symbolic and didn’t contain much substance.
In time, just like the soon to be born Justin, this announcement would have far reaching consequences for the direction of Canadian society. Though not made law until 1988 with the passage of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, this policy of Trudeau the Elder set into motion dramatic demographic change on to Canadian society. Where it concerns trucking, however, nearly a decade after Trudeau Sr and his announcement on multiculturalism, a monumental piece of legislation passed next door in the United States, which would also change the face of the trucking industry, permanently.
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, passed by President Jimmy Carter, introduced sweeping reforms to how trucking was regulated, who could become a motor carrier (literally anyone), and removed government control and oversight of rates that carriers could charge their customers. This piece of legislation has been blamed by many for all of the woes in trucking for decades now, and one of the most infamous scholarly works on this change, that ought to be read by everyone, is called Sweatshops on Wheels : Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation. I interviewed the author, Dr Michael Belzer, an economics professor at Wayne State University in Michigan and former trucker, for my podcast, which you can listen to here.
In what should have been a surprise to no one that understands economics, the opening of the market to anyone with a pulse lead to an immediate environment of cut-throat competition which exists to this day, and is one of the reasons why truck drivers in 2024 are earning, on average, in inflation adjusted dollars, 50% of what they earned in 1980.
One could argue that reform to how the industry was regulated was necessary, but anyone looking at trucking in 2024 can see that the pendulum swung way too far in the opposite direction.
Canada followed suit a few years later, with reforms that were made to the Motor Vehicle Transport Act in 1985, later permanently codified in the Motor Vehicle Transport act of 1987.
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It was in the mid-1980’s that a new term or meme began to circulate out of the trucking industry and into mainstream consciousness, the “truck driver shortage.”
As the effects of de-regulation were felt across the industry, specifically the intense competition from the opening of the market to anyone, drivers wages went into a spiral from which they have not recovered. Truckers like Belzer, who once enjoyed the benefits of belonging to the Teamsters Union, saw their salaries drop overnight, but were expected to continue working just as hard, if not harder, for this new reduced salary. Many truckers began to leave the industry for other fields of endeavor, even though in the 1980s, off-shoring of manufacturing jobs had begun in earnest, and would later be accelerated by the introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As predicted by Ross Perot in the 1992 Presidential Election Debates, the giant sucking sound took millions of jobs down to Mexico, though, in fairness, the suck of many turbos was heard from the increased freight traffic going north and south across America’s northern and southern borders, and the full extant of effects on wages across the blue collar portion of the economy had yet to be felt.
The trucking industry, facing an exodus of their best talent for greener pastures, could, at that time, have had a genuine case to make about a driver shortage, but in one of the world’s longest cases of mass Tourette’s Syndrome, they’ve been saying it for forty years now, even though the freight continues to move. How is this explained?
As the old saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Like any other job, trucking requires a certain amount of training, and to be honest, ought to require a lot more than what the government minimum standard is to obtain a CDL. When you’re a trucking company with empty seats and bills piling up, getting a bum in that seat sometimes means being less picky about what kind of bum ends up in it … and bums are exactly who the trucking industry began to rely on as they convinced the government to begin paying the bill for training new drivers.
In what I have dubbed a system of stealth corporate welfare masked as a jobs program, the trucking industry has created a novel method of recruiting and training drivers, the cost of which they have pawned off onto the taxpayer. This system is all around us, and is financed in the United States by all levels of government, and in Canada by both provinces and Feds. It is difficult to get exact numbers on the cost to the taxpayer, but we do have numbers on the amount of people this system churns through every year.
Scratch beneath the surface of the ad copy for any truck driver training school, or local- and state-funded retraining programs, and government grants and subsidies become immediately apparent. From funds doled out by The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) to Pell Grants to $47 million in extra funding from the Biden Administration, it is clear that the trucking industry is awash in taxpayer largesse.
In a recent study examining driver retention problems in California, it was discovered that the state spent around $20 million on driver training, but found all that was being financed was a revolving door, as those drivers did not stick with the industry. Extrapolate that to the rest of the country, and you will see at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted on many large trucking firms, many of whom burn through 92 percent of their drivers annually.
Despite this problem of driver retention never being solved, the money continues to flow.
