Trucking’s Death Spiral: Safety, Wages, and Foreign Labor | Episode 311

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome back. It's another episode of the Freight 360 podcast. We're going further down the rabbit hole today as we've got another guest joining us. We'll get to him in just a second If you're brand new. You got two other episodes in this series where we're talking about the fraud and just basically the garbage side of our industry and just really going down the rabbit hole. So check those out, as well as hundreds of other full-length podcasts, everything from freight broker sales tactics, how to build a carrier network, getting your brokerage started. You can also check out the freight broker basics course If you're looking for a full package educational deliverable there, share it with your friends, leave a review. All that good stuff. I want to give a quick intro to our our guests today. So we had justin martin on last week. He rejoins us. In addition, we've got gordon mcgill with us today. Gordon, for those who don't know you, welcome and uh, give us a quick little rundown on who you are uh, good day everybody.

Speaker 2: 1:19

I'm gordon. You may have heard my voice on my own podcast, the Voice of Gord, which is making fun of myself, because I mean, listen to this right Lifelong history in trucking Dad trucker, uncles were truckers, grandpa was a trucker. I've sort of made it my life's work, drove truck in Canada, the US, australia, new Zealand, and now I write about it. You might have seen me in Newsweek magazine or the American Conservative or the Blaze or Unheard or American Affairs Journal or American Compass or all kinds of different publications because the American trucking industry is in the process of immolating itself and I'm here to tell you why.

Speaker 1: 2:04

All right, Well, we're going to get into that in quite some detail today on this episode. First, a little quick sports recap Ben, steven, myself and Justin. Last week all four of our teams had Ws.

Speaker 3: 2:19

All winners across the board and good finishes for the Bills and the Steelers. Anyway, I was shocked.

Speaker 4: 2:26

There was a meme that came out last season or the season before. About every single time the Eagles win and it's just like sweet, the game's on and it's just a bottomless pit of misery, and then they just barely squeak a victory. It's like woohoo, Exactly how they've been playing.

Speaker 1: 2:41

Yeah, so, steven, you guys had the. The bengals had one of the more boring games. I would say um, but you guys squeaked out the win. Uh, you, were there any thoughts on it?

Speaker 5: 2:53

yeah, I mean it was uh, it was brutal watch, but the uh, the browns kicker really saved the day for us and uh, we had two missed field goals. It was yeah, uh missed, uh missed extra point and a missed field goal. Okay, and uh, I I got the pleasure of sitting in jimmy's box during the game and watching jimmy stand up after the missed field goal and walking out was probably one of the more beautiful experiences as a bangles fan.

Speaker 1: 3:20

So how'd you get in there anyway?

Speaker 5: 3:23

So we're a customer of Pilot Flying J. Dad knows Jimmy and the sales team really well, so we had tickets into the game already and one of the sales reps got a hold of my dad and said, hey, we got seven tickets. Do you guys want to come up? And so we spent the whole, made my day a lot cheaper. I'll put it that way.

Speaker 1: 3:44

Very good, so I got to take my customers up there.

Speaker 5: 3:46

It was fun, it was good.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Ben Steelers looking good with Rodgers in the pocket there. What were your thoughts taking that he looked?

Speaker 3: 3:55

very good. I mean running game needs worked on a little bit. Defense needs to shore itself up in a few different ways. But, like Rodgers looked very good, I think the offense looked great, aside from some work they got to put in the running side. But I mean also just the way the game ended was awesome. I mean like coming back the time, I mean like and then making a career record field goal. I think it was like 61 yards or 62 yards. He nailed that at. It was just like a nice nail. And then the last play that dude just got leveled and again like it kind of didn't matter.

Speaker 1: 4:28

It was a clean hit, though, because I would hate to have seen a flag thrown and then everyone just pissed you know, pissed off about that, so yeah, so yeah, fun time, nice first game.

Speaker 3: 4:36

Can't win them all if you don't win the first one that's right.

Speaker 1: 4:38

bills 41 40 over the ravens. Derrickrick Henry just embarrassed the Bills' defense, but Josh Allen did what Josh Allen does in the fourth quarter and, with a 1% chance of winning the game, with half a quarter left, they won the game. So I'll leave it at that. There's a lot to work on. Gord, are you a football guy at all, or sports in general?

Speaker 2: 5:00

I was. When I was younger. I played football in high school, although trucking took over my life once I left school. I do have a little anecdote I want to share about these two missed conversion attempts with the Cincinnati game. Did I get that correctly?

Speaker 2: 5:17

I came home from living in New Zealand and driving logging trucks in New Zealand and I convinced one of my logging truck buddies to come with me and come trucking in Canada and the United States and we're at the pub one day watching I think it might've even been a Buffalo Bills game, because I lived pretty close to the border with Buffalo and we're watching the game and somebody missed a conversion attempt and my Kiwi friend, nigel, said how do these bastards keep missing? They're right in front of the uprights Because in rugby, when you play rugby, you kick from the point on the line where the ball crossed. So if you score right on the corner, that's where the kicker is kicking from and the person who scored the touchdown or the try kicks the ball. You don't have some specialized place, kicker, and you could be kicking on an angle like this to the uprights.

Speaker 3: 6:13

Like a corner kick in soccer.

Speaker 2: 6:14

Yeah, exactly so. My Kiwi friend Nigel was simply amazed at how anybody playing North American football could possibly miss a conversion or a three-pointer.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Pretty valid statement there. So, yeah, the Bills had what's his name I can't even think of right now. So our kicker is hurt right now. So they brought in some guy out of retirement who, like, literally showed up on like Tuesday on a red-eye flight and, you know, within a week he's suiting up as a Buffalo Bill. But he had the you know, the walk-off field goal that almost got blocked too to win that game.

Speaker 2: 7:00

So yeah, Are you a Buffalo fan? I am, I live in Buffalo.

Speaker 1: 7:03

Oh, you do Okay yeah, are you a Buffalo fan? I am. I live in Buffalo.

Speaker 2: 7:05

Oh, you do. Okay, cool, I'm only three hours from you. I'm in Ithaca.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Ithaca's gorgeous? It sure is. It's right down the road Ithaca is also thought-terminating cliches, but that's another conversation. Fair enough, matt Prater, that's the kicker that came out of out of retirement to get signed by the bill. So All right News. So I guess Ben or Steven or Gord, someone take it away with this, this Kenya, whatever we got going on.

Speaker 3: 7:51

Yeah, we literally like Nate and I just literally heard this as we came on air that apparently there was an announcement from the Nebraska secretary of state that they're going to do like a. What does it say? It said officials from both Kenyan government and the state of Nebraska are responsible for the recent initiative to bring Kenyan drivers to Nebraska, nebraska. A memorandum of understanding was signed by representatives from both. Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnan was in Kenya in early September to finalizing the deal, citing the demand for truck drivers in his state and praising the work ethic of Kenyan workers. Oh boy, so we have there's a driver shortage again and we're going to be sourcing truck drivers directly from Kenya. And I lost the piece, but one part of it, I swear said that like they were going to be able to come over like with their like existing driver's license. Yeah, which is insane.

Speaker 4: 8:38

It's like labor mobility agreement is what it says. It's like the end of Watchmen. I don't know if you ever saw that movie, but spoiler alert uh the bad guy is like monologuing at the end and he's like oh, you think you're gonna stop my plan. It already happened 15 minutes ago. Uh, this article came out in 2024, but we only just uncovered it yesterday right, so can I take this justin, go for it, I'm in the middle of writing a fairly substantial article about this, because the whole thing was so shocking.

