“A man’s greatest enemies are his own apathy and stubborness.” –Frank Tyger

There’s been a huge amount of debate — much of it couched in violent terms — about immigration, especially what to do about illegal immigrants. This is an extremely important debate for our nation to engage in, but doubly so for trucking ,as this industry struggles to find people willing to get into the driver’s seat.

I am NOT proposing that trucking engage in the wholesale hiring illegals here, nor that we put new Americans behind the wheel that lack a working knowledge of English or proper driving skills (though that’s been happening quite a lot, I am disgusted to say). But what’s been lacking in the entire debate over illegal immigration is context — the critical fact that EVERY American is an immigrant. We all came to this country from somewhere else, more often than not fleeing economic malaise, war, hunger, second-class citizenship, etc. And a very large segment of our people came here without a choice, as slaves — a blot upon our nation’s history that will never go away.

But here we all are — and aside from Native Americans (who through an unlucky accident are almost universally known as ‘Indians’) we all come from immigrant stock. So before we so self-righteously condemn illegals in this country, we should pause and reflect that, you know, maybe our own ancestors might have shaded the truth here and there to get over the border. Yes, the tide of illegals is rising and that must be addressed, and yes they include criminals and other n’er do wells that are putting a strain on our society. But there are also countless upon countless others that are seeking the universal dream — a better life — and are frustrated by the beaurecratic nightmare that is our government’s immigration policy.

It is also a huge testament, I think, to us as a polyglot people that’s getting slammed every day in the global media and our own journalists here at home for countless crimes and errors (more immagined than real most of the time) that people STILL want to get in here — no matter what the risk. Because this country still offers anyone willing to learn and work hard unlimited opportunity.

Look at Johnnie Bryan Hunt, who recently passed away — could a chicken farmer’s son, and a fifth grade dropout to boot, create a billion-dollar trucking enterprise like J.B. Hunt … in England? Or France? Or Russia? And THOSE are what we call ‘developed nations,’ yet they are places where social and economic class distinctions still put restrictions on people.

My own family came from what was considered the ‘lower rungs’ of society, escaping not only poverty but incarceration and possibly death. For example, my dad’s mom (my paternal grandmother) came from Roscommon on the west coast of Ireland from a family of poor farmers. At the time she emigrated, British mercenaries — the hated and feared ‘Black & Tans’ — were combing her part of the countryside looking for Irish rebels. Then there’s my mom’s dad (my maternal grandfather) whose family WALKED from Kiev, Ukraine, to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905 to escape the Czarist pogroms against the Jews. My great-grandfather himself was a Rabbi, meaning his family was right in the crosshairs for all kinds of unpleasentness. But they were lucky — they left before the Nazis came.

So, yes, debate immigration policy and yes let’s find a way to deal with illegal immigration — preferrably using deportation as a weapon of last resort. There are countless millions of immigrants — like my forebears — that only want a chance to make something for themselves and their families, which will rub off for the good on our country. Send the criminals and related bad apples back whence they came, but let’s get the rest started on citizenship so they can help keeping making our country one of the best in the world.

A special treat came my way last week when I met up with Tom and Debbie Berkel to tour their brand new Double Eagle sleeper — more like a house than a sleeper, actually. A veteran husband and wife driving team that’ve worked 26 years for Mercer Transportation, they had longed to make their 13-year old Kenworth a true “home away from home” for some time — and now they’ve made their dream come true.

And what a sleeper! It containers a shower, fold-down double bed, double sink, refrigerator and freezer, microwave and convection oven, flat screen TV, and just tons of cabinets. Their satellite TV can be adjusted from inside the truck, so Tom doesn’t have to go out into bad weather anymore, get up on the roof, and manually manipulate the satellite dish himself. The decor just makes it feel like home, too — with the walls and ceilings a nice soft off-white and the cabinets a rich wood grain. The flooring is pergo, so it looks like wood, though Tom put a real wood floor in the driving compartment.

Best of all are the “little touches” that make it feel like home: characters from the movie “Finding Nemo” inhabit the shower, while the cabinets have lady bug, Mickey Mouse, and beautiful rose-shaped knobs — the rose knobs a tribute to Debbie’s mom, who passed away three years ago.

OK, so it’s gorgeous — and lots of truckers have sleepers as big and as nice if not nicer. And sure you can debate how a sleeper of this size impacts fuel economy, payload capacity, turning radius, etc. But after talking with Tom and Debbie (absolutely two of the nicest people you’ll ever meet anywhere) you begin to realize just how life-changing a sleeper like this can be to a truck driving team.