In this piece from 2021 by NPR, it is revealed that the United States issues 450,000 new CDLs a year.
The government estimates that there are between 300,000 and 500,000 long-haul truckers in America. And according to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, state governments issue more than 450,000 new commercial driver's licenses every year. A large fraction of those drivers enter the long-haul trucking industry.
"It's just simple math," Spencer says. "If every year there are an excess of over 400,000 brand-new drivers created, how could there possibly be a shortage?"
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in 2023 there were 2.2 million trucking jobs in America, and it is also estimated that there are another 1 million plus jobs which require a CDL in local delivery, or in other areas of endeavor.
My friends at CDL-Drivers Unlimited recently conducted a survey of State DMVs and found that there are nearly 9 million active CDLs in the US, which is roughly 3 times as many as there are jobs requiring one.
One can assume, like so many other aspects of the economy, that Canada has ratios and percentages in line with the United States, but at only 10-15% of the total numbers, which reflects the population difference.
Does anybody ever ask why this industry replaces, at very least, 20% of its workforce every year? Where do these people go? Why do they quit? How far down into the Human Resources barrel must we reach for all of these new people? Where else are drivers coming from if people understand what’s really going on here and have to be coaxed by free government training to even bother signing up?
These are questions which ought to flow from another question on the lips of anyone who has spent any time on the roads (or on social media) as of late - why are all of these trucks causing so much havoc? Why are traffic fatalities on the increase, per Transport Canada statistics?
https://northernontario.ctvnews.ca/two-commercial-truck-drivers-dead-in-highway-11-crash-1.7146734
Two commercial truck drivers were killed and two passengers were taken to hospital after a crash on Highway 11 west of Hearst on Saturday, Ontario Provincial Police say.
The collision happened just after 8 a.m., OPP acting Sgt. Hayley Mcleary told CTVNewsNorthernOntario.ca in an email.
Both drivers were pronounced dead at the scene.
Mcleary said "it was relatively sunny out that morning" and the roads were clear and dry at the time of the crash.
The article in question fails to mention the names of the drivers, Jaswinder Singh Jassi & Rahul Bajaj, a phenomenon we see with many of these incidents.
Though, when they can’t ignore the social media firestorms that erupt in the aftermath of such incidents, they relent and do tell you who.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/manitoba-fatal-crash-accused-missing
Manitoba RCMP have issued an arrest warrant for an Ontario truck driver who was allegedly involved in a crash that killed a woman and an eight-year-old girl.
Brampton, Ont., resident Navjeet Singh has been charged with two counts of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death as well as obstructing a peace officer.
Police say officers have attempted to locate the 25-year-old in Winnipeg but have been unsuccessful.
A month later …
https://www.insauga.com/brampton-trucker-remains-on-the-run-following-deadly-manitoba-crash/
A Brampton trucker wanted on a Canada-wide warrant stemming from a collision that killed a mother and daughter in Manitoba, could be hiding out in Ontario.
The RCMP said recently they are following up on tips that Navjeet Singh, 25, was spotted back in the GTA.
Police are urging him to surrender to local authorities and answer the charges.
Singh has not been seen since he was released from hospital following the deadly crash that occurred Nov. 15 at a highway intersection near Altona, about 100 km south of Winnipeg.
Police allege that Singh was the driver of a tractor-trailer that went through a stop sign and collided with an SUV.
A 35-year-old woman, the driver of the SUV, was pronounced dead at the scene. Her 8-year-old daughter was taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries and later died.
‘Brampton trucker’ has become something of a meme and might just enter the lexicon in the same way ‘Coolie’ did for Chinese laborers brought to America in the late 19th century during the railroad boom.
A friend of mine did a crowd funding search for truck drivers whose families were trying to raise money to deal with the aftermath of these crashes.
You might be wondering why it is that the same demographic of people keep coming up in all of these stories, or why Twitter pages like Skilled Truckers Canada or 401 da Sarpanch or the YouTube channel Bonehead Truckers post footage and news items from dozens of these incidents every single day. I’m not kidding; go scroll them, and within a week your eyes would have absorbed the aftermath of so many people sent to hospital or killed, and millions of dollars in wrecked equipment.
