Last week’s shutdown by truck drivers is history. Looking back, it appears to not have produced the results organizers hoped for. It did, however, produce a lot of comments — pro and con — by a lot of truckers.
Writing for Overdrive, Senior Editor James Jaillet recapped the events of April 12:
“Though it’s hard to gauge the number of drivers that actually sat out for the called-for April 12 nationwide driver shutdown, organizer Patrick Karns admits that the planned protests ‘kind of fell apart.’
“The numbers ‘were nowhere near what we needed,’ Karns said, to have the type of impact he’d hoped for in alerting the public to their hopes for more hours flexibility and more safe parking options, among a long list of other points the group wanted to address.”
Not surprisingly, individual truckers commenting on the Truckers News Facebook page had their own takes on what happened, what went wrong and what ought to happen in the future.
Here’s a selection of the comments:
Rick Reynolds You can’t get 10 drivers that will agree on any “one” thing! It’s always been that way! 😢 They can’t organize squat! 😢
Vanco Kode I was all up for it but who thought it was a good idea on a Friday? Maybe on a Monday and not a slow/fast roll JUST COMPLETELY STAY HOME FOR THE WEEK !!!! Most people don’t even work Friday afternoon anyway
Jay Mcclanahan If u want to make a stand fine but 10 out 2 million isn’t doing anything but making the rest of (us) look stupid.
Andrew Gohsman Good reason bad method.
Joseph Henry I spent 20 years driving, the last 3 on E-logs. I hated them at first too. Once I got used to them, I really liked them. I honestly don’t see what the big deal is. Now granted, I no longer drive, but that doesn’t change my experience with them. I simply got a chance to do what I always wanted to do, so I jumped on it. I would gladly get back in (the) truck with my E-logs if this new job fell apart tomorrow.
Darrell G. Turner Joseph Henry Well as a company driver driving for one of the big companies ELD’s are fine because they always have another power unit to keep the load going and that driver goes to bed with no worries because he still gets his pay !! But for the O/O with one truck or the guy like myself with 3 or 4 trucks we don’t have another truck to repower the load and we get hit with late fees that’s just one reason guess if some of you company drivers were on the other side of the fence maybe you could see and understand the problems with these ELD’s
Kevin Hester What I wanna know is where was everyone when the 14-hour clock was implemented over 15 years ago. Bitching about it now ’cause you have to adhere to it is too little, too late.
Steve Usrey What’s new, no solidarity in trucking, so nothing will change but some guys losing money.
Don James Cooper For those who did this, did it change anything? You know the companies that you work for could always find somebody else to drive their truck and probably be someone who has no respect for our industry (and) we have too many of those already
Aaron Strassman Just a bunch of crybabies crying cause they can’t run two log books and break all the rules anymore.
Jay Mcclanahan Learn to adapt! Who wants to drive a new truck anyway? Too much added cost in repairs and they’re ugly! If you don’t want to use a computer, drive an old truck it’s simple.
Andrew Gohsman Wrong method and results to prove it.
Kevin Hill Nothing is gonna change because it’s the big boys using government intervention to shut down smaller companies.
Mark Hollinger Crybaby’s that have no idea how to run a business. They want the government to step in and control rates because they haul for cheap.
Todd Ramey Well a lot of good that shutdown did. Stores still got their food delivered, truck stops got their tanks filled. And Black Smoke Matters just proved to the nation what idiots they are. 27,000 members and only a hand full of trucks protested.
Greenfield Carper (I don’t know) how any driver can be in the industry and don’t even follow what’s going on in the industry. They are part of the problem or they just love catering to the overreach of the government. 24 years and I’ve run paper and Elogs and to be forced to drive when your tired and forced to try to sleep when your not tired is a bunch of crap. This industry needs flexibility, not a dam clock telling us when and when we can’t work. Hell so many that are adjusted to these Elogs or never knew what it was like back in the day would of made it back then, as we didn’t have GPS, ours was called an atlas, and we didn’t have cell phones we had calling cards and had to keep an eye open for a payphone that we could get to. But most of all we had the freedom of the open roads without all these wrecks and untrained drivers on the road. All new drivers were 100% trained for months before even getting their own keys to a truck and Turned loose. Today’s trucking is nothing like when the industry was enjoyable.