“Take the shower — you go into a truck stop shower and you wait in line, and they can be none-too-clean,” Debbie told me. “Having my own shower allows me to clean up when I want, as I need to, without being rushed.” She also noted that their fold-down bed runs down the cab wall, not across the back of the cab, greatly reducing road vibration, so they sleep much better as a result.

Cooking their own meals has been a huge plus, Debbie added, allowing them to eat healthier and save money at the same time. She showed off a freezer packed with roasts and ground beef, as well as bread dough ready to be defrosted for the oven. Fresh baked bread out on the road! You can’t beat that — and Tom said that by eating better and at more regular meal times helped him lose 20 pounds.

Double Eagle’s flexible construction plan also allowed them to lay out the design of their sleeper the way they wanted — without a lot of upcharges. Light fixtures you’d find in a typical home didn’t cost extra to install, for example, enhancing the home-like feel the Berkels were after.

Having this sleeper also allowed them to save money when they took quick vacations at various points across the country as they didn’t need hotel rooms. Tom also installed an extra 40 gallon water tank just for washing his truck, saving him the $60 it typically costs them to run their Kenworth through a commerical facility. And these are only a few of the myriad ways the Berkels make that sleeper pay for itself.

While not every driving team or driver can afford the Berkels’ set-up, the sleeper they’ve created with Double Eagle’s help really shows off a lot of possibilities — especially the ways life on the road can be made easier and more enjoyable for drivers as a whole.

“Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?” –Frank Scully

Trucking is simply not the kind of industry where you want to throw around the word “love” too much. Sure, you can say you “love” your truck or “love” driving as a career, but that’s about it, aside from using it in the family context (in terms of wives, husbands, and kids).

Jim Jeter, however, doesn’t let that bother him one bit. “We love our drivers — and we try to tell them that every day,” he told me recently. And Jeter — general manager of trucking operations for Houston, TX-based Empire Truck Lines — isn’t some sort of “new age” shaman or something. He’s a former driver himself, with 20 years behind the wheel and a right palm gnarled by shifting gears to prove it.

I wrote a story about Jeter — and Empire’s — driver-relations philosophy for our online web news site this week, but it didn’t even come close to conveying the kinds of emotions the company puts on the table with its owner-operators (they employ 350 of them). I find that really interesting because almost no one talks about truck drivers — much less ANY type of employee — like that these days. But there’s good reason for it, Jeter told me.

“Listen, I’ve been there and so has our president — we understand what it’s like to get a call at 2 a.m. on the road that your son or daughter just broke their arm and you need to turn the truck around,” he explained. “Because we’ve been on the road, in those situations, we try to convey that to the rest of the company — especially our dispatchers — so those kinds of issues can get taken care of.”

It’s not as if Jeter is a pushover, mind you (he’s built like a summo wrestler for starters) but it’s more about him and his managers having that visceral knowledge of life in the cab — what you’re feeling when things go wrong at home and you’re 1,000 miles away under load. The over-the-road experience of Empire’s president also affects how he approaches the business as well, Jeter said.

“Once, we held a meeting with all his VPs in one room and he said straight up, ‘Look around you — never has there been such a large gathering of such unproductive people under our roof.’ Because we all understand that the driver makes the money that pays our salary. They are the ones doing the work,” he said.

Jeter explained that the reason emotion gets brought to the table is that trucking, at it’s core, is really all about feelings. Sure, you may deliver your loads 100% of the time, but if the driver is a jerk, no one wants him making those deliveries.

“This business is so much more than just moving freight from point A to point B,” Jeter told me. “It’s about three people — the customer, the shipping clerk and the receiving clerk. You can be 100% on time, but if you’re mean and nasty, two out of those three people won’t want to deal with you. But you are not on-time as much but are a good person, the customer will say to his clerks, ‘This driver’s on time percentages are lower than we like,’ and those two clerks will say ‘We can’t get rid of him — he’s one of the best we have.’ Because it’s all about human relationships at the end of the day.”

And those emotions and relationships are equally important between driver and customer as between driver and company. “We’ve lost a few drivers and when we trace back the reasons why, it’s almost always due to a breakdown in the relationship between us,” Jeter said. “That’s why we want our dispatchers talking to our drivers a minimum of two times per day, why we focus on caring about drivers as people. Why we say ‘We love you’ as much as we can. Listen, they pay our bills — we try never to lose sight of that.”