Its enough to give you screen induced PTSD.
And I’m not the only one to ask the questions about why this is happening.
None other than the Globe and Mail, Canada’s self-styled ‘National Newspaper’, published an investigation into the problem back in 2019.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-foreign-truck-drivers-canada-immigration-investigation/
His new employer had sent the 26-year-old rookie driver out to navigate a semi-trailer through treacherous mountain passes. “There was no training,” says Mr. Singh, who had been in Canada as a visitor for just a few months when he got his first job here under a temporary work permit. “I was scared. I didn’t have any idea it would be like this.”
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.
“Unable to decipher road signs”.
On April 6, 2018, 16 people were killed and 13 were injured when a northbound coach bus struck a westbound semi-trailer truck that blew through a stop sign near Armley, Saskatchewan, Canada. The driver of the truck had failed to yield at a flashing stop sign at the intersection of Saskatchewan Highways 35 and 335 while driving at a speed of approximately 100 km/h (62 mph). Most of the deceased and injured were players from the Humboldt Broncos, a junior ice hockey team from Humboldt, Saskatchewan, which plays in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League
Sara Unger, 35, and daughter Alexa Unger were heading home from the grocery store Friday evening when the driver of a semi-trailer crashed into their SUV at the intersection of highways 201 and 306.
RCMP say the driver of the semi, a 25-year-old man from Brampton, Ont., was eastbound on Highway 201 and had a stop sign but went through it, hitting the southbound SUV on Highway 306.
One would think the ability to communicate in one of Canada’s official languages to be a requirement of obtaining a Class 1 or Class A truck drivers license, or at very least an industry standard, if for nothing else to make sure everyone is on the same page for safety.
Roughly one quarter of Canadian truck drivers and fleet managers have a non-official language as their mother tongue, as defined by Statistics Canada. Of these most (78% of the truck drivers and 74% of fleet managers) report using a non-official language regularly at work, as defined by Statistics Canada, in addition to one or both official languages.
With a current driver workforce of approximately 291,700, based on current Statistics Canada labor force data, this means we have more than 56,800 employees using a language other than English or French in our workplaces.
Punjabi is, by far, the most common non-official language used in trucking and logistics’ workplaces, accounting for 60% of non-official languages used at work by drivers and 33% for fleet managers.
It appears that ICBC, British Columbia’s DMV, will get you a translator to help you pass your license exams.
If you have an upcoming appointment at a driver licensing office and English isn’t your first language, we have interpreter services available at select locations. We can connect you with an interpreter on the phone to help you speak with our customer service representatives.
Interpreter services are not available for road tests.
One wonders the bureaucratic magic that affords full comprehension of English in the step between doing the paper tests in your own tongue and then getting in the cab.
Getting back to that Globe and Mail article, it appears language comprehension requirements are not the primary concern of the Indians who are blatantly abusing Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program in order to fill seats.
The Globe investigation has revealed that immigration authorities let trucking companies hire newcomers through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, even when the carriers have a proven history of multiple-injury accidents, serious safety violations or exploitative labour practices.
The Globe also found marginal operators were granted permits to hire many more foreign drivers than they had trucks, raising questions about whether they actually needed the labour. Several people in the industry say small companies can profit more from cash paid by recruits than they do from hauling loads. Many of those businesses operate out of private homes, sometimes under more than one name. Often they have just one truck, according to government records.This is just the type of employer that Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, who came to Canada as a student, was working for when he drove his truck through a rural stop sign last year, smashing into a bus and killing 16 hockey players from Humboldt, Sask.
Mr. Sidhu’s employer had just two trucks, and the company had committed multiple safety infractions before it put him on the road with what Mr. Sidhu’s lawyer called a “complete absence of prior driving skill.”
It should be noted that Mr Sidhu had a grand total of 4 weeks of experience driving truck before he drove through the heart of the Town of Humboldt while pulling a set of Super B Trains.
Super B Trains?
Here is a set I used to drive in Alberta while delivering fuel to remote oil sands and pipeline construction projects in the north of the province.
In Canada, a Super B train combination is notable for the two trailers in the arrangement connecting together on a frame mounted fifth wheel that extends beyond the rear of the first trailer, with no dolly converter. The whole combination can be up to 82 feet long, and weigh 140,000 pounds, which is much heavier than the US standard for a standard semi-trailer combo at 80,000 pounds.
