In a week, families all over the country will pack up their cars and make a trip to the beach, to a family picnic, or just to get away from day to day life for the holiday weekend.
And if the trucking industry had its way, those families would be sharing the interstate with semi-truck drivers who are exhausted from working more than 80 hours a week.
Seriously. If that sounds reckless and unbelievably unsafe for both the public and the drivers, that's because it is. Nearly 4,000 people die in large truck crashes each year, and driver fatigue is a leading factor according to the
Department of Transportation.
Take truck driver Dana Logan, who recently told reporters the heartwrenching story about how she personally witnessed another truck driver fall asleep and ram an SUV from behind. The SUV was slammed underneath Logan's trailer, shearing off the top of the SUV and decapitating the two fathers and two children inside the SUV. The truck driver who had fallen asleep and rammed the SUV from behind managed to ask Dana Logan's husband one last question before he died, he asked simply "Did I hit something?".
More famously back in June of 2014, a Walmart truck driver had been awake for more than 28 hours when he slammed his truck into actor
Tracy Morgan's limo van, killing one passenger and leaving Morgan in a coma for two weeks.
We all drive on the roads, so this is definitely a matter of public concern. So when will the public comment period be on this proposal to let trucking companies push their drivers even beyond an 80 hour week? When will the public get to weigh in on whether the truck drivers are allowed to work themselves to exhaustion and threaten public safety?
Never.
That's because these measures are being inserted into a must-pass spending measure that includes funding for transportation, funding for housing and military construction projects, funding for the Veterans Administration, as well as new funding for Zika prevention in the United States. Both the House and the Senate versions of this legislation would block the Obama administration from enforcing a regulation that requires workers to take two days in a row off per week, and caps truck drivers' hours at 70 hours a week.
And as the
Huffington Post points out, bribing, excuse me, "making campaign contributions to", compliant congressmen to use this sort of legislative backdoor to roll back safety regulations is something that the trucking industry has been doing for at least the last three years.
But it's not just the trucking industry that does this, pretty much every lobbying group on Capitol Hill can pull a few strings to get riders inserted into must-pass spending bills, and even though they rarely have anything to do with the larger bill, they always have a clear benefit to special interest factions.
In the last few years we've seen spending bills amended with
industry-friendly riders that would roll back clean water protections and net neutrality rules, we've seen riders to defund Planned Parenthood, to defund Obamacare, to gut the National Labor Relations Board and thus block a litany of safety regulations, and the list goes on and on.
