Illustrative of not defining the actual 'problem' with HOS is the current electronic surveillance method of ELDs. By defining the problem on the one hand as 'safety', and on the other hand as an electronic lock to deter adjusting logs, FMCSA has already admitted it does not understand its mission nor its solution, both of which are seen as punitive.
Adjusting logs is a direct function of having to work under rules that both do not understand the work being governed and do not enhance a drivers economic well being. Besides designing a driver's work days with irregular hours, HOS logs do not guarantee pay for all hours worked. Instead both paper and E-logs record all the hours in a day drivers must work to do their job, but still allow carriers to pay only for the driving hours. Non-driving hours can consume from one to 14 hours of a driver's 14 hour allotment of available hours. If you had this type of pay schedule, wouldn't you 'adjust' your non-driving hours so as to maximize your driving hours, your earning hours? Because you'd have to, in order to make a living.
Until FMCSA acknowledges that working without pay is the driver of the log adjusting, they will rubber stamp any simplistic and automated system offered by the carriers and vendors, whose only goal is more profit at the expense of commercial drivers and by extension, at the expense of the safety of the drivers and the innocent public.
The ELD Solution Defined devising HOS to allow drivers to prosper safely
Congress charged the FMCSA with the mission of upgrading the HOS with an electronic format. Congress, however, also does not understand why HOS, as currently written and enforced, is not working. They have been misled into thinking it is a method problem and thus a different, electronic, method would 'solve' the problem.
As the reader has already surmised, this is only a feel good high tech bandaid.
If you understand that adjusting logs is an economic based issue, then the obvious solution is to devise HOS to allow drivers to prosper safely.
THE REAL PROBLEM THAT HAS BEEN CREATED BY NEGLECT OF FMCSA AND NEW PUNITIVE LAWS
George woke up in his cab one morning and didn't feel like driving. "I was exhausted, so I just sat all day in the TA and drank coffee, played some video games. I told my dispatcher that I had been throwing up and couldn't drive. I didn't like lying, and it made me feel like a deadbeat, but I didn't have a choice. I was so tired. Truth be told, I didn't really give a crap about the load anymore, or the job. Nothing really mattered."
The third-year driver, who asked that his real name not be used, wasn't just tired, bored or unhappy about his job, he probably was suffering from 'burnout,' a difference that eludes and confounds both drivers and their companies – even some doctors – but is a serious and explicit malady from which recovery is more than a solid night's sleep away. While the term burnout often is used incorrectly to describe everything from exhaustion to hating your job, those who have studied the subject say it encompasses specific criteria and, unfortunately, is extremely difficult from which to recover. Many sufferers must quit their jobs to do so.
Nobody knows how much industry turnover is attributable to burnout, but driving a truck almost seems like a job made to order for the problem.
Michael Leiter, who recently joined the faculty at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, has been researching burnout for 30 years. He is one of the editors-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Burnout Research. According to Leiter, the current research shows that burnout has three components.
The first is physical and mental exhaustion. "Some people say burnout is just exhaustion, which is silly, since you could just call it exhaustion,” he explained. “It's clearly more than that, but exhaustion is definitely a piece of it. Exhaustion is when you say 'I feel tired when I start my work day.' Feeling tired at the end of your work day is not so bad, but when you feel tired at the beginning, it means that it's chronic. You're not really getting the rest and recovery you need, so that's one dimension, but still it's exhaustion. It's not burnout."
The second is cynicism about the job and distancing yourself from it. "For example," said Leiter, "you used to think you had a neat job, but now you say, 'I really don't give a damn anymore,' and part of that is often tied with being miffed at management for interfering with things. You find yourself saying, 'I just want to get away from this.' It's a kind of distancing and cynicism."
The third component is losing confidence in your abilities and skill. "Your sense of efficacy drops," Leiter said. "Ideally, you once felt like you were doing important work, and were good at it, but with burnout, you start doubting whether your work is important and that you're good at it." This combination of exhaustion, cynicism, and a lack of efficacy defines burnout."
When told of these criteria for burnout driver George said, "Yes. I felt all of this."