Speaker 2: 9:06

So what happened yesterday was um, there's a twitter account bone truckers tart I think his handle is tar heel truckers, but he's at wishbone truckers uh, gets into my mentions with a screenshot of one of these articles talking about this insourcing of Kenyan drivers to America. So I start looking it up and I find these two articles and I start posting them on Twitter and I start looking into it. And then I see that the secretary of state of Nebraska is talking about this labor mobility agreement. So I start diving into that and that is downstream of a sort of a trade mission that the state of Nebraska had been making with Kenya since early in 2024. And part of that mission it included agricultural stuff technology exchange. This is sort of like this is not really news. This is stuff that states and other countries do all the time.

Speaker 2: 10:01

But the thing that stuck out was about the mobility thing and I started digging last night and this morning and it actually this is downstream of another company in Nebraska that's been doing this since like at least 2022. So there's a company in Nebraska called IWS Trucking who are a recruitment and training company that place drivers with a number of companies in Nebraska, including Sunrise and Grand Island Express. All right, not necessarily Werner and these guys in Aurora, nebraska, have been running this program since at least 2022 and maybe even longer, because it sounds like, if you look through their personnel list, they've all been tied up in trucking for a long time and these guys have been bringing dudes over from Kenya for at least three years. And I think what happened was is that this mission that the state of Nebraska took to Kenya was trying to sort of solidify it and give it some more, like you know, political oomph. And I make this tweet that went super viral right away. And then my friend Danielle takes the same information and tweets it and she gets an almost instantaneous response from Derek Letters, who's the CEO of Werner Transport, and of course, he denies any involvement with this, even though one of these articles from a news source in Kenya claims that Werner was in discussion with these same folks from Kenya who were already affiliated with these guys IWS Trucking who source drivers for Sunrise and Grand Island Express and these other companies in Nebraska. So this hole goes pretty deep.

Speaker 2: 11:48

But I started going even deeper on this to figure out. Why are they doing this right? We've seen all these accidents recently. 2025 and 2024, have been just crazy for increased truck collisions and fatalities involving drivers who've been insourced from other countries. This is what got the whole ball rolling with the English language proficiency thing, and now everybody is like what's going on here? Well, it turns out that Grand Island Express and Sunrise and all these guys all haul meat for JBS Foods. Jbs Foods is one of the biggest producers of beef and chicken in the world. They've got plants all over the place and they have a number of plants across America. And it seems like JBS has got a long history of abusing migrant labor, using third party service providers to bring children from Guatemala and Honduras and Mexico and El Salvador to work in their kill plants, and they've been Wouldn't that Gord, didn't that article?

Speaker 3: 12:48

I was telling Justin that after we were talking yesterday that I read about that like it was like a year ago or something. Yes, I read this large article. They were like it was literally like titled like Child Labor in Kill Plants. It looked like when I read this I was picturing literally things I read about in like the early 1900s in slaughterhouses is what it sounded like.

Speaker 2: 13:07

That's right, it's very recent.

Speaker 2: 13:14

The JBS was busted in 2022 by the Department of Labor, or maybe that's when the investigation started.

Speaker 2: 13:18

And it was everywhere Wall Street Journal, new York Times, npr. Jbs basically had to like you know, had to have their, like you know road to Damascus Saul Paul movement and turn themselves around and they were ordered to spend all this money on, you know, english training for migrants and making sure kids weren't working in their plants and like it was a humongous, massive story. But so what I'm seeing here and the connection I'm trying to make is this because we see this across the rest of the industry, where this model of specifically agricultural companies in the United States trying to grind everybody down to the point that nobody wants to work there locally so that they can only get migrants to do it. We are now seeing that in trucking right, and because Nebraska is a big ag state corn, beef, cattle ranching, all that stuff you're seeing this idea of employing migrants instead of locals because you can pay them less and treat them like crap, is migrating into the trucking companies who serve JBS.

Speaker 2: 14:22

Which is a disaster because as horrific as child labor.

Speaker 4: 14:26

And all this migrant exploitation occurs in the plants. It's in the plants. When this gets applied to trucking, these guys are on the highway Right.

Speaker 2: 14:35

And like I say, I mean I don't have any ill will against people from Kenya or wherever we're all humans right. The problem I have is this Kenya or wherever like we're all humans right. The problem I have is this for better or for worse, america has a particular driving culture, same in Canada, a lot of Western countries. We are careful, we put a lot of time in training, we take kids and we make them go to driving school when they're 16. You sort of absorb it through osmosis as you grow up and start driving when you get older. Of course it's not perfect. There's still lots of accidents.

Speaker 2: 15:06

Everyone likes to complain about bad drivers but compared to the rest of the world, this place is paradise on the highway compared to most of the rest of the world. And you know I've been doing a little bit of a look into things and Kenya has got something like four times the amount of traffic fatalities as the United States does. Eight times what they have in Europe. Like I get it. You know, people are people. We should treat everybody with the same amount of respect.

Speaker 2: 15:34

But like I looked into IWS trucking and their training program and they have a whole. It's listed right on their website. You know, get here from wherever. We get you set up with a social security number, we go get your medical, we buy your cell phone, we put you up in this hotel and then three weeks later you have a CDL and you're on the road. There is no universe where you can take somebody from Kenya who may or may not speak English, has got no idea what America's driving rules or driving culture is like, put them on the highway and then send them out in a big truck and expect them to succeed after only three weeks of training Not possible. We all know this is totally fraudulent and what they're doing is they're taking advantage of the extremely lax rules to get a CDL and the virtual lack of existence of a barrier to entry into the business whatsoever.

Speaker 3: 16:27

Can I? I want to segue a little and backtrack to the root cause, right? So the reason it seems that is stated by Nebraska, the secretary of state and everyone in all these articles is driver shortage. Everyone in all these articles is driver shortage. Okay, what I really want to start with is okay, so us in the brokerage space and the trucking company space and even the shipper space, like we have seen depressed trucking rates in the open market, and we'll define that right Over the road trucking and shipping right, not local, and we'll just leave LTL aside.

Speaker 3: 17:05

So, like open market contract rates between shippers and carriers and spot market within brokers, right, that entire market, post the peak in COVID, has had the longest recession in its 43 years. I think it's roughly about 43 years and it's modern existence of how we function. Right. They have never lasted longer than somewhere between 14 to 18 months where it will cycle the whole way around from too many and then rates go down, they go out of business rates, go back up and it just cycles right. It has not cycled since peak COVID.

Speaker 3: 17:36

So we have seen pain across the entire industry for going on four years now because there are so many drivers in the full truckload space and drive-ins and reefers and even in flatbeds that rates have not moved. No matter what has happened We've seen massive tariff swings, imports coming in, stopping, even with massive disruptions, we still haven't seen rates move because there is a excess of drivers in this space right, okay, which is again and anybody correct me, but like is, the largest portion of the entire trucking market are over-the-road drivers and I don't know exactly the piece of that pie, but it is overwhelmingly much larger than local and LTL and we have known this and nobody has disputed this. However, we're seeing both the ATA, which we'll get into, saying there's a driver shortage of 68,000 because they are seeing thousands of job postings for companies that can't hire for very niche jobs like local driving. They've cited concrete delivery and things that move in very local areas. We have the secretary of state saying that they want to bring in, under a special program, folks from other countries to fill jobs that they're saying they can't fill, but in the bigger market it seems like there are way more CDLs than there are loads to move.