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.” –Thucydides

I met Leonard and Charlene Testerman several years ago on a cold, snowy day before the Mid America Trucking Show. Stopping in for my annual visit to Mercer Transportation’s headquarters in Louisville, KY, I couldn’t take my eyes off this glorious black-and-red extended hood Peterbilt in the parking lot. It was the Testermans’ pride and joy — named “Rollin’ Thunder” — and they spent over an hour telling me how they built it, showing off the scrap book they made detailing the refurbishment process in their garage behind their home in Frederick, MD. They didn’t know me from Adam, yet they treated me as though I were family.

I later learned from Dale Corum, Mercer’s general manager, just how special they were. Besides being the top earners year in and year out (pulling down six figures), the Testermans were extremely well-liked by customers and fellow drivers alike. In fact, many customers asked for them by name to haul their loads — something that’s all too rare in trucking these days. Yet none of it went to their heads — they were simply the nicest people you’d ever want to meet.

I kept bumping into the Testermans at show truck competitions over the years — in fact, I made a point of seeking them out. They always gave me warm hellos, no matter that most drivers are rightly wary of reporters wearing tires and carrying cameras. They never ignored me in the company of their peers — they were never stingy with their handshakes or well-wishes. Visiting with them always made my day.

That’s why finding out that Leonard got killed this past May in a freak construction accident at his home came as quite a shock. I simply couldn’t believe it. Even worse, he died practically in the arms of Charlene, who’d been by his side literally for 22 years, both at home and on the road. That’s the thing about husband and wife teams in this industry — you bond on a level many marriages simply can’t achieve because you live and work together almost every single day.

Leonard and Charlene really made it work — they tended to be quiet folks but you could really sense how tightly together they were. I remember when Charlene showed off her scrapbook detailing how she and Leonard stretched the frame on Rollin’ Thunder, with her doing a lot of the welding. Leonard — sporting his trademark 1950s-style flattop haircut — just stood back and let her have the floor, smiling all the while. He knew how much pride Charlene took in the work she’d done on their truck and I could tell he wanted her to have the spotlight all to herself.

So well respected were the two of them that when Bob Martin won a truck makeover from Shell Lubricants for his rig, the firm that did the work — S&J Truck Sales — had a picture of Rollin’ Thunder painted on the side of his sleeper along with Leonard’s name. S&J did a really beauitful job with this testament to Leonard (and a great job with Bob’s truck I might add).

I kept telling myself over the years that I needed to get up to their home in Frederick — only an hour and a half north of where I live — for a visit, but, as usual, I kept putting it off. Now that chance is gone. It’s but one more regret I’ll be keeping close at hand for a long, long while, I think.

Five seconds after the stock car engines turned over, I knew I’d made a huge, HUGE mistake … and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I’d run head on into “too late” and as our nine-car squadron pulled out of pit row onto the Texas Motor Speedway track, I said my prayers and fervently hoped not to puke during our four lap jaunt.

You see, stock car racing — like driving big rigs — looks pretty easy on the outside. I mean, sure, they go fast, but it’s not like they are navigating a maze of turns or dodging pedestrians, bicyclists and fellow car drivers. There’s the fear of crashes and fires, of course, but in our case, there’d be no bumping — we’d be staying a car length apart, with no jostling for first place. We’d basically go very fast in a big circle. C’mon, how bad could that be?

A LOT bad as it turns out. First, there’s the screaming engine all of 10 inches in front of you. And when I mean screaming, I mean SCREAMING. My nerves were shot in an instant. Second, when we hit 163 mph into turn three on the first lap, it felt like the G-forces were ripping the flesh right off my face — and a wide open window didn’t help matters at all. Every turn drove me back into my seat like a punch to the gut and my mouth became as dry as a desert. How someone could even keep their hands on the wheel, much less DRIVE, under that G-force pressure gave me instant new respect for stock car racers, amateurs and pros alike.

Before we’d gotten into our cars, zipping up into our flame retardant suits, I mentioned to one of my fellow journalists that I wished I’d gone to the bathroom first. She replied that by turn one I wouldn’t need to pee — in fact, I wouldn’t be able to think about much of anything. Except staying alive. Boy, was SHE right.

