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There is one issue that affecting thousands of my brother and sister company drivers: The bad economy affecting the way we are being treated by the companies we work for these days.

As you know, high fuel costs and a slow economy are causing many trucking companies to shut down. The ones that remain are scared and scrambling to stay afloat. To do this, many are putting the onus of fuel savings and lack of incoming revenue squarely on the back of their drivers.

The company driver has no control over the freight a company agrees to haul or the rates the company charges. The driver has no say in how a company operates or conducts their business. The driver has no say in how a company specs their trucks. Yet the company driver is expected to sacrifice their pay, their home time, their health, and their safety for the company's bottom line.

It starts out with idling. An idling truck is for some the only way to sleep comfortably in the highs and lows of weather around the country. No one could hold a comfortable sleep against a driver who has been on the road for a stretch. But some companies are charging their drivers a gallon of fuel for every hour idled. (It takes approximately one gallon of fuel to idle a truck one hour.) We drivers are now being monitored closely on our idle times and are being told to not idle except in extreme temperatures, if at all. Have you ever sat in your car on an even 70 or 80-degree day in the sun without the a/c on? It heats up fast, doesn't it? Can you imagine trying to sleep in the sleeper of a truck without the benefit of air conditioning? To be a safe and effective driver, sleep is a must. Many of us are not getting it due to the heat/cold of the sleeper without the idling.

Furthermore, our personal safety is jeopardized with not idling the trucks. In today's world of hijackings, rapes, robbery, it is not safe for us to leave windows even cracked open and vents open. Companies, in a lot of cases, are refusing to pay for idle aire, a system that provides heat or a/c into the truck and truthfully, it costs almost as much as idling would. Also, many companies are not installing alternate power units (apus) on their company trucks to provide power to run a/c/heating units, citing the cost of the units in today‘s economy and high fuel costs.

One side note about idling. I have a little dog that has been riding with me for over four years. Many companies, the ones who offer pet riding privileges, are now banning pets from the trucks because they think the driver will idle the truck more for the pet's comfort. In searching for a new job, a recruiter for a trucking company told me to "just get rid of the dog, have it put down if necessary" if I wanted to come to work for them!

Another thing that companies are doing to their drivers is cutting benefits and pay. Sometimes how they do this is very subtle. Drivers that run over the road, not local, are paid on performance pay for the most part, or a certain amount of cents-per-miles driven. Companies are cutting the speeds of their trucks back below posted limits in the name of fuel economy. In the end, this means fewer runs per day and fewer miles per day, ergo, less pay. The company I worked for up until recently cut their fleet's speed back 7 mph. This cost me 490 miles a week (7 mph x 10 hours per day x 7 days per week = 490 miles). At my rate of pay, this costs me approximately $180.00 a week gross.

The funny thing about all this is that in the long run, it costs more in everyone else's fuel for trucks to run slower. When trucks run slower than other traffic, it causes more lane changes and acceleration/deceleration by both trucks and other, faster vehicles than if we ran with the flow of traffic. Not only does this burn more fuel overall, it also poses a safety hazard.

Companies are now trying to force their drivers to run harder, to "maximize their hours." They do not want a driver to stop if they get tired, or to eat during the 14-hour period until they do their total miles allowed. The dispatcher at my previous company even questioned why I had stopped for two, five-minute periods during a 600-mile day's run (bathroom breaks) and why I had taken an hour off (to take a nap during the 5 a.m. sleepy time), he was monitoring me off the satellite system.

Home time is being cut back also. Some companies are going from say, four days off not including the day you get in the yard, to 96 hours off from the time you enter the gates of the terminal, no matter if you have work to do in getting repairs scheduled, paperwork done, or any other random things a driver needs to do before leaving the yard for home.

I do not know of any segment of the industry where company drivers are not suffering from the slow economy in some way. Companies are laying off drivers (yes, even the union companies), tightening up their running areas (meaning fewer miles), selling off trucks and hiring more students instead of experienced drivers for the difference in pay.

Company drivers are walking on eggshells wondering if they will get the call to bring the truck to the yard, the company is closing, or waiting for the next change in policy to occur, all in the name of the bad economy.

Ya'll be safe out there!