Speaker 3: 18:58

So help us understand this, guys, is that, like the larger market has more CDLs and more drivers than we've ever seen, we're not seeing rates move because there's less freight than there are drivers, and I guess you can make the argument maybe the economy is just not moving as much as it usually does because they're correlated. But how do we have so many more drivers in the bigger market but yet they are saying we have a driver shortage, and have been saying the same thing for over a decade. What are we missing here? How are both of those things true?

Speaker 4: 20:18

Can they both be true? Yes, they can, because not just trucking, but just in general. A lot of industries have seen this rise in what they're calling ghost jobs or ghost positions, and a lot of it is just publicly. Companies are trying to look like they're healthier than they really are behind the scenes. So if you're constantly putting up job postings, it's a signal to people in your company of like, hey, you're replaceable, so don't go anywhere. But you know whether it's bullshit or not when people apply for these jobs and nobody gets hired and also they never post the pay rates these jobs and nobody gets hired and also they never post the pay rates. So my gut instinct is always if I see a job posting for anywhere and they're not telling you how much it pays and I can't find any reviews from people that recently got hired, chances are that's probably a bullshit job posting. Fair enough.

Speaker 3: 21:07

Is there any evidence? I mean again, the ATA and we dug into this yesterday said that like well, driver pay has gone up 19% in the past five years. Well, that we looked into that. Like that's not inflation adjusted so like on a rate per mile, everything has gotten more expensive. Like that doesn't mean they have made more money in respect to the cost of living, going up with inflation, with inflation. But is there any evidence out there that companies are having a difficult time hiring for any CDL positions in any niche area of the United?

Speaker 2: 21:41

States. They're having a difficult time hiring because they don't subscribe to the laws of economics like the rest of us try to right. So in my research for this article, I came across a local newspaper online in Aurora, nebraska, and in the very first paragraph let me get this up here. Hold on a minute, I just got to scroll down. And what's interesting about this is that you see this in every single article about the driver shortage phenomenon as it exists in 2025, right? So here we go. I'm going to quote this newspaper. The American trucking industry is currently facing a number of prolonged and serious challenges, including a soft market characterized by lower freight rates, higher fuel costs and rising interest rates. In addition to these challenges, vital goods. Well, don't just correlate it Well, they're contradictory.

Speaker 1: 22:39

They're contradictory.

Speaker 2: 22:41

So two sentences. They open up this news article with lower freight rates. Okay, if we understand the laws of economics, lower freight rates means what? When the price of something is low, that means there's an oversupply on the market or a glut of that right, Because when there's a lot of something, the price goes down. And then, in the second sentence, there's a shortage of truck drivers. If there's a shortage, that means the price of the freight rates would go up.

Speaker 2: 23:12

Okay, every single time you read one of these stories, especially in the last couple of years, at least when they're being honest. They mentioned that the trucking's having this problem with short freight rates or low freight rates, but we also still have this shortage. It contra they, they contradict themselves. Or do journalists not have like undergrad degrees? At least maybe some of them have a master's degree? Maybe some of them took fucking math in grade nine when they were in high school. How does this shit keep getting?

Speaker 1: 23:43

printed, because if you just keep saying it over and over and over, people that aren't educated on it believe it to be true. And the other thought I have is if, if we have seven million unemployed, working, working aged americans, why that are unemployed right, why are we going to bring in folks from another country? And the reason I mean the reason is is clear and obvious. Um, but I mean, it's just, it's, it's absolutely insane. But back to your point, gourd. I think you know in 2020, late 2020 and 2021, when we saw rates go way up because of supply and demand, there was really a tight market in capacity. And we are three and a half years removed from that, or more, and it's the opposite freight market that it was. But people are still saying the same thing there's a truck driver shortage. So I think the reason is the longer and more you just keep repeating yourself. Those that don't really know the industry just believe it to be true.

Speaker 2: 24:37

Well, this is what happens, right, Like if you go on YouTube and type in truck driver shortage and I think Justin's done this before All the time. It's like every single local news affiliate in America and every single state, for as long as YouTube has been around, has got some story. It's like tens of thousands Truck driver, shortage truck driver. The ATA has put this narrative out for so long and they've repeated it for so long and at such high volume that everybody has just internalized it. They don't question it anymore, unless you're us.

Speaker 4: 25:10

You know why those stories get put out there. So I've talked to some of the journalists and they've invited me back on to correct the record. What they've explained to me is a lot of it is either the companies or the CDL schools in the area come to them and they say, hey, our attendance is down. Hey, we can't get any drivers into our trucking school, whatever, we have a massive truck driver shortage. And the journalist goes is that true? And then they open up the Rolodex, call somebody from the ATA, and the ATA and the ATA says here, here's a bunch of talking points. So because we have too many truck drivers, the pay is low. Because the pay is low, nobody's going into these CDL schools. Because nobody's going into the CDL schools, they're not making any money. So in order to get any money, they got to go to the media and say hey, we have a truck driver shortage, Can you please do a story on this? And then that gets the ball rolling so they can get more money from the government for these programs.

Speaker 3: 25:56

And they're the training programs right, like it's basically the funnel that makes money off training them, not the folks that are actually doing this job, making less and less money every year. I'm trying to find the numbers on active drivers, cause I know I've seen this chart from somebody we all know and I'm like I know that I saw us, like MCs maybe have shrank a little bit over the past couple of years, but the number of drivers has gone up, meaning like they were consolidating. Like you were saying, more of the smaller trucking companies leave the industry, but their drivers were just going and working for other countries.

Speaker 3: 26:27

So, the number of actual drivers had continued to go up.

Speaker 2: 26:30

Yeah, and the problem with the driver statistics stuff and I've it's very difficult to get hard numbers right. So in 2019 the american trucking association, through their research arm atri, puts out another report on the supposed truck driver shortage and in a footnote in that 2019 report they admit that there's 10 million people with the cdl that they know about. 2019? Not that long ago there was a sort of short-lived driver advocacy organization called CDL Drivers Unlimited, of which I was a member, but they're gone now. They paid an intern in 2021 or 2022, maybe even 2023, to go around and ask all of the state DMVs all across the United States give us all the info you have on all of the active CDLs that you know about. 34 states responded and then the other 16 refused to respond, which is another problem. So they took the data from the 34 states they could, they prorated it and then made a guesstimate for the other 16 states based on their populations and they came up with this number of 8.8 million active CDLs in.

Speaker 2: 27:45

I guess it was 2023. You go on the MCMIS or the Federal Register, it says 6 million. Are they tracking the people with non-domiciled or limited ones, or the ones that are issued dodgy, or the truck drivers who just fly into Chicago from Serbia and get in on board a Chicago Volvo mafia truck and just drive without even having one, because that's a thing. In 2024, the CVSA, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, published their statistics for all of their truck safety blitz. They do every June for a whole week.

Speaker 3: 28:23

We're just going to ask you that I remember those numbers.

Speaker 2: 28:26

Yeah, they raid the whole country Canada, usa, mexico they do a huge blitz and they have vehicle out of service violations and driver out of service violations. The number one or number two driver out of service violation in 2024 was not having a CDL whatsoever. So these people are in here driving in our industry. They don't even have a CDL, like some of these gangsters that are up in America's trucking, do not care about the law whatsoever. Get in the truck, go follow my instructions from your mobile phone and whatever language it is, and just follow GPS and do as you're told. Compliance and following the rules is off the table for a lot of these guys.

Speaker 3: 29:09

Here's that number. By the way, it was in 2024. 25's numbers haven't been released yet. 2425 numbers haven't been released yet, but it said there were six hundred and eighty eight violations. Twenty five point four percent were for no commercial driver's license. One in four of the violations.

Speaker 1: 29:27

I remember putting this out in our newsletter earlier this year.