In Canada, you can go from zero driving experience, having recently arrived in the country and not having any grasp of English, to being legally allowed to operate one within a matter of weeks, through a work visa and ‘driving school’ complex largely operated by Indians who are abusing provincial and federal government programs.
And its not just the TFW program which comes in for necessary skepticism where it regards the flooding of Canada’s roads with recently arrived Punjabis and various others. Yet another component program of the sprawling spaghetti monster that is Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is something called a ‘Labor Market Impact Assessment’, a document that is supposed to be issued by another gobbledygook named group of bureaucrats called ‘Employment and Social Development Canada’, whose main business seems to be making Canadians unemployed at the expense of foreigners while disassembling the existing social fabric. Orwell would be proud … in the constellation of NGOs and Non-Profits we all know and love from other crimes against the sovereign nation state, one that sticks out in the debasement of Canada’s trucking industry is TruckingHR Canada. Notable firstly because they are repeating the lies of a shortage of truck drivers, and secondly, the board of directors of TruckingHR Canada is a “Who’s Who” of Canadian Mega Fleets whose profit margins depend on depressing the wages of Canada’s truckers. Quelle surprise!
Quite a mess we have here, isn’t it? From the smallest Mom and Pop Punjabi trucking company, right up to the biggest private equity controlled trucking corporations in the country, almost everyone is feeding at the trough of a highly abused government program that puts third world peasants behind the wheel of Big Rigs, with no one pointing out how utterly easy it is to get a license to drive one, and all for the express purpose of keeping truckers wages frozen in time to four decades ago.
I wish we could just laugh this off as greed, but I can’t laugh off the memories of Sara and Alexa Unger, or the entire Humboldt Broncos Hockey Team, or god knows how many Indian men and their families brought here in arrangements that amount to indentured servitude, only to end up immolated in incidents such as that head-on collision along a road they had no business being on, all so some suit on Bay Street can say ‘Line Go Up’.
And what’s being done about this?
Not a whole lot, it turns out. Certainly nothing of note that the CBC Marketplace spot I alluded to above bothered to ask about, other than one Ontario MPP they interviewed who clearly doesn’t understand the depth of the problem.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada certainly knows, and in a report released in April of 2024, without directly attributing the problem to the high numbers of Punjabis on Canada’s roads, place a great deal of blame on “new and inexperienced drivers” and the lack of training they get, which is the one area that the Globe and Mail and The CBC did get right.
There’s an advocacy group in Western Canada that a friend of mine is part of called ‘Trucking is a Trade’, who are requesting that trucking receive trade certification, and all of the extra hours of training that such a certification would require. Of course dickheads at corporate lobbying groups like the Canadian Trucking Alliance make allusions to the necessity of ‘extra coaching’ but in a recent blog post titled Coordinated Action Needed to Build Next Generation of Safe, Qualified Truck Drivers to Sustain Supply Chain: TIRF-CTA no mention is made of trade certification, or enforcing language standards, or doing anything about the immigration scams, or maybe even imposing a graduated truck licensing system like they have in New Zealand or Australia, where you need one year of experience driving a straight truck, like a CDL-B with no trailer behind it, before you can apply to get a full Big Rig license, much less a license to pull B Trains, which is a separate category altogether Down Under.
No, none of that, but they did put out a detailed report about, you guessed it, the truck driver shortage! It’s no wonder these corporate lackeys all slagged the Freedom Convoy and were full throated supporters (yes, FULL and THROAT) of the totally unscientific and unnecessary trucker vaccine mandate that Justin Trudeau used to punish the people who were keeping our society functioning.
Real and substantive change that would make the trucking industry safer is a non-starter for the same people who want infinity Indians to take over the business, and the Indians are playing right along, even rubbing our faces in it. There used to be an article available at an Indian-Canadian online news website called The Canadian Bazaar in which someone within the Punjabi trucking community bragged -
”We Punjabis control more than 60 percent of all trucking operations in Canada. There is a perpetual shortage of truck drivers and mechanics and new Punjabi immigrants fill this need.”