By lap two, I’d had enough — turn three came up again and the wall looked WAY too close to me. I could see and feel just how deadly such speeds can be. Heck, Dale Earnhardt was killed by a less-than-spectacular head on tap into the wall. So I screwed my eyes shut and kept them shut till we pulled back into pit row and the motor cut out. I could barely get my helmet off and my hands shook for nearly an hour afterwards.

Todd Graham, an account manager for Eaton who’s spent years learning to drive stock cars in his spare time with the Texas Team Driving School (the folks who manned the wheels for our troupe) later explained to me that it’s all about throttle control and track position out on the raceway. “You can’t think about where anyone else is on the track — you have to focus on what you are doing, especially where you are on the track,” he told me. “You learn to keep the throttle cranked up into the turn and take the right position so you can stay in the turn safely at that speed.”

Todd also added that you don’t just go out and rip off a 100 laps either. The school teaches you in 10 lap increments over a day and a half, gradually increasing your speed levels on the straightaways, then getting you to throttle up in the turns. “The instructors are the real crazy ones,” he noted. “Because they are getting into the passenger seat with complete novices behind the wheel. That’s truly scary.” But if you keep up your training, your body and reflexes adapt to the conditions and the high speeds. Eventually, you become a natural.

There are lots of ways this relates to trucking (not 163 mph though — please don’t attempt that on the highway! PLEASE!) but most importantly when it comes to training. Stock car racing is a sport where mistakes come with deadly consequences — just like trucking. And it takes a patient and oftimes fearless instructor to let a rookie have the wheel, knowing all the while how disastrous one error on the part of that rookie can be.

As for me, I am NEVER getting in one of those cars ever again — NEVER. That may be fun for some people, but not this one. I’m going back to my old and slow minivan, thank you very much, without a shred of regret.

“Consistency is the key.” — Roy Sanders

I got to spend the good part of a day with Roy, taking a tour of International Truck & Engine Corp.’s Garland, TX, truck assembly plant — which is his baby now, since he’s the manufacturing and facilities manager here. Roy’s worked at International for 16 years, with the last three spent here at Garland, so he’s had a front row seat to view an amazing amount of change to the truck building process — changes that are designed to give you, the fleet owner, a more reliable, durable, and higher quality product.

Roy explained that it’s all about consistency — installing a component, painting a cab, spacing the axles and wheel hubs — the right way every single time, hour after hour, truck after truck. International — and every other truck manufacturer, I might add — has spent millions to develop new manufactuing processes to give customers this consistency, yet at the same time preserve much of the customization they demand in their vehicles.

“No two trucks we build here are alike — the are all completely different,” he told me. “A dump truck with tandem rear axles may be followed by a day cab tractor with a single rear axle, followed by a concrete pumper with a tandem rear and tage axle arrangement. That’s a lot of complexity but we need to handle that with the same consistency that the auto manufacturers do.”

Roy’s factory builds mostly severe service, vocational, and military trucks and that range makes attaining consistency that much harder. “We’re dealing with anywhere from 20 to 30 different axle combinations alone on our line — that’s a lot of variation we have to manage,” he said.

Amid the whir and scream of torque wrenches, hoists, and other equipment, Roy explained that every truck OEM is trying to imitate the way the automakers build cars — especially the high end brands, such as Lexus. They want to deliver the same level of product quality, yet in a package durable enough to take more pounding than a Lexus would see in two or three lifetimes.

It’s a very detailed process now, with pre-test checks of components conducted in many cases right after they are installed on a chassis to see if they are working properly. Validation supervisors roam the line conducting their own checks as well, with a series of final checks spaced out at the end of the building process — a 10 minute dyno test for each truck, a quick run over a bump lane to make sure the suspension is solid, and a variety of electronic diagnostics to make sure everything is ship shape, to name but a few.

All of this is geared not only to making trucks better but delivering them to you, the customer, faster. Gone are the days when individual components would be constructed by hand for hours, with the quality of the work depending on how tired the line workers became as the day wore on. Now, pre-made components — called modules — get quickly put into place and tested out, so an entire truck can be built in about an hour and a half. Just building a battery box by hand used to take three hours alone, noted Roy.

“If you had told me five years ago we could do what we are doing today in terms of production speed and quality control, I would have told you it would be impossible,” he said. “But here we are doing it. And it’s all geared to giving the customer a better, more durable product for their business in a much shorter time span. That’s our overriding goal now and for the future.”