Speaker 3: 29:29

Yeah, One in four. Just no driver's license Now.

Speaker 1: 29:34

I mean Justin, I talked about this too Like if they didn't have a CDLA and they had like a lower, a lower level commercial.

Speaker 3: 29:40

It says no commercial driver's license was the citation or violation. I'm like I'm like I don't even know what the penalty is, but like I'm pretty sure they arrest you for driving without a regular driver's license, like I don't think they let you get back in your car.

Speaker 4: 29:54

It is insane that the handcuffs don't get immediately slapped on if you're driving an 80,000-pound vehicle and you don't have a license to drive it.

Speaker 3: 30:00

I can understand if it was expired or your medical card was invalid or whatever, but no license at all From you two who are drivers, right Like I went from your both of you guys. If you get pulled over during Blitz Week and you don't have a CDL not like even an expired, just like don't have one what happens, like what happens at that stop and what happens after the stop?

Speaker 4: 30:24

I honestly have no idea, because I never got pulled over during Blitz Week.

Speaker 2: 30:28

Good question and I think what happens is, basically, I don't think the cops are allowed to take the keys out of the truck, unless it's like a truck violation.

Speaker 2: 31:57

If it's the driver, they just give you a citation and they say, hey, you're not allowed to drive and better call your company.

Speaker 2: 32:03

They have to send somebody to come and get the truck. If it's on the side of the road it'll get towed somewhere. But like that's it, like there's nothing stopping the guy from like going and hiding at a restaurant or somewhere and coming back an hour later when nobody's looking, getting in his truck and driving away. Like there's literally nothing, there's no mechanism in enforcement, unless you like take the keys off the guy and like boot his truck to keep them from just driving it away. So Danielle put up a tweet about this a couple days ago, where a guy in Tennessee was busted for the English language proficiency twice, both in Tennessee, one one day, one the next. Same truck, same driver, same company, same everything, and they just let him go. This just proves that unless you arrest these people or you brick the truck somehow, take the keys, put a boot on it so it can't drive away, they'll just get back in the truck and keep going.

Speaker 4: 33:00

Yeah, there was like a little bit of there was a fear going around when the ELP mandate was first announced. Everyone was like, oh, they're going to get all off the roads. Then it was like, well, if they're not being enforced it's not really going to take any capacity out of the market.

Speaker 3: 33:17

Now we're seeing that, even if it is enforced these guys just don't care and nothing happens to them and they're just going to keep driving anyway. That's the part that is just like absolutely shocking right, Like anybody that has ever fished here. Like it just kind of reminds me of like when you catch a fish and your buddy catches the same fish, like later in the afternoon because you threw him back, and it's just like it's just the same thing happening over and over and over again.

Speaker 2: 33:33

It's going to keep happening, right, Like the ELP thing, is like they're nibbling around the edges and they're not addressing the real problem here, right? So a very good point that was made in a book I want everybody in logistics to go and read. I read it and I had the author of the book on my podcast last year or the year before. Her name is Karen Levy. She's a sociologist at cornell university, eight miles from where I'm sitting here in ithaca. She was trained at princeton. She's a lawyer, it professor.

Speaker 2: 34:03

She's got like a a zillion credentials and she got really interested in trucking as the sort of like what would, what did she? It Like a sort of zone of you know labor. I can't remember what the word she used, but anyway she was really interested in, like how truckers dealt with surveillance, with being, you know, chased by cops, harassed, you know all the problems we deal with out on the road. And she spent 10 years working on this book studying how the imposition of surveillance technology on trucks affected our working lives, the money we made, the whole thing Big, huge, long book. And she, much like Overdrive Magazine, did her own research into the effects of the ELD mandate, Come to find out, didn't do anything actually made it worse. Didn't do anything actually made it worse. Crashes go up, people engage in more aggressive driving behaviors. It literally did nothing.

Speaker 2: 35:01

And because, as Levy says in her book, you're not addressing the fundamental incentive structure of how truck drivers are paid right. All you're doing is just putting a clock on their available hours. You're not doing anything about delays. You're not doing anything about delays. You're not doing anything about the fact they get paid by the mile. You're not doing anything about what makes people tick Right.

Speaker 2: 35:22

And as long as there's an incentive and a way for foreign companies to get in here, for domestic companies to abuse foreign drivers and people that don't speak English or don't have a CDL, they're just going to keep doing it. So, like the government has to get a whole lot more serious than just trying to administer English language tests. You have to take these people and you have to, like cancel their license. You have to chase the employers and say you employed this guy, knowing that he breaking the law by not being able to speak English and your MC number is temporarily canceled. They have to go to the state DMV and find the official that issued the CDL and say you guys are doing something wrong here and we have to correct it. We have to like, fine you, we have to. You know there are other holes in the system by which these guys get here in the first place and if we're only going to address the guys without addressing the wider system, they're just going to keep doing it.

Speaker 4: 36:22

And circling out from that. While all this is happening, I just see post after post after post on social media of young men complaining about how, oh, it's so over for me. I'm looking at this one here that was posted, uh, four days ago. He says I'm 26 years old, no job, no car, no girlfriend, five foot six, live with my parents, multiple health issues, terminally online, loves Pokemon, no social life. Is it over for me? Yes or no, other than the health issues and the Pokemon?

Speaker 4: 36:55

That was me at 25, and trucking saved my life. Like I had a high school diploma and, you know, a couple of years of work experience, but I didn't have a degree or anything like that. And once I had my CDL, it's the golden ticket. You can get a job anywhere. It might not be a great job or a glamorous job, but you know it's going to be better than or at least it was better at the time than being, you know, a retail wage slave.

Speaker 4: 37:13

And I talk to young men now all the time and I ask them you know, once you try trucking and they tell they give me just excuse after excuse and I I get it, they're decent enough excuses. It's like it only pays 45 50 000 a year. Now it was paying that in 2007 when I started. So the the price that these companies are willing to pay to get people to leave their friends and family and loved ones for weeks, months at a time just hasn't even like not gone up, it's gone down, like these companies are. Just they're just not paying at all. So you have an entire generation of young men that are suffering because they have nothing to go into that otherwise would have been a stepping stone into something else down the line. Nothing to go into that otherwise would have been a stepping stone into something else down the line. You don't have to be a truck driver the rest of your life, but at least getting some step into like a profession and realizing like oh, I can actually do stuff is such a game changer for people.

Speaker 3: 38:05

Well, and I want to go. I want to circle back to to like the root cause is like okay, who benefits right? Well, when you have more truck drivers and there are loads to move, prices go down. As Gord pointed out, like simple economics, our industry may seem very complex and there are arguments and how. Some of it is more complex than other things. But like, at the end of the day, like you have a number of shipments that need moved every day and a number of trucks that can move them, when there are more shipments than there are trucks to move, it, rates go up. When there are more trucks than there are shipments, the rates go down.

Speaker 3: 38:40

Rates have been down for the longest period ever, mostly because the things moving have stayed the same, maybe gone down a little bit, but the number of trucking companies have not shrunk, or the number of drivers, because the companies don't matter. It's how many actual power units can move, the number of loads that mean moved every day. That determine rates, right. So when you see that those numbers are that low and depressed for that long, part of me and the cynical part of me goes well, you have a government that is trying to fight inflation post-COVID. So who benefits from cheap rates? All of the companies. Every single company that moves anything any day from anywhere to anywhere benefits from having rates. All of the companies. Every single company that moves anything any day from anywhere to anywhere benefits from having more drivers.

