Chris Burroughs, senior government


JOB, DENIAL OF SUBSEQUENT LOADS, REDUCED PAYMENT, DENIED ACCESS TO THE BEST TRIPS, ETC.”


—FEDERAL REGISTER For carriers, it’s long been illegal to try to


coerce a driver to violate rules, so the new rule may not be a “sea change” for them, Sharma said.


However, the rule brings shippers, receivers


and intermediaries under the FMCSA’s regulatory realm. Pianka said the ATA will be looking to see how much overlap there will be between this rule and existing whistleblower protections enforced by OSHA. He said the ATA is concerned about potential duplicative enforcement now that a new procedure and a new enforcement agency have been added to the mix. “On the whole, we think that shippers


and intermediaries and so on should be our partners,” he said. “We should all be committed to drivers operating within the rules, and this extends prohibitions that motor carriers have always been under.” Bruce Carlton, president and CEO of the


National Industrial Transportation League, a shipper group, said that while the rule’s initial draft was too vague, the final rule is “a perfectly livable solution.” Under the rule’s original wording, a


shipper could have violated the rule by telling one carrier that its driver’s potential hours of service violation forced it to find another carrier—the argument being that the first


20


carrier was being “coerced” by the threat of a loss of future business. Tat possibility eventually was dropped in the final rule. “Tere was sort of an ambiguous sense that


having direct normal business conversations could somehow be deemed to be coercion, and our reading of the final rule says that a shipper or receiver can have those normal conversations that they would encounter with any service supplier, and not have that translated immediately into a coercion,” he said. He said an example would be, “You keep


sending me drivers who only have 30 minutes left on their hours of service. I’ve got a seven- hour haul here. Why are you doing this?’” “Tat’s not coercion,” he said. “Tat’s just


saying, ‘Look, we need a better relationship between our companies.’”


FOR SAFETY’S SAKE He said shippers, like carriers, have no


interest in taking actions that result in a safety issue or rules violation. “Bluntly, if there is a bad shipper out there who is in fact twisting arms on a driver to violate a rule, well, maybe that shipper should be taken out of the picture, right?” he said. “Te highways are there to service the trade, and we all want them to be as safe as possible.”


STATED EXPLICITLY OR IMPLIED IN UNMISTAKABLE TERMS: LOSS OF A


“THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR REFUSAL TO DO SO ARE EITHER


affairs manager with the Transportation Intermediaries Association, said the FMCSA did listen to the various groups’ concerns as it improved its original approach. Changes eliminated what he called a “known or should have known” provision that placed too much responsibility on shippers, receivers and intermediaries who could not be expected to know what rules a driver would potentially violate. Tat rule would have been potentially perilous for intermediaries, whose industry standard is to avoid direct communication with drivers. “In the proposed rule, they wanted the


brokers to reach out to the carriers or to the specific driver and say, ‘Hey, do you have enough hours for this?’ We strongly oppose our guys doing that,” he said. Maverick’s Newell said in an interview


Jan. 11 that his company doesn’t “foresee a huge problem internally on our company.” Te carrier had already started having classes to train employees on how to comply with the rule. Executives and operations personnel were practicing responses to various scenarios. “Everybody’s got to be on the same page. …


It needs to be a consistent message across the board,” he said. “‘We are not going to do this.’ ‘Tis cannot be said like this.’ Tings like that.” He said that, as with other areas of


trucking, communication and relationships will be important in successfully navigating the regulatory environment. Maverick’s technology enables its back office employees to estimate how many hours a driver has been on the road. It’s accurate to the point where the driver approved his logs, and an internal system has been built that can predict when a driver will arrive at the destination. It can predict hours of service accurately, but not exactly. So the carrier must still communicate with the person operating the vehicle, and for that communication to occur successfully, trust must be built. “People forget, this is still a people


business,” Newell said. “People come first. You’ve got to have relationships with the drivers.” NT


NEBRASKA TRUCKER — ISSUE 3, 2016 — www.nebtrucking.com


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