Leiter added: "What we find with people who are burned out is that they're concerned about workload and having too many demands, but they also are just really frustrated with everything about the job. They don't like the management of it. They don't like the pay. Everything seems unfair, and they say things like: 'People are just really unpleasant to me, I don't like these people at all, and everything about this job is... I don't like it at all."
Burnout is a relatively new concept, having been identified by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970s, who coined the phrase based on his work at free clinics and therapeutic communities. In 1980, he published “Burn Out: The High Cost of High Achievement.” What it is and how to survive it, a book that became a standard reference on the topic. Much of his ideas survive, but his original 12-stage rubric of burnout has been pared down to three criteria. "It isn't quite so organized in that way, and the data doesn't really support it so much. It was a good early try to make sense out of it, but I don't really subscribe to that [the 12 stages]," said Leiter.
Vishwanath Baba, professor of management and chair, human resources and management at DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who studies stress and burnout, agrees.
"The first symptom of burnout is exhaustion,” he noted. “You’re tired and oftentimes you're not merely physically tired but mentally tired. It is what I call emotional exhaustion. That is the first sign of burnout.”
When you're emotionally exhausted, he added, you're not able to provide the kind of service or attention that your work demands. You depersonalize the people you're working for and your customers. Then you start feeling guilty about it. "You think, 'I’m supposed to be good at this, but I don’t think I’m good at it anymore.' Self-doubt starts seeping in."
To Baba and others who research the issue, it's more effective and easier to deal with the causes of burnout before they occur. He is adamant about this. "My attitude is that it's much better to deal with the stress and the antecedents of stress, rather than treating burnout. It is already quite late when you start feeling burnout. When a manager sees burnout in a person, the best strategy is to reassign them." He added: "Take them away from the work environment and reassign."
He admits that this isn’t easy for carrier managers to do. Baba, who has presented his findings on driver stress to trucking industry stakeholders, says that managers can help by seeing early indications of burnout in drivers and taking action. "Burnout is an end state. It doesn't happen overnight."
The most important signs for managers to look for are drivers dragging their feet on assignments, being negative about everything and reluctance about doing the job. There are several remedies that managers can employ. The first is to increase a driver's resources such as more time to do the job and the training to deal with it. "As a manager, you need to make sure that the demands you place upon your workers are reasonable. I always tell managers to build a little slack time in designing work for their people." Again, it's not an easy fix for drivers.
Baba added: "Be realistic in terms of what resources are needed and make sure workers have those resources, including intellectual resources. If someone doesn’t know how to do certain things, provide training. Make sure they have equipment that is working and in good shape… in other words, try to minimize their stress level."
He noted that dispatchers and managers need to appreciate that not all drivers are the same. Some can handle what's thrown at them and others cannot. "Instead of treating them all as an undifferentiated mass, take a look at these [troubled] people and ask them, 'What is the problem?' Try to start a conversation. "
Leiter and Baba concur that social networks, phone conversations and other interactions can help prevent burnout if drivers are willing to reach out. "It's difficult for a truck driver [because they're alone most of the day] but strong, supportive relationships to the people at work and outside work can make a very big difference. They say people don't quit a job; they quit a boss, but they also quit a team, so when you have other people that you're connecting with, these relationships are as valuable as they can be."
As for George, he quit driving and now works in construction. "I just didn't want to drive anymore. I hated it. It didn't bring me the joy or money I expected. My attitude is way better now about everything."
OUR RIGHT TO STAND AGAINST THE ELD MANDATE STEMS FROM THE RIGHTS OF ENGLISHMEN UPON WHICH OUR OWN BILL OF RIGHTS IS BASED
We did not make these mandates that are issued against our freedom, our economic well being and our safety. The ELD is a perversion of law, a set of chains imposed upon us truck drivers by those who will use the law against us and for their own enrichment. This is not the way of America.
http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?standardNo=076152553X&standardNoType=1&excerpt=true
The legal security that the poor share with the wealthy is based on a set of principles known as the Rights of Englishmen. These rights serve as armor against capricious arrest, confiscation of property, and deprivation of life, limb, and liberty, and they protect every "Englishman" against predatory actions of government. The rights flow from a unique conception of law, but they were not handed down from above as natural law carved in stone. Rather, they are human achievements, fought for by those who believed in them.
