You Deserve a Break Today

In June, the House of Commons Transport Committee endorsed a proposal to change rules governing how many hours a truck driver can work. This proposal, developed by a task force of regulators, industry representatives, and safety groups, would establish a 14-hour on-duty cycle followed by 10 hours off each day as the federal standard.

The committee’s review of this proposal and the public hearings it conducted generated a lot of political smoke, much of it fuelled by the number of hours a driver should be allowed to work during a seven-day cycle. The number the proposal would allow is 84, down from a legal maximum of 104 today. The critics say 84 is too much, and if you’re a politician with no understanding of how the industry works, you might be inclined to agree.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no fire there, because the real focus of anyone forming an opinion on this issue shouldn’t be on hours of work but hours of rest each day. The proposal would require a driver to book off duty for a minimum of eight solid hours daily. That’s eight real-time, on-the-clock hours, sitting still. Personally, I’m thrilled by the prospect (even though I know many drivers are not). I believe this proposal would restore a measure of value to the time drivers spend on duty that often goes uncompensated. It would also mean more drivers would finally get the sleep their bodies need.

As I’ve studied the issue of fatigue, I’ve spoken to some of this country’s best sleep researchers. I’ve also done something even the guys in the lab coats haven’t done: I’ve taken the science and compared it to my real-life experience. There are some frightening similarities between what they’ve seen in the lab and what I have seen and done out on the road.

Sleeping in split shifts, as many drivers do, is considered napping as defined by the medical crowd, and there’s a big difference between sleeping and napping from a scientific perspective. Napping doesn’t let the body cycle through the several phases of sleep required to provide what’s called “restorative” sleep.

In a paper called “Performance Effects of Fatigue,” presented to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board in 1995, Dr. David F. Dinges writes, “The performance of an individual fatigued by sleep loss is characterized by slowed reactions, errors, false responses, … and at times, reduced motivation and laxity in safety. From an operational perspective, [fatigue] leads to compromised attention and vigilance, limited situational awareness, and a judgment process clouded by failure to be able to reliably detect, appreciate, and respond to events in a timely manner.”

But let’s skip past the science for the moment and look at today’s so-called flexible hours of service in the context of the real world. Right now, there isn’t a finite end to the driver’s workday, which diminishes the value of the time he spends on the job. Shippers exploit the driver’s time because they know that time lost at the dock can be made up later in the day, usually at the expense of the sleep the driver needs.

The driver’s time does have a value. Let’s approach what drivers do from the perspective of having a limited window of opportunity in which to accomplish a task, rather than asking how much more time can be applied to it. Now anybody or anything that stands in the way of maximizing the potential return should be required to pay the difference. Ever wonder why rates are stagnant in spite of an apparent demand for drivers? The supply of drivers, or trucks for that matter, will never dry up entirely as long as somebody is willing to give away his time.

Many of you won’t agree, but this industry needs a clearly defined limit to the driver’s workday, followed by an uninterrupted off-duty period. Without such an arrangement, there is no way to restore a realistic value to the driver’s time. It would also give the carrier some clout in dealing with shippers who don’t seem to understand that you can’t unload 20 trucks through 10 loading doors, all of them at 8 o’clock in the morning.

More importantly, a driver would be able to get the rest he needs.