> You don’t want all truck drivers putting in the maximum hours humanly possible. It’s a safety hazard. But having to pay for health insurance makes corporations try to optimize for this at the expense of human lives.
... what?
First, I don't understand how paying for health insurance means they are trying to get the most hours out of their employees. I guess you could say thats somewhat true for literally every overhead cost including social security payroll taxes, training, heating buildings, etc. At best, it seems a little true in a very indirect way so why the laser focus on health insurance?
Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it disincentivizes employers from doing it.
> First, I don't understand how paying for health insurance means they are trying to get the most hours out of their employees
I'm not OP, but my take: the health insurance cost of hiring a driver is fixed, regardless of how many hours per week they drive. Therefore, the more hours they drive, the more the employer's "bang for their buck".
> Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it disincentivizes employers from doing it.
Health and safety regulations are written in blood, and exist precisely because employers need to be forced by law to maintain safe working conditions for their employees.
> employers need to be forced by law to maintain safe working conditions for their employees.
Probably less true in trucking, where the leading cause of worker injury is road accidents. If, say, a roofer falls off a roof, the only damage is to the worker, but if a trucker crashes badly enough to get injured, the truck and cargo are likely damaged as well. Truckers and their employees should be more naturally aligned on safety issues.
This is one of those situations where a theory reasoned from first principles fails to match reality.
Back in the 20th C., drivers frequently took amphetamines in order to spend more time driving. Forged log books are a significant incentive for the development of electronic logs. I've seen many stories of drivers told to break hours-of-service regulations by dispatchers.
And the hours of service regs are insane (https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-... - keep in mind "on duty" != "driving" but waiting for loads and such, which the driver is not paid for) largely to maximize the number of hours driven.
That doesn't necessarily mean there's a disagreement about safety between workers and supervisors, it could just as well mean they both disagree with the regulators about the acceptable level of risk.
This would make sense from first principles, because unsafe truckers impose externalities beyond the direct risks to truckers and their supervisors, by making the roads more dangerous to the public.
Why isn't it illegal to force someone to log/elog overage hours? Isn't that a fifth amendment violation as you're forcing them to incriminate themselves? Seems elog should be challenged.
By that logic any law requiring disclosure of any kind would be a fifth amendment violation.
You are not required to participate in trucking, nor is it a right to do so. Choosing that career (and it's associated licensing) comes with responsibilities...
Here's an example. You don't have a right to a short barreled shotgun (per US v. Miller). But you can get one by buying a stamp. If I'm a felon applying for the stamp would be incriminating, thus courts ruled felon cannot be guilty of not disclosing they have the shotgun. So they get to have it and never 'log' it even though everyone else must.
It's only violating the fifth for the part where you must admit to crimes, not all logging. I'm talking about hours logged past the maximum.
For employers who are big enough maybe. A big percentage of freight though is handled by small employers and owner operators.
If a particular unsafe practice produces an extra $1 million dollar accident every 200k hours of driving time, a small one man operation isn’t likely to see that happen over the course of a career. And even if they do, they may not have enough data to notice the correlation.
A company with 1000 drivers will likely deal with it once per month.
But keep in mind, even the least-safe driver will get 99% of the loads to their destination. Dealing with accidents is a cost-of-doing-business issue for large companies.
Most semi-trucks cost about 200 000 USD. I couldn't find the value of a single truck load anywhere but there's a thread here[0] where folks are speculating it takes about 30-60 trucks to fully stock a Walmart, and a second thread where folks are talking about the likely cost to buy everything in a Walmart[1], which converges on low seven figures.
Let's maximise the truck value with these constraints, so $10M/30 = 333 333 USD.
Then we could perhaps estimate that the value of each truck is somewhere around 550 000 USD.
How many trucker hours is that? Well, let's take the number from TFA which is 110 000 USD/year, assuming an average of 10 hours per day[2] (50 hour weeks) for 50 weeks per year (even truckers need a holiday), we get a total of 2500h/year. That means that one Walmart truck is worth 12,500 trucker hours.
The 'involvement rate' for crashes resulting in injury per 100 million miles was 36 in 2021 (i.e., approx 1 every 2.7M miles).
In 12 500 hours at 45mph[2], a trucker will travel around 562 500 miles.
Wherever I've had to make an assumption, I've leaned towards it being less expensive to not have a crash (high end of value of stock in the store, low end of number of trucks, choosing to 'total' the truck in case there's an injury, etc.).
However, this very basic and unscientific examination it does seem to suggest that your immediate conclusion that the employers of truckers should be economically aligned towards protecting trucks and truckers is not supported by data.
> Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it disincentivizes employers from doing it.
When have employers ever cared about safety except when mandated by law? These things were all legally codified because people got hurt or died, not because companies wanted to be "nice"
... what?
First, I don't understand how paying for health insurance means they are trying to get the most hours out of their employees. I guess you could say thats somewhat true for literally every overhead cost including social security payroll taxes, training, heating buildings, etc. At best, it seems a little true in a very indirect way so why the laser focus on health insurance?
Second, it its truly a safety hazard then it disincentivizes employers from doing it.