Weary, financially pressed truckers raise round-the-clock road risks
Hurtling down a darkened Indiana highway, Roger Kobernick pulls his 75-foot-long rig into a truck stop just long enough to grab his one meal of the day, a thin baloney and cheese sandwich that he gulps down with a huge mug of black coffee.
He has several more hours of driving ahead this night to reach a warehouse in Walton, Ky., where he wants to be the first in line so he can get quickly unloaded and back on the road.
The next morning, after his truck is emptied, he sets off without breakfast or even washing up. Hours later as he falls in with a truck caravan snaking along a stretch of North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, he relaxes and his worries spill out.
"I'm 42 years old," he said. "And what am I going to do? Give it up? No, you gotta go out and pay the bills. You gotta keep plugging at it. I don't foresee me ever retiring. My dad worked 'til the day he died, and I foresee that being me."
Long hours
Truckers like Kobernick are travelers adrift in a tumultuous sea.
Spurred by a global economy that demands that goods be delivered on time and at low prices, business has never been so brisk and so cutthroat. Paid by the delivery, not the hour, the country's 350,000 independent truckers like Kobernick are lashed to punishing schedules that practically force them to live in their rigs. Counting all their time on the job, some earn as little as $8 an hour.
Long hours, chaotic schedules and exhausting work conditions make for a potentially lethal formula - for truck drivers and everyone else on the road.
Nearly a decade ago, the government vowed to significantly reduce the number of fatalities from truck crashes, but the results have been mixed. Nationally the death toll fell until 2002 and then started climbing. In the three most heavily traveled states, California, Texas and Florida, deaths involving large truck crashes have steadily climbed.
More than 5,000 people die and 116,000 are injured yearly in truck-related accidents, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Most often the victims are in passenger cars.
Take the night last April when trucker Robert Spencer, 37, of Canton Township, Mich., was headed north on I-69 in Indiana at close to 70 mph, according to a sworn statement from an investigator.
His truck crossed the highway's divide and slammed into a southbound van carrying nine people from the Fort Wayne campus of Taylor University. All were injured; five were killed, four of them students in their early 20s.
"Did I hit something? What happened? Who did this?" Spencer said at the scene. Besides five counts of reckless homicide, Spencer also was charged with filing a false logbook, concealing that he had driven 9 1/2 hours beyond the 11-hour daily maximum allowed by law.
Truckers do not escape being victims; 930 were killed in the U.S. while working last year, up 33 percent from 1992. And while they made up only 2 percent of the work force last year, they accounted for more than 16 percent of fatal workplace injuries.
Last week the health of truck drivers was taken up by the U.S. Appeals Court in Washington, D.C. It heard the latest arguments in a long battle that has pitted trucking companies against groups concerned with driver safety. Companies are pushing to increase the time drivers can be behind the wheel; critics contend that extending truckers' work days is aimed at increasing corporate profits at drivers' expense.
"You have drivers who are already working almost twice the normal 40-hour week," said LaMont Byrd, the Teamsters' Health and Safety director.
Dave Osieke, head of safety for the American Trucking Association, said the fact that fatality rates had fallen until only recently is evidence "that safety has improved."
One reason fatality rates haven't fallen faster, added Ian Grossman, a spokesman at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, is that highways are more congested and more truckers are on the road. Since 1996, trucking mileage has soared by 43 billion miles, up 24 percent. Considering such dramatic changes, the death toll increase is quite low, he said.
'Race to the bottom'
When did the dream of being a trucker turn sour?
It began after the government deregulated the industry in 1980, said Mike Belzer, a one-time trucker who is now a Wayne State University professor and trucking industry expert. Ever since, he said, it has been a "race to the bottom."
Before 1980, nearly 9 out of 10 over-the-road drivers were union members, he said. Today, 1 out of 10 carry a union card. That shift ushered in lower pay, fewer benefits and tougher working conditions.
It also made the highways far more dangerous as inexperienced and lower-paid drivers push themselves to earn more, Belzer added.
"You get what you pay for," Belzer explains. It is a matter of choosing between a "skilled professional" and someone "from the soup line," he said.
New drivers' inexperience worries Kobernick, too. Schmoozing at a warehouse in northern Kentucky, Kobernick swaps stories about new drivers with fellow trucker Jerry Knoy, 52, of Salem, Ind.
"I met a guy two weeks ago who said, 'Hey, can you back my truck in for me,'" Knoy said.
By the late 1990s much of the industry was transformed into a "sweatshop on wheels," Belzer said. Truckers' income, when adjusted for inflation, dropped steadily as the market was flooded with new companies, new drivers, and pressures from shippers and manufacturers to keep freight costs down.
Figures from the American Trucking Association show that between 1980 and 2005, the number of interstate trucking companies soared from 20,000 to 564,000. But nearly 90 percent operate six trucks or less, according to the industry group.
The result is a highly fragmented industry with "low profit margins," according to an association study.
Out of an estimated 3.3 million truckers, about 1.3 million haul freight. Of these, about 350,000 are independent drivers. Most own their trucks but lease them to companies. Or, in Kobernick's case, they work for whoever has goods for them.
Some Teamsters members earn as much as $70,000 yearly, and industry experts say the salaries of drivers for large, nonunion fleets are close. Overall, the average pay is about $35,000 a year.
The average independent driver earns about $40,000 a year, according to the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association.
No comments:
Post a Comment