Carriers Putting Out HoS Fires as They Pop Up Its been several months since the new hours-of-service rules in the U.S. took effect and some of the blowback on trucking productivity and capacity is starting to surface, U.S. carriers say. Last week, truckload giant Schneider National reported a 3 percent drop in productivity on solo shipments and a 4.3 percent decline on team shipments. The company blamed the new hours of service rules, which, Schneider added, has no measurable benefit to the fleet’s safety record. At a ‘All About the Driver’ panel at the American Trucking Associations Management Conference in Orlando, agreed that the new HOS rules have hurt the ability of fleets to find and keep good drivers, reports Commercial Carrier Journal magazine. “It absolutely limits driver flexibility at a time when we can least afford to make the job more restrictive,” Derek Leathers, president and COO of Werner Enterprises, was quoted as saying. “It’s my belief that’s a representative sample across the industry of drivers who just said, ‘I’m out. I’m done. Thanks, but I’m moving on. “The drivers that probably some of the most-qualified … That’s concerning.” Steve Gordon, COO of Gordon Trucking Inc., said the rules are undoing the carriers’ efforts in recent years to make the job more lifestyle-friendly, specifically by getting more drivers home on weekends. “The new restart has been most painful for those folks,” Gordon said. “They can’t leave the house until after 5 a.m. If they get hung up somewhere, they lose that time the next week. So the very people we’re trying to tell, ‘we’re going to do right by you, we’re going to get you home to see your family,’ they’re the ones paying the price.” Jeff Flackler, vice president of transportation for Wal-Mart Stores Inc., likened the situation to tuning a carburetor: “You get it just right and runs really well. But if you go just a little bit further, it starts choking,” CCJ reports him as saying. “Drivers do get frustrated by this and say, ‘I’ve had enough.’ It is frustrating.” While the data has not yet been quantified, Gordon said his company has also seen an impact with teams and “higher work content applications.” yet, Gordon said pinpointing all the losses is a work in progress. “With all the different applications that we have, it’s a hand-fight trying to figure out where it’s going to have an impact,” Gordon said. “Unfortunately, sometimes we’re not getting feedback from drivers until they walk. We’re trying to dump water on those fires as they pop up.” At Werner, Leathers agreed the impact on team operations “caught us most off-guard,” so management didn’t have a plan in place on July 1 to mitigate the impact of the HOS change. Specifically, it’s the high-velocity routes that are no longer feasible. Bottom line: “It’s cost our drivers money, and that’s certainly helping to drive turnover,” Gordon said.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 16:03:39 +0000
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