Given the humungous balls required to advertise about parasitizing themselves on another countries industry, backed up by a verifiable lie that only corporate lobby groups and the government believe, it’s no wonder that the folks behind Canadian Bazaar took that article down.
The Internet, however, NEVER FORGETS.
It is probably worth reminding readers that one of the findings of that 2019 Globe and Mail investigation into the Punjabi immigration scamming in the trucking industry is that what some of these guys are doing is effectively enslaving their own people in a form of indentured servitude, hanging the visas over the heads of these guys who clearly didn’t move to Canada to become truck drivers. We hear plenty of talk in the zeitgeist about ‘human trafficking’ but you almost never hear about the traffic in humans being part of the traffic on the roads.
And what has the government done about this since 2019? Not a damn thing, though the widespread abuse of the TFW program, LMIA documents, and student visas issued for dodgy schools has become enough of a problem that Trudeau has finally announced changes to these parts of the immigration system.
Trudeau, as always, is too late to course correcting his own failed policies, and it is now revealed that the human trafficking problem from India into Canada is off the charts, and a much deeper problem than anyone even understands.
Given the shear volume of this operation in India it is probably safe to assume that a great many of the people trafficked to Canada end up driving trucks.
The scheme, as uncovered by the ED, involved a network of over 5,000 agents in India, with 1,700 linked to a single Gujarat-based entity and 800 actively engaged. Students were promised entry to Canada under the guise of legitimate college admissions but were instead funneled into illegal immigration channels leading to the United States. Tragically, this fraudulent system claimed lives, as evidenced by the deaths of four Indian nationals from Dingucha village, Gujarat, who froze to death at the Canada-US border in January 2022.
And if they don’t end up at a dodgy school or even dodgier truck driving operation, they are bound to illegally migrate to the United States.
Speaking of the United States, where Canadian truckers often haul their freight, one might ask if they are having similar problems.
I’m not going to share this video, which went viral earlier this year, but suffice it to say, the three motorcyclists we see in the screenshot here did not make it.
It turns out that Rafiki’s CDL was going to expire the day after this incident, but one wonders how a guy who couldn’t speak English got one in the first place. We will get to that later.
According to a report by news station Denver7, Ignacio Cruz-Mendoza, 47, had been ordered by ICE to return to Mexico two weeks before the fatal crash.
Before that, ICE officials said he was arrested and deported 16 times, beginning in 2002.
Cruz-Mendoza faces vehicular homicide charges after police say he drove his southbound 18-wheeler off the edge of the road, causing it to roll onto its side and dump a load of pipes and angle iron onto five vehicles.
One person died at the scene, while another was seriously injured, according to the Colorado State Patrol.
Wednesday on I-64 around mile marker 124 in Bath County 54-year-old Troy Caldwell was killed after being struck on the highway. Caldwell was a tow truck driver from Morehead. Other drivers who knew him say they'll miss his smile.
Bubba Johnson, the owner and operator of Bubba’s Towing and Recovery, says, "You always got a smile and a wave out of him going down the road."
Brian Scalf, who works for Halsey’s Towing, explains, "He really enjoys what he'd done and he really cared about his customers."
Kentucky State Police say Caldwell was loading a vehicle onto a rollback when a commercial truck hit him. Caldwell was pronounced dead at the scene. 29-year-old Shodmon Yuldashev was charged with tampering with physical evidence. The citation says he was actively watching YouTube on an ELD tablet. Safety is a growing concern for these drivers.
https://www.lex18.com/news/covering-kentucky/1-killed-1-charged-in-fatal-crash-on-i-64
Upon an investigation, the citation reported that Shodmon Yuldashev tried to conceal his "ELD or Electronic Log Device" on the dashboard after he was stopped. Several troopers reportedly saw the electronic device "actively playing YouTube" before a detective arrived on the scene to inspect the vehicle.
According to the citation, Yuldashev was allegedly "watching YouTube on his ELD Tablet with a tablet mounted on the center of the dash visible to the driver."