“Personal feelings don’t make for good politics, legal decisions, or business deals.” –Roger Zelazny

There’s a crescendo of emotion swirling around the issue of Mexican trucks operating on U.S. highways, bordering in many cases on hysteria. That’s why it’s high time to table it — stuff cross-border trucking into a freezer and let it sit for another decade while we sort this complex issue out.

There’s a lot of good and bad associated with opening the U.S.-Mexican border to two-way truck traffic. There are rightly concerns about the safety compliance of Mexico’s truckers with U.S. regulations — hours of service, equipment safety, and pollution control — and these must be dealt with. Another issue is the territory U.S. truckers would have to navigate were they to drive south of the border — widespread banditry, roads in disrepair. When many cross-border trucking shipments must be escorted by armed guards, you know there’s a serious problem.

Yet we can’t dismiss Mexico like this — saying, in effect, you’re third world, second-class, not worthy of our trouble. Far from it — Mexican drivers I’ve met at trucking shows are as hard working and honest as any U.S. trucker. And they must contend with a lot rougher conditions than any driver up here — we may complain about the lawlessness in their territories and the bad equipment they drive, but they must live with it every day.

So what we need to do is put the cross-border question on ice and stop carping about the border, so we can instead roll up our sleeves and get to work solving these problems. We need to help restore law and order to Mexico’s roadways before our trucks and drivers go down there — that needs to happen first and that requires more work on forming joint law enforcement efforts.

Next, we need to do a serious vetting of those Mexican carriers seeking to operate up north — not just a quickie review of a few months, but a good couple of years of monitoring. We need to let our emotions cool while we examine everyone’s credentials — and we need to beef up the ranks of federal inspectors to do a good job of it. That takes years to accomplish, by the way, which is what another moratorium would give us.

We need to stop the shouting and screaming so we can get down in the trenches and start solving the issues everyone is getting so upset over — so when we talk about opening the border again, we’ll know for certain that we’re all on the same page.

“The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.” –James Russell Lowell

There’s movement afoot in Congress to slow down and modify efforts to improve corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards and I think that’s a good thing, the reason being that cars and light trucks are very different animals and trying to get them to meet the same fuel economy standards via federal mandate would’ve been catastrophic to domestic automakers.

Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.) got the CAFE ball rolling this year with a proposal to make cars and light trucks both meet a 35-miles per gallon standard by 2019 — which would’ve required manufacturers to improve overall vehicle fuel economy by 4% a year. That’s incrediably steep and would’ve forced automakers to eliminate whole ranges of models — especially rear wheel drive V8 sports cars, according to Motortrend magazine, in order to save just some (not all) of their light truck lines.

Then Representatives Baron Hill (D-Ind.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) stepped into the breech with their bill, H.R. 2927 (dubbed, appropriately, the Hill-Terry Bill) to instead call for two separate standards — 35 mpg for cars and 32 mpg for light trucks — to be met by 2022. That’s still a big increase the current standards of 27.5 mpg for cars and 22.5 mpg for for light trucks and it gives automakers a little more time so they don’t have to pull a fuel economy rabbit out of the hat every year, as they would’ve been forced to do under Markey’s plan.

Over 138 fellow legislators signed on to support the Hill-Terry Bill in just 11 days, showing it’s got some serious legs, but more importantly this bill recognizes that cars and trucks are just plain different kinds of vehicles — and need to be treated as such. Now, sure, plenty of regular folks (me included) buy trucks and never use them as work vehicles — their primary function. But under Markey, improving fuel economy would’ve thrown a lot of truck models out — ones fleets use to get myriads of jobs done.

There’s other issues at work here, too, that we need to address — the role government and consumers alike play in managing our fuel consumption. Mass transit development, for example, has lagged tremendously in this country, yet it’s what gets commuters off the road. Giving people viable alternatives to using their cars to drive two and from work is a big fuel saver and one we could make cost efficient if managed better. I think about my own experience here in Washington D.C., where the Metrorail subway cars are Italian made and pricey, where monies get spent on artistic displays and expanding the legal department library to the tune of $250,000. The focus on transit needs to be on moving people safely and quickly, day in and day out.

Then there’s every day driving — trips that don’t need to be taken, wasteful idling, the whole smash. If trucking fleets can be rigorous about their fuel expenditure, so can the average car driver (me included). Less driving equals less fuel so the more of that, the better.

Finally, we must remember light trucks are around for a reason — they go places and do things cars can’t. Yes, Detroit makes them cheaper and made a huge (and devastating) bet that light truck sales would keep on clmbing back in the late 1990s, leaving car development behind just as oil prices exploded. But that is the past — we can’t change it. What we can do is make reasonable fuel economy improvements at a sustainable pace that keeps the mix of vehicles we need for daily life on the road.

