The End of the Road

I’d like you to meet my friend, Phil. He’s in his mid fifties, graying, and sports a well-earned driver’s paunch. He spent 30 years hanging on to a steering wheel, and another nine after that in various administrative roles with a host of different trucking companies. He’s an accident-free driver, and has abstracts going back to 1975 to prove it.

He’s held positions from driver to driver trainer, safety supervisor, and accident investigator, to name a few. In recent years, he’s done work for several major trucking firms as a safety and compliance officer. He has held salaried positions and he’s done contract work, too.
Phil hasn’t had a steady job for more than a year, after having been let go in a corporate reorganization effort in 2001. He was the higher paid of the company’s two safety officers, and the last one hired. C’est la vie. He has since been offered safety supervisor positions at several other firms, but he’s reluctant to take on a role with that much responsibility for less money than his subordinates make.

The problem with the contract jobs is that the companies wouldn’t keep Phil around long after he’d put all of his compliance methodology into place. More than once he was replaced by a junior staffer at a fraction of the price he charged.

Now, as his search for meaningful employment continues, he’s finding that carriers won’t even hire him as a driver. Some say he’s over-qualified to drive, that he won’t last long in the position because they suspect he’ll become restless and leave. Others say they’ll take him on, but at the wage for a newly hired driver (anywhere from 22 to 28 cents per mile). And, because he’s been longer than a year away from the wheel, some recruiters tell him he’s an insurance risk. Remember, I’m talking about a guy who has been in the business longer than many of the people he’s applying to have been breathing.

Phil’s other problem (and it relates only to his pursuit of work as a driver) is that he’s blind in one eye, and has been since birth. Does that make him a safety threat? How does one explain 30 years of accident-free driving? It’s not as if Phil just lost the use of the eye. He was born that way, and has obviously learned to compensate for his monocular vision.

Now let me introduce you to another fellow. Peter, here, is another veteran driver, with more than 20 years of time-on-task. He’s been an owner-operator for most of that time, and even served as a “driver consultant” for a truck manufacturer.

Peter isn’t one of those pedal-to-the-metal types, but a student of the owner-operator arts. He made money at what he did, and would likely still be out there if he hadn’t developed insulin-dependent diabetes. That, folks, is a one-way ticket to the unemployment line if you need to operate in the United States, where waivers are no longer forthcoming. The carrier Peter worked for when he got the bad news runs the U.S. but also has a significant Canadian operation which he would have fit into comfortably had the carrier not canned him after learning of his condition.

That’s the nice thing about owner-operators. They’re disposable, with none of those annoying liability issues that one associates with company drivers. But I digress…
Here we have two middle-aged men who have given most of their lives to the trucking industry only to have the industry slam the doors in their faces at a time when their skills and expertise are badly needed. Neither of these fellows wants any more than to continue being productive and to enjoy the fruits of a lifetime’s labour.

Peter and Phil (not their real names) both have a lot of life left in them and don’t deserve to be cast onto the scrap heap just because, in Phil’s case, he costs too much, or in Peter’s case, he no longer suits a particular need.

There’s an axiom that transportation is nothing more than a commodity, but I sincerely hope the people who make this industry one of the safest and most efficient in the world haven’t become mere commodities, too. If anyone still wonders why we’re about to experience a devastating shortage of labour, you might ask Phil and Peter. I’m sure they could tell you a thing or two about shortages.