Speaker 3: 39:19

Who else benefits, right, you have organizations that get paid by their members and then the larger trucking companies benefit, and we talked about this. Why do the trucking companies benefit? Well, it's a lot cheaper for me to hire a driver their first year than their fifth year. So if I can hire a lot of drivers and pay them for a year and a half, they're getting the entry-level driver rate. Then they leave, then I got to bring in another one. Why do most companies not just pay entry-level people? Because they've got to pay to get them and train them. The trucking companies aren't paying that bill because the government is subsidizing it into driver training programs, spending money into CDL programs to just keep that funnel going.

Speaker 3: 40:00

So the trucking companies benefit by paying drivers less, shippers benefit by paying less freight rates, but at the end of the day, the entire working class in the trucking side suffers from this, while the advocacy groups that are supposed to be having their back and helping advocate for better working conditions and better pay, are literally saying the opposite thing. They're literally standing on the podium and the one of the guys was literally in Congress at a subcommittee meeting. What was it last month, in July, saying there's a giant driver shortage. And I think your quote yesterday, justin and I looked it up was that, like anybody that says anything different than this, he was attacking the nuance of even the argument and saying if you disagree with me, hold on, I'm going to find the exact quote. But it's wild, like the fact that nobody is talking about, like this giant pink elephant in the room that everybody in the industry can see. And they're not only not talking about it, they're saying the opposite thing is happening.

Speaker 3: 41:04

And then you see, states doing things that are making it worse and driving rates even further down on the justification of what was never true in the first place. And to me, like yeah, there's always bullshit, for sure in government and in business, but like this is like the biggest load of it that I think I've ever seen for the longest period I've ever seen.

Speaker 4: 41:24

Right, gord's a big fan of the term thought-terminating cliche and that's exactly what this is. It's just, it's an easy talking point and it's steady as she goes.

Speaker 2: 41:35

sorry, gordon, yeah no problem, no problem, um. So, uh, yeah, we have a major capacity glut. Everybody knows that there's no truck driver shortage. Meanwhile, chris spear keeps going off about it and the media keeps repeating it. But we all know and it gets complicated too right about like where are all these trucks and drivers coming from? So 2021, uh, biden-harris Trucking Action Plan and I've talked about this at length. Our friends Shannon and Harvey and Cliff at American Truckers United have done all the research on it and 2021, we have the COVID demand spike. Everyone's making out like bandits, tons of money because everyone's at home, got their free Biden bucks. They're spending money like crazy at Amazon, but we're all at home because COVID, right.

Speaker 2: 42:21

Massive demand for trucks. Lots of people get back into the market. Lots of guys start their own companies. It gets crazy. People are getting $4 or $5 a mile and then it all crashes, right. So you would expect this market to shake out. Eventually. Guys stop making truck payments. People aren't making enough money. They quit. They find something else to do. Natural cycle.

Speaker 2: 42:44

Problem is this 2021 Trucking Action Plan, which was very explicit about why they were engaging it. It says right there the ATA went to Biden and said we have to pay a premium of an extra 7% to 12% to our drivers in order to keep them lest they quit and go work for somebody else, right? So they say, well, we're going to try and figure out how to stabilize their supply chains and make sure everything works correctly. So they bring in all these stakeholders right and all these industry experts. They get testimony from everybody and a bunch of people that are not the ATA or their members. Tell Biden there's enough truck drivers, you're just not using them correctly. Mit data scientist, david Carell I've had on my show. 40% of United States trucking capacity is sitting at any given time waiting to be loaded or unloaded Massive drain on the system.

Speaker 2: 43:37

Steve Shelly, author of Big Red Trucking the Decline of the American Dream, told the Biden people you got to pay guys more, you got to solve your retention problem. All kinds of people told Biden what the truth was. What does the Biden administration do? Or I should say McKinsey Consulting, who are working with their buddy Pete Buttigieg. They ignored all that. Let's flood the market with more drivers to get the price down.

Speaker 2: 44:01

So, according to Shannon's research, it looks like 10 to 14 states cooperated and now we get this non-domicile CDL holder thing or limited term CDL holder and all of those the numbers for all of those types of licenses start spiking like crazy in 2021 and 2022. So where did they get these people? If they're non-domicile or limited term, that means they're migrants and refugees? Where did they come from Biden's really terrible border policies and just letting people walk in the country tens of millions? They just took like a few hundred thousand of those people and turned them into truck drivers overnight. Now they've been in the system for a couple of years and to them.

Speaker 2: 44:43

They're not used to the cycle. They're also not used to being paid what Americans get paid, or what one third of what Americans get paid, and they're happy to keep doing it. They're not going to leave willingly. If you look at all these numbers at minimum at minimum since the late 2021, there have been half a million, if not more that's the conservative estimate 500,000 of these CDLs issued, these non-domiciled and limited-term CDLs issued almost exclusively to migrants and refugees, and there's probably more. Those people aren't just going to leave. There's only two point something million truck driving jobs. You just dumped an extra 25 percent of that number on top of it, and they're happy to work for way less than what the American drivers actually are used to making. No wonder the capacity glut won't go away. We've got all these people who showed up here yesterday that are just not going to leave unless we force them to.

Speaker 4: 45:45

I was listening to this interview that CEO Warner did last week or the week before with Bloomberg and he had the same exact thought. He was asked directly like do you think that there's a truck driver shortage? And he said he's like we can clearly see that there is plenty of quote unquote CDL holders out there, but what we really have is a shortage of qualified drivers. And I'm like the system doesn't care. If you have a CDL, you can get a job. The system itself does not care.

Speaker 2: 46:23

I cannot stand Especially his part of the system, because the specialized, high-quality, really competent drivers of which there is a shortage are the guys hauling fuel, oversized cattle, specialized stuff. The guys like me with a quarter century of experience are kind of hard to come by and the entire industry is set up to fuck people like me off, with your driver facing cameras and you're paying these slave wages. Why am I going to go driving truck? 90% of the trucking companies in this fucking country couldn't afford me and would treat me like I just got here yesterday or I was like a criminal with all their surveillance stuff. This industry and this system is doing everything possible to make life difficult for guys like me, while doing everything possible to continue to insource labor from other parts of the world here to undercut us.

Speaker 2: 47:01

That's a death spiral that's not going to work out for anybody and we're seeing it in the accidents and collision statistics. Well, I want to point that out.

Speaker 4: 47:10

I got into the industry right at the start of that death spiral, because I'll give you guys my like brief start in the industry when I joined Schneider in 07, and there were 98 of us in our class and it was a two week class and Schneider at the time was a training school, so our training company, so they would do a new class every two weeks, so every two weeks you had anywhere from 100 to 200 people come in Within the first day. Half of us were gone. 200 people come in Within the first day, half of us were gone. They did like a health screening. Half the people were disqualified right there on the spot. Two weeks later, 16 of us graduated and got our CDLs.

Speaker 3: 47:41

So you take 98 people, 16 of them got their CDLs 16% success rate every day.

Speaker 4: 47:45

Within a year, I was the only one left still driving a truck, not driving for Snyder just driving period, because at the time that was when the housing market and everything had collapsed and everyone was trying to get other jobs elsewhere. So that's only gotten worse over time. So, as Werner CEOs grumbling about there not being enough qualified drivers out there, it's like you guys are a training company. You're the ones that are making the drivers that are supposed to stick around and go on to other jobs elsewhere to get more money.