Last anyone has heard, Mr Yuldashev has disappeared, and it is quite likely he has returned home, possibly Uzbekistan, given his name, and will never face justice.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2024/11/25/pedestrian-hit-by-semi-killed-i-44-sullivan/
Police say a Ford F-250 pickup and a Chevrolet HHR had pulled to the shoulder and a 60-year-old man was helping change a tire when he was struck by the truck that had veered over onto the shoulder. The truck also sideswiped the two vehicles before it drove off.
Sullivan resident Mark Foder said, “It happens a lot with truckers, they don’t even know they hit somebody.”
The company name on the side of the trailer is Super Ego Holding Company. But the Highway Patrol said the trailer was likely leased and the driver didn’t work for the company. Investigators are working to identify the trucking company that owns the cab.
Super Ego - what a great place to work -
The lawsuit alleges that Super Ego has a companywide practice of underpaying drivers by skimming off the top of the load price. The complaint alleges Super Ego regularly lied to truckers about the price of the load by secretly altering the brokers’ rate confirmation sheets to make the load price appear lower than it actually was. Super Ego then paid truckers a percentage of the lower, secretly altered price, and pocketed the difference.
The lawsuit also claims that Super Ego misclassified truckers as independent contractors, made illegal deductions from their pay, withheld their pay, and even paid them less than the federal minimum wage during some pay periods. Plaintiffs seek damages for fraud, breach of contract, violations of the federal Truth in Leasing Act and Fair Labor Standards Act, and violations of the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act.
They’re also listed on a website that specializes in recruiting truckers from Eastern Europe.
I could carry on with hundreds of examples of this, but you get the point.
The truck driver shortage narrative, and the greed which animates so many people, has resulted in a situation where trucking companies all across America would rather hire people from overseas, often under dubious and illegal arrangements, just like Canadian companies would rather hire Punjabis than those born in Canada.
And so many of the same scams are operating in the US.
Lured by the promise of better pay and the American dream, some truck drivers from Eastern European countries claim they were sold a bill of goods after arriving in the U.S.
Drivers told FreightWaves that recruiters said they could earn more money in a month hauling cars in America than they could make in an entire year in their home countries.
The average yearly pay for a truck driver in Russia is roughly equivalent to $4,700, according to Salary Explorer. Truck drivers earn even less in Ukraine — about $3,100.
So when the drivers saw the YouTube and Facebook ads offering to pay them up to $3,000 per week to transport cars in the U.S., they jumped at the opportunity to make a better life for their families and achieve the American dream. Others wanted to earn money to help support family back in Russia and Ukraine.
However, once in America, the drivers told FreightWaves, they found themselves trapped in an alleged human trafficking scheme, forced to drive seven days a week and up to 20 hours a day and getting paid a fraction of what they were promised.
San Antonio police officials say their investigation into 35-year-old Jose Velazquez and 51-year-old Juan Velasquez started when a victim reported them and their company, VSR Transportation, to the National Trafficking Hotline in 2023. Authorities discovered that the Velasquezes would recruit migrants looking for work and pay to bring them into the U.S. before exploiting them, even allegedly altering logbooks to make it seem like employees weren't being overworked.
Some, though not all, of the migrants were undocumented, and the Velasquezes would allegedly threaten to report their immigration status if they didn't do as they were instructed.
Colleagues of mine at American Truckers United (ATU) have been investigating the connection between the use and abuse of illegal migrants in the US with fatal collisions and have made some terrible findings.
As I have discussed in many other articles, the imposition of the ELD mandate, which was supposed to tighten up road safety, did the opposite, and what we got instead were increases in crashes and citations for aggressive driving. What is this other factor the ATU are showing here, this FMCSA Memorandum?
Well well, wouldn’t you know it, the Obama Administration handwaved away the Federal Regulation requiring those applying for a Commercial Drivers License to communicate in English.
Can read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records;
What purpose does it serve to remove requirements for the necessary ability to communicate in the lingua franca of the road? How can one read road signs or weather reports or highway closure signs or overpass height indicators if you can’t read English? How can you possibly fill out the mandatory pre-trip inspection forms required every day of every trucker in North America if YOU CANNOT READ ENGLISH?
One wonders how many of these trucks stuck up on Donner Pass are being driven by someone who couldn’t read Nevada or California DOT road information signs, or maybe didn’t have the cognitive capacity to think to check the weather reports on their phones, who, giving them the benefit of the doubt, may have been offered in their native tongues.