“Here’s to the teachers in the crowded schools. Here’s to the workers in the fields. Here’s to the preachers of the sacred words. Here’s to the drivers at the wheel. Here’s to you.” –The Call

Time-critical expedited freight is a tough niche to serve — right from the get go, you know it can’t be late. It’s the call of last resort and it takes a special kind of driver to deal with that kind of pressure day in and day out. Yet that’s the beat FedEx Custom Critical has to walk every day and interestingly enough it relies on owner-operators using beefed up medium-duty trucks to manage it. Recently, the company rolled out the red carpet for its 2007 Four Star Award winners — an award that recognizes the top 50 independent contractors who exemplify the company’s dedication to superior customer service and safe driving.

I talked to Scott McCahan, senior manager of safety, contractor relations and recruiting for FedEx Custom Critical, about the kinds of drivers that make up his company’s “top echelon” — the ones to whom this award (now in its eighth year) is geared to recognize. The criteria for winning it are by no means easy: they include accident-free driving, on-time service, availability and load acceptance.

“We used to make annual awards based solely on safety records, but we quickly realized so much more goes into serving this niche successfully,” he told me. “Safety is a big part of it, but so is being consistently on-time and other factors. It really requires an entrepreneurial spirit to make it work.”

McCahan added that it isn’t easy at all, either — there’s a lot more expectation on the part of the customer and every shipment is different, so there are always new wrinkles to handle. But the payoff is pretty big, too, and not just in terms of money. “When we get the call, shippers have reached a point of desperation in many ways,” he said. “So when our drivers show up with their cargo, there’s a great sense of relief on the shipper’s part and an even bigger sense of accomplishement on the driver’s side. It’s a great feeling for them.”

“We’re so technologically savvy now, so focused on efficiency and productivity, that a lot of times we forget about the human being behind the wheel.” –Dale Lawless.

Dale is hands-down one of my favorite sources when it comes to discussing the driver shortage and retention issues facing trucking. So when Schneider National announced a big pay package increase for all of its drivers this week starting Sept. 30 (and you can read more about that in the news portion of our web site), I had to give Dale a shout to get his thoughts on the subject.

An ex-U.S. Army staff sergeant (who still sports a razor-sharp Army haircut to this day) Lawless is president of LPS Inc. – a firm that specializes in hiring and retaining drivers for all kinds of trucking companies (you can reach him at www.cdltruckers.com by the way). With an Arkansas twang and an easy manner, Lawless boils all the issues about recruiting and retaining drivers down to what he believes is “the simple stuff.”

It’s his belief that if you just show that you care about drivers, respect them, talk to them, and most important be upfront and honest with them, they will stay with your company despite pay and home time issues. Now, that isn’t to say pay and home time can be ignored – far from it actually. But if a carrier takes the time and effort to connect with its drivers, pay and home time issues can be managed – meaning drivers won’t jump the minute they can get a penny more a mile at the company down the road.

“What really gets drivers is the way they are treated,” Lawless says. “From maintenance up through dispatch, accounting, and administration, they are generally treated unprofessionally. People don’t listen to them, cut them off, and ignore their problems. So is it any surprise that they leave the first chance they get?”

One of his interesting observations about this industry is despite how technologically advanced its gotten, driver recruiting and retention remains a major Achilles heel for trucking companies. Turnover still plagues trucking just as it did two decades ago and it shows no signs of abating.

“We’ve done everything to improve trucking – except when it comes to the personal touch,” Lawless says. “We’ve put all kinds of technology into the truck and on the trailer. We track them both, map more efficient routes, extract maintenance data, record fuel tax data and send it electronically, monitor idling and waiting time, you name it. But we can’t attract new drivers to the industry nor retain the ones we have. That’s because we forget there are human beings behind the wheel – trucks aren’t automated.”

That isn’t to say that all truck drivers are perfect, nor that with but a few words of encouragement they will gladly drive the streets of New York City in rush hour for free. Drivers are people, pure and simple – they are have different family lives and economic needs, different likes and dislikes. What works for one driver doesn’t necessarily work for the next one. But that’s where communication comes into play, says Lawless. If you talk and more important listen to your drivers regularly, you’ll get a clear picture of what they need to stay put and work effectively for your company.