Speaker 4: 48:16

They give them no reason to stick around what's happening is these people come in, they go through the training and then they quit. They just quit trucking period. They don't stick around to get the experience. If you come into trucking and you make it a year, it used to be two years but nowadays it's gotten so bad it's just a year. If you can make it a year at any company and not reckon anything, you will be hired anywhere. As long as you have the right credentials. You don't have an automatic restriction. You have hazmat, doubles, tanker, all that Anybody will hire you. That's just how bad it's gotten.

Speaker 3: 48:50

Well, the thing I want to point out is what Gord said a moment ago, because I was talking with Klein Vars, who owns a trucking company, about this literally yesterday. And we're doing a lot of like in our brokerage heavy haul, over dimensional and I did a lot of tankers last year. Exactly what you were saying, gord, is like when you get into high risk cargo where if there is something that happens meaning like a spill, an accident and you are hauling styrene or extremely flammable, hazardous material, right, like those rates seven $8 a mile. When I'm looking I look at the bid sheet for a project I was working on the past two weeks. This stuff's like overdimensional, over height, but not that heavy, but you need lots of permits, bucket trucks and like routing surveys. We're seeing anywhere from 11 or 12 bucks a mile to $18 a mile and I've gone through like I have a list of literally every trucking company in the country that has the equipment, has it registered, and have talked to or emailed and reached out to every one of them to pull together the biggest list I could for these projects and it ends up you go from like I think my list started with like 5,000 or 6,000 companies my list of ones that are willing to run that and can run it, even though they have the equipment, ends up being about a dozen, 15 or 20.

Speaker 3: 50:07

So you take this list of thousands and thousands of companies that own this equipment could theoretically run this, and I've talked to them. I've been talking to them for the past month. They'll get on the phone with me like we won't run that, like our drivers just aren't qualified to run anything that tall, that wide and they're not super tall, they're like one's 13 and a half foot, one's like 12 and a half foot. So they're like a bit above legal, but nothing crazy. And like one after another will email me and call me and just say, like my guys won't run this, like they'll run something that's a little heavy, my guys can't run it because they can't fucking read English and understand their routing permits.

Speaker 3: 50:41

Well, this is the thing I was getting at.

Speaker 2: 50:43

Okay, so I hate to interrupt you, but this stuff just makes me furious. I used to haul oversize. I've done all the things you talked about. I hauled fuel for 10 years. I hauled anhydrous ammonia, which is the super toxic liquid nitrogen shit. I hauled super loads with jeeps and stingers and fucking escorts and all that stuff.

Speaker 2: 51:02

It's not that hard. Read the fucking permit, follow the route, read a map, hang your flags on it, drive slow. Just follow fucking instructions. This is not hard. It's not that difficult. What this? The whole thing we're being told here again.

Speaker 2: 51:21

Our industry is being immolated from within by the death drive to get the dumbest possible people, the cheapest possible people. If they only last year, who cares? We'll find somebody else. They're digging through the bottom of the human resources barrel to get the worst fucking stupidest people possible to put them behind the wheel. And this is the result of it. It's resulted in a massive competency crisis. Nobody can do anything. Nobody trusts anybody to do anything. And then what happens? The fucking insurance companies make it so hard for people that can do something that nobody can afford the insurance. Nobody wants to take the risk, nobody wants to get sued.

Speaker 2: 51:59

I was, you know I was talking to a trucking company owner about this the other day. Everybody in the industry knows that the driver facing cameras don't do anything. All they do is record the incident. They don't prevent people from getting in accidents. Why? Because you're still putting retards behind the wheel. What does the driver-facing camera do for you? All it does is show trial lawyers when you eventually go to court over an accident that you did your due diligence, so you're going to take— oh my God, I can't.

Speaker 2: 52:30

I'm going to throw my fucking laptop through the window.

Speaker 4: 52:34

I had a post on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, right when the Florida accident happened, and all I did was I posted a screenshot of the in-camera footage and I said, huh interesting that the camera inside the cab did nothing to prevent this accident. And so many people lost their minds on LinkedInin because I knew what I was doing when I posted. I've been seeing post after post after post, before this florida accident happened, of all these chat, gpt, written slop articles on linkedin of like this is why these cameras are so important. We need this for this and this and that, and I'm like it doesn't prevent anything. So much of this shit happening is reactive, not proactive. You wouldn't need the cameras in the first place. You wouldn't need the cameras in the first place. You wouldn't need the tens of thousands of dollars in carrier vetting.

Speaker 1: 53:14

you wouldn't need the quadrupling of your insurance premiums if you would stop putting these people behind the wheel in the first place yeah, the same concept applies to with, like, if you ever ride in an uber, the reason that they have those cameras forward and rear facing is not to protect anybody inside the vehicle, it's for insurance, like accidents and insurance.

Speaker 1: 53:34

I remember when I worked at Conway Conway Freight back in the day and they were um, they were looking to put in the uh in-cab cameras and drivers got pissed off and the reality came down. It was like the company was forced to if they wanted to keep their insurance costs at a reasonable rate without having it skyrocket. So absolutely does nothing If anything. Like you, you piss off drivers like like Gord mentioned right, like there's a, there's a level of like privacy that, as humans, you feel like you're. If you're constantly being watched, you're going to act different. You're almost not as focused on what you should be, which is looking down the road. It can almost have a negative impact.

Speaker 4: 54:19

The other thing you watch. Like Rob Carpenter is a great follow on LinkedIn with this stuff. He just posts video after video after video of these idiots fucking up all the job. All the time the camera did nothing to stop them.

Speaker 3: 54:28

Well, video after video of these idiots fucking up all the job, all the time the camera did nothing to stop them. Well, the better stat too, that I saw as, like an analogy, showed the crime and stabbing incidents in countries like Great Britain that have put CCTV everywhere they went oh they put cameras all over the streets, on all the buildings, to reduce crime.

Speaker 3: 54:44

The numbers went up and then they didn't use any of the footage to address the core issues of why they happened in the first place. It's just after the fact of like oh well, now we have footage of the crime happening and now there's more of them, and nobody goes and uses that to figure out to the bigger point of like well, why did this happen in the first place? It's clearly not making them go down. It's not a deterrent. No one's driving safer because of it. And to Nate's point, like human beings need some sense of privacy to some degree and trust, right. Like nobody wants to work in any job where you feel that nobody trusts you to the point where they're recording every one of the things you're doing all day. Like it does not give you a sense of fulfillment, it does not give you a sense of pride and it does not give you a sense that anyone appreciates anything you're doing in any scenario there's some.

Speaker 4: 55:30

All you're doing is chasing away your best talent. Unfortunately, they're also your most expensive talent, so the only people that you're going to be able to afford to put in the truck next are the ones that need those cameras and those surveillance systems in the first place there's some, uh, there's some funny clips that I've seen from those cameras.

Speaker 1: 55:45

Not to go off topic, I I remember we had one at our, I think it was at our the trucking leg of our company caught a dude like pissing in a Gatorade bottle and we're like what the hell is this guy doing? So anyway, all that to say, gore, we went down a bunch of rabbit holes. If you had a magic wand and you could make changes, and you could, you know, have the immediate influence to have things go the way that you think they should, what does that look like?