One also wonders if these gentlemen could also read the gradient signs which indicate how steep the grades they are about to find themselves launching down.
Mederos was sentenced on Dec. 13 to 110 years in prison for a 2019 fatal crash on Interstate 70, outside Denver, that killed four people and injured several others -- a sentence the judge said he wouldn't have chosen if he had the discretion. Mederos testified that his brakes failed, but he was driving 85 mph when the speed limit was 45 mph and he drove past a runaway truck ramp before plowing into stopped traffic, police said.
Do the recruiting agencies abusing America’s work visa system know that they don’t have to bother screening candidates for language skills?
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And how about those state DMVs that are giving out licenses without even testing the drivers?
The defendants included DMV employees who took bribes, trucking school owners and affiliates who bribed them, and others who participated in the conspiracies, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney. The criminal activities charged in these cases took place throughout California, including the Central Valley, Los Angeles Basin, and as far north as Eureka.
A statement from the U.S. Attorney's office said defendants "helped put unqualified commercial drivers on the nation’s highways operating large commercial vehicles even though those drivers had not passed the necessary written and driving tests."
Conclusions?
If you’ve managed to read this far, surely you get the point now. It is beyond obvious that after 40 years of the trucking industry scrambling to keep decent drivers around, and failing to do so because they would rather pay them insulting salaries that often amount to minimum wage, and treat them like criminals with surveillance technology that undermines their skill, professionalism, and trust, the industry is now reaching below the bottom of the human resources barrel into the muck beneath for recruits.
A very recent kerfuffle on Twitter, where Elon Musk and the caste of Tech Bros who were part of the coalition that returned President Trump to office, shows us that they are all big fans of H-1B visas, which are claimed necessary to the recruitment of ‘Elite Human Capital’. In an avalanche of pushback on Musks own platform, it has been revealed that this visa program is used not to attract the best and brightest, but to undermine American workers and their wages in nearly every field of endeavor … including trucking.
If the American motoring public is interested in increasing highway safety, and if President Trump, amongst so many others, wants to ‘Make America Great Again’, this race to the bottom in punishing American truckers must come to an end. Massive companies like Amazon are going to be asked to stop employing the worst truckers in the industry to move their freight, and large trucking companies will have to stop advocating that the government reduce training standards. President Trump would do well to overturn the memorandum that allows the illiterate to drive trucks on American highways, and terminate the visas that the Biden Administration is issuing to foreign truckers on their way out the door, despite massive layoffs in the trucking industry throughout 2024.
The Canadian government is likewise going to have to make up its mind - on the one hand, they appear to fully support the debunked driver shortage narrative and on the other, are disqualifying ‘truck driver’ as an occupation for consideration in applying to immigrate. The discussion around truck driver training is also going to have to graduate past useless gimmickry to something far more serious like graduated licensing, which Ontario imposed on car drivers in 1995; why not on truckers?
Ask yourselves - is the marginal increase of pennies per order the next time you log on to Amazon worth another Humboldt Tragedy? Are the suits who have orchestrated the near complete financialization of the economy going to compensate the next family who gets wiped out by an illegal Guatemalan migrant? Do you want to share the road with a lifelong welfare case who the government paid to go to some shitty truck driving school in an effort to juice jobs numbers?
Do you want you and your kids to arrive safely at your destination on the next family trip you take, or will they be remembered by more crosses on the side of the road?
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com
Great, well documented article. Working in the trucking insurance industry for 30 years has been wild. The number of foreign owned trucking/logistics companies has skyrocketed and most have a similar business model based on short term profits built on abuse of drivers and short cutting regulations and laws which are costly to comply with. State regulators and enforcement tend to look the other way blaming lack of manpower. I personally will not work with anyone who operates outside the laws and therefore don’t have much local business.
I commend your efforts in bringing this chicanery to light.
I remember highway driving in the 70's and 80's and how lucky I considered myself to find a big truck on the highway in a blizzard.
I'd get in their tailstream and be confident they'd see any trouble ahead.
Nowadays, I get as far away from big trucks as I safely can. I've seen too much dangerous driving to trust any big truck driver these days.
Though I'd get behind you, Gord. Good job!