In The News

Dan Rather blasts trucking, industry blasts back

Dan Rather took the trucking industry head-on Oct. 20 during his weekly program on HDNet, especially blasting driver recruiting and competency.

And it didn’t take industry officials long to take Rather head-on.

Rather used three primary sources to build his case that a lot of men and women become drivers as a last resort, and that drivers are basically put in a cab and sent out on the highway.

“Their sources were suspect, a disgruntled trucking company employee, a disgruntled driver who presented rumor as fact, the Americans for Highway and Auto Safety with its routine recitation of erroneous stats. I do not trust any one of them,” Clayton Boyce, the American Trucking Associations’ vice president of public affairs, said the day after the episode aired. “They indicted hundreds of truck driving schools based on one person’s recollection of her experience at one school.

“The trucking industry was falsely portrayed as unsafe. They repeatedly said that unsafe drivers were being put on the roads every day because of a driver shortage despite the fact that I told them over and over again there is no driver shortage.”

Rather introduced the episode.

“Tonight, trucking down the highway, out of a job elsewhere, thousands take to trucking and the lure of the open road, but are they semi-tough?” the former CBS Evening News anchor said, introducing Desiree Wood, whom he described as a newcomer to trucking and blogger of A Day in the Life of a Lady Trucker.

“They're gonna give you the keys and you're gonna start driving. But I don't know how to drive. I never drove before. I only drove around the block,” Wood told Rather.

Rather described Wood as a 45-year-old single mom who admitted she’d had her share of hard knocks.

“She never gave one iota of thought to trucking until two years ago,” Rather reported. All at once, her relationship turned sour, her career path hit a pothole and her cash flow dried up. So she set out to find a new route in life.

“The open road has always lured its share of dreamers, and with the trucking industry’s chronic driver shortage, it was an easy match for Desiree Wood,” Rather said, apparently without noting that the industry doesn’t have a driver shortage now and that, in fact, it’s lost almost 200,000 jobs in the past three years.

Wood said she attended a truck driving school in Miami where she paid more than $5,500 to learn how to drive a truck.

She claimed that she had limited training driving on the street.

Wood also alleged that while working for Covenant Transport of Chattanooga, Tenn., she took notes and filed repeated complaints, detailing everything from a pill-popping co-driver to being asked to falsify logs to having her and her belongings pushed from a cab.

Covenant officials told Rather that they had looked into some of her complaints, but couldn’t discuss them because they were “personnel matters.”

Rather also interviewed Tom Hansen, former driving training manager and terminal manager for CRST Van Expedited at the Oklahoma City terminal.

Hansen told Rather than CRST’s road test, which consisted of a total of about three miles and four right turns, shouldn’t have been a problem for rookie drivers, but said that even with two tries, typically at least 10 percent of every class failed and got sent home.

“I felt good about having a 10 percent failure rate,” Hansen said. “That means that those 10 out of 100 people that I was keeping out of the trucks were not gonna be out there, where my mother, my daughter, my sons are out on the roads.”

But Hansen told Rather the fact that so many new hires were sent packing was expensive for the company because CRST had already paid for their orientation expenses and often the tuition for CDL school.

“The company decided that the costs per hire was getting too high, so, ‘We need to change. What are you doing wrong,’ meaning me. My road test was too hard. ‘Change your road test,’" Hansen related to Rather.

“They criticized excellent, safe trucking companies,” Boyce told The Trucker. “They criticized one company because they were sued by the EEOC and then mentioned as if it were irrelevant that the lawsuit was soundly thrown out of court. They criticized a second company based on the flippant remarks of a single employee.”

The program’s producers went to Las Vegas to interview Dave Osiecki, ATA’s vice president of safety, during the organization’s annual meeting.

“The circumstance where a person can go and take a one-hour, two-hour, eight-hour training course, operate a truck around the block and then go pass a test, that’s a problem in oversight,” one of two short clips of the interview with Osiecki said.

“They cut down Dave Osiecki’s interview to eliminate statistics that show trucking is much, much safer and getting safer every year,” Boyce said.

Rather did refer to Osiecki’s comment that trucking was as safe as ever, but then followed with an interview from safety advocate Jerry Donaldson, research director for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.

“If it's safe as it's ever been, then it isn't a very good story because it's not very safe,” Donaldson told Rather. “We've averaged about 5,000 deaths over the past decade. Those numbers have not significantly changed in many years. The fatal crash rate is still the highest of any type of surface transportation. So unfortunately, the same disproportionate impact on human lives and suffering is the same now as it has been for many years.”

Officials at CRST Van Expedited and Covenant Transport had not responded to a request for comment as of press time.

“Overall it was very biased against trucking,” Boyce concluded.

To read the entire transcript, click here and look for Queen of the Road transcript.

Lyndon Finney of The Trucker staff can be contacted to comment on this article[email protected] .

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