Between each Englishman and the government stand a few basic legal principles that prevent the government's use of the law as a weapon for oppression.
The most essential protection is the precept that there can be no crime without intent. But the opposite is also true, The fact that the HOS recorder of record is the ELD, which operates as warrantless surveillance, is the proof of the opposite, that the ELD is a weapon of oppression.This foundation of a just legal system is based on the presumption that people have a moral compass that allows them a choice between violating the law and obeying it. To make it easier to ensnare people, Caligula, the Roman tyrant, wrote his laws in small print and posted them on high pillars to prevent ordinary people from knowing the law. In contrast, basing crime on the accused's intent guards individual liberty by ensuring that people cannot be convicted for offenses that they did not intend to commit. By the same token, this law should ensure the ordinary people that the FMCSA committees need be held liable for their intended violation of our liberty by mandating this ELD device. As eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, "An irregular act without a vicious will is no crime at all." And Qualcomm, the carriers and vengence committees have loudly and regularly declared their ill will towards truckers. Economic surety and safety are not sought after with evil intent but are a law of survival that supercedes any law crafted by those predators, who intend to profit from our digital thralldom.
TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION IS THE APT METAPHOR FOR THE PROTEST OF THE ELD MANDATE
Previous and continuing into now, the FMCSAs advisory committees are adversarial to the population that they are empowered to oversee. Mega carriers, vendors and vengeance groups occupy 17 out of 20 seats. Making a show of getting input from drivers, FMCSA offers an open comment period, where tens of thousands drivers expressed their dissatisfaction with the FMCSA mandates. Expressions that were as effective with this adversarial committee as trying to blow out the fire of the sun with a few strong breaths, because of their agenda of power over and profit from us all.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/01/house-arrest-surveillance-state-prisons
Few think of it this way, but the ankle bracelet is a constant, warrantless surveillance, which violates the constitution..
ELDs' 24 hour surveillance of your location, movement and actions are also, by definition, a violation of the constitution.
To sum up, the ELD dilemna is more than the sum of its parts, including:
monitoring your working time but still not providing the force of law to ensure that you are paid for all that time.
monitoring your actions necessary to do your work, like avoiding accidents, and harassing you and forcing you to endure censure and forcing you to travel to a certain site to be subject to training films, demeaning your professionalism.
monitoring your eating times, insisting you only eat at their discretion
monitoring your bathroom breaks, the most personal action a person can take, which should not be anyone's right to know
exposing you to coercian to run past your legal time window by carriers who can actually change these parameters
OOIDA has it Right - ELDs violate the constitution for unwarrranted surveillance
Five unintended consequences created by the willful ignorance of FMCSA, because they did not consult their attorneys.
1. ELDs automatically create employees of independent contractors in direct violation of IRS rules.
2..ELDs create an opening for carriers to adjust drivers logs, adding more hours and harassing drivers to run them.
3. ELDs create a back door for remote takeover of a trucks operating system by hackers, as proven by UMI.
4. ELDs create even more restrictions on a driver's ability to earn a living by forcing them to eat non-driving hours.
5. ELDs create an atmosphere of greed, where the vendors and carriers earn obscene profits at the expense of drivers.
The ELD Solution
ELD profiteers spun the lie of safety and the Fed's, like the Emperor, clothed their mandate in its fragile virtual weave. Never the less, we call the ELD by it's proper name, digital slavery. The garment of safety quickly unravels to reveal an illegal unwarranted surveillance device, forcing drivers to drive faster and more carelessly because of the loss of elasticity inherent in paper logs; a device that reduces drivers to machines, replacing their professional judgement with algorithms.
From The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey says, "Our basic nature is to act, and not be acted upon. As well as it enables us to choose our response to particular circumstances it empowers us to create circumstances.