Speaker 2: 56:11

That looks like addressing the problem that begets so many others, which is detention. I am thoroughly convinced that a lot of this stuff starts with the fact that trucks are sitting all the time and we have a major capacity utilization problem, which leads people like the ATA to believe they need more trucks and more drivers, because what we have is not being utilized correctly. That's not across the entire industry, but enough of it that MIT came up with this 40% number. Also, you have to put a value on driver's time which will help solve that right. You are going to be less likely to drive like a maniac if you know that when you're sitting somewhere and they're taking their good sweet time to load you and unload you and that's cutting into your driving time, you are still being compensated and you are being compensated well. So we have to deal with detention. We have to pay drivers better. Then we need less drivers, Then we have less of a problem with feeling this stupid need to insource drivers when we are in a capacity glut. Now, separate from the detention, separate from the pay, we're going to have to get real hard on the companies that are insourcing labor from other countries in the middle of an overcapacity glut. They are taking the piss when the Secretary of State of Nebraska is saying we need more truck drivers, when FreightWaves has an entire section of their website dedicated to nothing but bankruptcies and truck enclosures and drivers being laid off, and it's active, and they have a couple of journalists that write about nothing.

Speaker 2: 57:45

But that means we don't need in-source labor. That means the people that are trying to bring those folks here are not only screwing American truckers. They're setting up these poor migrants from other countries, from failure, who are going to show up here. They're going to feel animus from people like me and everybody giving them the stink eye and they're being paid less and sooner or later, like every other truck driver in this country, they're going to quit their job within a year because they're going to get sick and fucking tired of being ripped off and having their time wasted. Sorry, I'm, I'm, just I'm, I'm. I'm incensed about what's going on in this industry. It drives me insane do you?

Speaker 1: 58:25

do you think that with the new administration in Washington, that they're heading anywhere closer in the right direction? Or do they not even have any idea of what the real issues are.

Speaker 2: 58:38

They have taken a step in the right direction, but they need to drive a few miles. So, yeah, they're nibbling around the edges. This remains to be seen. Duffy and the USDOT are investigating this issue of non-domicile stuff. What that investigation comes up with, what it leads to, will there be any action? Who knows? I'm not keeping my hopes up, but at least they're looking at it and acknowledging there's something going on here which is more than can be said about the previous administration, who were told directly about what the actual problems are and did everything to make them worse.

Speaker 1: 59:12

All right, justin. Do you have anything to add in given the conversation?

Speaker 4: 59:18

It's really hard to follow up a rant like that from Gord Preaching to the choir there, my friend, we have some good clips from this episode.

Speaker 4: 59:30

You hear the complaints from everybody. I hear rumblings that a lot of the state affiliates are getting sick and tired of the national from the ATA. So everything is going to reach a boiling point where, as we see not to get too political on here but when things start getting real bad somebody is going to step up and take that reign of power and there's going to be nothing there to stop them. And I really think, you know, part of the reason why trucking was deregulated in the 80s was because it became impossible to really move anything in the country. And I feel like that's kind of where we're headed right now too. It's you know, the industry has gotten so bad that somebody is going to step in and come up with a bunch of solutions and just make everything even worse. So I would rather we fix things now, before it's too late.

Speaker 1: 1:00:15

I'm curious, ben what your take is.

Speaker 3: 1:00:17

The part of me thinks that, like, there's like three thoughts in my head that I want to tie into this on. Like the other side right Is like what you were saying, gord, about what they did in 21. Part of me really believes that they were like you know what Inflation's really bad right now. Nobody can get their stuff. Let's solve it now and we'll figure it out later. So bring a bunch of drivers drive rates down. That's our biggest problem. Figure it out later and nobody thought about later is part of where I think the motivation was.

Speaker 3: 1:00:49

The other part of me is like, well, if all the companies benefit and they're the ones with the most money lobbying all the folks making the decisions, they have nothing to complain about. The only real people suffering, right truck drivers, right people in our industry and the safety of people on the roads. And I think if this thing actually gets changed, it's going to be initiated from the general public being scared and terrified of who they're sharing the roads with, of people that aren't qualified to drive or putting their families and friends and everyone in society at risk because companies can benefit and we can bring in cheap labor. And to me, like that's probably where the solutions will start is you're going to start seeing more and more. Unfortunately, you're going to see more accidents before you see less, until eventually, politicians go like we have to do something about this, because we've only seen like two or three this year that really hit the news and like that number is not going to go down, it's going to go up until somebody actually addresses this. That's the part that terrifies me, but like I think that's probably how this starts to be addressed. And who knows, to your point, gord, like there's a step in the right direction, but there are miles to walk before you get to any solution.

Speaker 3: 1:01:58

And you are just seeing millions of people that spent their life learning how to work in this industry, love this industry, want to do these things, care about their work ethic, and they're getting the short end of the stick and nobody is looking to address it because, hey, the company's the one paying for my reelection. Why do I care about, you know, a couple hundred thousand people that will just go find another job anyway? Right, at literally the same time, unemployment is rising. Right, like you're literally seeing unemployment going up at the same time. And I think, like human beings are terrible at making long term decisions. They will always make decisions that make them feel better today to deal with it later.

Speaker 3: 1:02:36

And I think, unfortunately, we need more of that short term pain and people going, calling Congress, reaching out and saying like what are you doing about this? Where are you voting on this? Where do you stand? What are you doing about this? Where are you voting on this? Where do you stand? Because if we, as like the general public, don't reach out to government officials and let them know like this is terrifying and this needs addressed, at the end of the day, the companies are talking to them every day. They're on the phone, they're on speed dial, they're going listen, man, our shipping rates are great. We don't want you guys to decrease the amount of drivers. We don't want you guys to decrease the amount of drivers. We don't want to pay more for our cost of goods. We're already spending too much money. You need more of us than are of them, because they have more leverage, because they're the ones cut the checks.

Speaker 1: 1:03:15

Yeah. So I want to wrap this up, I want to ask you and Justin as well. I'll be on Capitol Hill next week. I'll be lobbying with TIA. We typically go and talk about, you know, concerns and issues, but there's oftentimes additional a little bit of time at the end of our meetings with different congressional offices about any other industry-related topics that we can discuss. So I'm curious what are some things that we from the brokerage community can share with our leadership at the federal level in DC, specifically when I'm down there next week, at any you know, quick bullet point items to bring to their attention?

Speaker 2: 1:03:57

Uh, past the guaranteeing overtime for truckers act. Um, you know this capacity glut. Uh, downstream of the detention problem, I think you guys should hammer on the detention problem because you as brokers are always trying to like. You get carriers asking for detention and you can't get it if the shippers don't pay. The shippers don't pay if there isn't a value put on the driver and that capacity's time. And one of the reasons they're able to get away with it is truck drivers are by law excluded from the overtime pay provisions that everybody else gets in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. There has been a bill before Congress sitting there for three years. It's one line Remove the exemption for transport workers from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, that's it. No pork, no taxes, no regulation, no, nothing. Remove that exemption. Then it's up to the industry to figure out how to solve that problem and pay guys correctly. And then maybe it incentivizes shippers and receivers to get moving and get our capacity moving, because all the other problems are downstream of that. Pass the GOT Act.

Speaker 3: 1:05:02

That's huge because there are shippers for sure that turn detention into profit centers, like I have had customers that literally will bill their customers that they're like, hey, I need your detention, check in and check out. Like, ok, can you approve that I got to pay the care? It's like, oh, we don't pay detention. Well then, why did you need to check in and check out times? Because you're going to bill them, keep that money and then I hours waiting for your load to come in off the field. It is so abusive in produce.

Speaker 4: 1:05:24

I can't tell you they basically just see every single truck, any reefer trailer sitting on their dock with a truck in front of it.

Speaker 4: 1:05:38

That's free storage as far as they're concerned. My advice to you guys everything, everything. Copy and paste everything Gord said. But if you're talking to congressmen especially, really emphasize the national security issues we're seeing with a lot of this stuff, most of these criminal enterprises. Part of the reason why the trucking market is such a shit show right now is because we have so many carriers that are basically just fronts for organized crime, and the reason that they can operate at the margins that they do is because they don't make money hauling freight. They make money hauling their illicit shit, so that stuff never reaches the spreadsheets.

