Be careful what you ask for. Those words came from owner-operator Henry Albert. He wasn’t talking about the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s call, issued last Friday, for the resignation of FMCSA chief Anne Ferro. Those words summed up his message, essentially, following a lot of what he heard from drivers participating in the now-long-ago listening sessions on the hours of service revisions that went into effect last year.
On those revisions — those relative to the restart particularly onerous, Albert notes — he saw then that FMCSA could easily be viewed as having listened to drivers in crafting the rule, if they didn’t hear the call for flexibility, as I’ve written. From my memory of the listening sessions, take these two major complaints, from drivers:
**Carriers too often insist on drivers maximizing all available 11 hours of drive time.
**Carriers too often position drivers to take their restarts at odd hours of their weekend so they weren’t getting restorative sleep.
Ask and you shall receive: Later, we got the 30-minute break and the requirement that two 1-5 a.m. periods be included in the restart.
When OOIDA’s call for Ferro’s resignation came across the desk last week Friday, Albert’s words came to mind. At once, I was well primed to meet the reasoning behind that call with an affirmative nod of the head. With certainly more-than-routine driver and trucking vilification in the headlines all week last week, when regulatory consultant Richard Wilson posted early Friday morning on his Facebook profile about Ferro’s June 3 entry on the Fast Lane blog, he made arguments similar to those OOIDA would make later on that day in their own public letter to the Department of Transportation secretary, and it was easy to see Ferro’s post as out of hand for the chief trucking-safety regulator in the nation.
Wilson, and OOIDA to a certain degree, equates the tactics employed in the blog to those employed by the law firm’s “serial killer” ad you’re likely familiar with at this point.
Ferro’s post’s rhetorical strategies are indeed more akin to those of a marketer unconcerned with reality beyond his or her pursued goal, as the post picks out a few tragic examples of fatigue-related crashes to make a case that Congress shouldn’t suspend changes to the 34-hour restart. Look no further than the post’s primary (before the colon) title for evidence of such exaggerated strategies: “Congress shouldn’t roll back safety,” as if the restart’s 1-5 a.m. periods and once-per-week use provisions are the bedrock of safe operation. Not to mention, too, that there is no mention of the 34-hour restart in the post, period, essentially discouraging those outside the know from engaging in the particulars of the debate.