Speaker 3: 1:06:15

The ELT-. It reminds me of the strip mall businesses, you see, where there's never a car. Then you're like, how's that place in business? And it's like, yeah, it's just money laundering, right? Same thing.

Speaker 4: 1:06:24

Walk through South Philly and find a random Italian restaurant or a pizza place. They stick out like a sore thumb. They're open two days a week, three hours a day, cash only but best damn pizza you've ever had in your life. But the ELD, especially, is like a huge thing right now. It was pushed that this thing is mandated to be put in the trucks, but then they have zero vetting whatsoever in who's actually making the ELDs and we're seeing a rise in cargo theft as a result.

Speaker 1: 1:06:53

And all that data is getting sucked up and sent overseas and being done God knows what with so, on that ELD note, because I remember this, we talked about this with Danielle a couple of weeks ago. She wanted to, when there's a violation and a roadside inspection, to list the if there's a sorry, if there's an hours of service violation list, the ELD provider that was used and you're saying is yours the certification process.

Speaker 3: 1:07:20

You're saying You're going to sell certification.

Speaker 4: 1:07:23

Yeah, yeah, I think that should just be on the report. You know, when they're writing a truck up, they got to write down the make model, make model of the trailer, make model of the truck, put in the ELD as well, because I think it used to be. The initial thought was oh, it's just these, these white, white white label services, it's all the crooked ones. No, we're seeing, you know, drivers come to us saying like no, no, we use Samsara and we can, we can edit logs in Samsara. Come to us saying like no, no, we use Samsara and we can edit logs in Samsara. And the fact that you can even do that in Samsara should just be like sounding alarms.

Speaker 3: 1:07:53

Yeah, and I think to Justin's point. Nate like is that you don't want to just write it down if there's an hour of service violation, because if you write it down every time there's an inspection, you're probably going to correlate a lot more inspections to certain ELDs, because those are the guys driving more hours, more tired, faster. You're going to see lots of correlations with every single incident with the ELDs. To be able to start creating lists and go okay, like this is ridiculous. 90% of the violations come from 25% of the ELDs, or maybe it's a lot of them Cause, to your point, even the well-known, reputable ones. We're now starting to hear from drivers that other companies are absolutely manipulating almost all of them.

Speaker 2: 1:08:32

And something with the ELD thing. One last thing you can take to Congress, as you're talking about the ELD stuff, is that the companies who use this in their marketing to attract drivers are flagrantly advertising flexible ELDs so that they can have drivers work way over hours of service rules. And those same companies are often owned by recent arrivals to America who know that most American truck drivers are not interested in being worked that hard. And those companies are actively discriminating against American-born indigenous truck drivers. The correlation with this is off the charts. Are actively discriminating against American-born indigenous truck drivers. The correlation with this is off the charts. Shut them down and then you close the channel by which American workers are discriminated against in employment.

Speaker 1: 1:09:22

Extremely huge issue. Yeah, you guys have given me a ton of talking points. I appreciate it. So it's good, ben, it's good for you and I to get the perspective from the trucker in the last couple of weeks here, because we're normally on here talking all about brokerage. From a brokerage perspective I never drove truck outside the military. It's definitely a great perspective to have.

Speaker 1: 1:09:45

The one thing that you guys we kind of went around and gave our take towards the end there, the one thing and this is really for the audience listening from a broker's perspective everything you've heard today and last week and the week before in our discussion about what's going on here is all the more reason to do a really good job at vetting your carriers and aiming to build a very strong carrier network. Have good, trusted people that you know the kind of safety operations and preventative maintenance that they do with their trucks and their fleet. You know they're taking care of their drivers and you get to know these folks. So I can't stress enough how dangerous. Not only this is safety-wise on the highways, not only this is safety-wise on the highways, but one crash, one bad incident could destroy your business, can get you pulled into a mega lawsuit and you lose a customer that could bankrupt your company or put it under.

Speaker 4: 1:10:39

Can I put an anecdote to that point real quick? Yeah, so the other day this video went viral on Twitter, an account that has absolutely nothing to do with trucking, but it's a large political account. They had this video sent to them of a guy, a strong, solo Sergei, swapping the DOT signs on the side of his truck, and the post was about what are these guys doing? Are they smuggling people? Are they smuggling drugs? There were a couple of replies and they were like oh no, I know that carrier, they're totally legit.

Speaker 4: 1:11:08

I looked them up on search carriers had in 15 trucks and their fleet and about 290 drivers. And he's like I use them all the time because, um, they have day of teams anytime in out of Los Angeles. I was like dude, there is no way those guys are teams, none whatsoever. I sent him a screenshot of a DOD contractor I used to drive for they haul nothing but team freight and they have 33 trucks, 68 drivers. So you can tell if a carrier comes to you and they say, yeah, I got real teams, look them up. You can spot the lie immediately If they have. If they say they have nothing but teams and they have the same number of trucks as they do drivers, or more trucks than drivers. They're lying to you and you're going to be putting yourself in your freight and your customer's freight at risk.

Speaker 3: 1:11:55

Liability too, because it is our job to hire what was instructed or documented in our load tender from the customer. Customer pays you and hires you to hire a team driver and you don't vet that. Care and make sure there's two drivers and something happens. You can be certain whoever is injured or killed is looping in the brokerage and suing them as well.

Speaker 4: 1:12:16

Yep, and they may have hauled many loads for you in the past, no problem, but it only needs to happen once.

Speaker 1: 1:12:21

Yeah Well, good, great discussion today, guys. I appreciate it. Gord, thanks again for joining us. Anything you want to wrap up with or final thoughts to the audience. Anyone who wants to?

Speaker 2: 1:12:31

follow my writing. Thank you very much. By the way, if you want more of my writings and rantings autonomoustruckerssubstackcom. I am very close to finishing a book on everything we just talked about and more. It's called End of the Road Inside the War on Truckers. It'll be published by a company called Creed and Culture Press and will be available for pre-sale in November. Follow me on Twitter at Gordon McGill. And thank you very much. We got to keep talking about this stuff because the people in charge aren't talking about it.

Speaker 1: 1:13:04

Absolutely, Justin. Any final thoughts from your end?

Speaker 4: 1:13:07

I'm just thrilled that we're starting to see a lot of these cross-channel communications happening. I mean, these aren't new problems. These are complaints people have had since before my time, even in the industry, and nothing gets solved unless we're all talking about this. So I'm really glad to see even the public catching glimpses of this. I had this saying that the greatest trick the supply chain ever pulled was convincing everybody it doesn't exist and as long as the store shelves are fulled and your amazon package is arriving within two days, nobody cares. But people are starting to notice, you know, the the cracks in the road, so to speak, and uh, hopefully we can get this stuff fixed yeah, absolutely yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:13:48

I always call that a pfm, or pure fucking magic is what it is right yeah yeah, steven, you didn't say a whole lot, but you were behind the scenes in the chat today. Any final thoughts on your end about all this?

Speaker 5: 1:13:59

no, I kind of just echoing justin's point. It is nice to see that our industry is starting to be discussed more and people are starting to kind of understand what goes on on the roads and in these trucks. And it's also nice to see, you know brokers and truckers and all these people like talking amongst each other and not yelling at each other. You know so because at the end of the day, this affects all of us, not just the drivers, not just the brokers.

Speaker 1: 1:14:32

Yeah, absolutely Ben, what do you got?

Speaker 3: 1:14:34

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't you're right, and until next time, go Bills.