On April 28, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that puzzled many, as it addressed a problem that hardly anyone even knows about, much less understands how it ever came to be. The order, entitled “Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers,” had one primary objective: overturning a peculiar memorandum by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), issued in the waning days of the Obama administration, that waived the enforcement of English proficiency standards for those who hold a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL). Prior to this memorandum, any commercial driver who was found by police or enforcement officials to be unable to communicate in English would be placed “Out of Service,” since their inability to speak English was deemed an imminent safety hazard to motorists.
No one knows exactly why the Obama-era FMCSA waived enforcement, though it is theorized that legal difficulties for Spanish-speaking truckers from Mexico and French-speaking ones from Canada may have worried government officials concerned with NAFTA, since renegotiated as the USMCA under Trump. But until recently, Mexican truckers were constrained to a narrow geographical band along the southern border, and most French-Canadian truckers were either bilingual or knew enough English to get by as a result of trucking in other areas of Canada, so non-English speaking truckers were not a major problem in America. Another theory points to pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, who have a long history of suing the government for having the perfectly reasonable expectation that people who move to the United States should learn the dominant language. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, an association of safety and enforcement agencies across the US, Canada, and Mexico, claim that a vote they took in 2016 is behind the waiver, though they now support President Trump’s EO. Trump has, quite sensibly, sought to make English America’s official language, and surely that should at least apply to its roads, where safety-critical signage is written in English.
The new EO suggests that the Trump Administration has been listening to truckers—myself included—who have been sounding the alarm about the problems associated with Obama’s enforcement exception, problems that included an awful lot of innocent motorists killed in collisions with illiterate truckers. In the EO, Trump cites the problem of state DMVs issuing CDLs to “non-domiciled” drivers, which is to say, people who don’t live in that state, and which is really to say, drivers who are not American at all. After Joe Biden’s refusal to enforce immigration laws and the resulting flood of migrants over the border, there are no doubt many such truck drivers around today.
The president should be applauded for taking notice of this problem, and specifically, for listening to the small group of truckers and transportation watchers who have been researching and discussing it openly for some time, and who officially notified Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy of the issue well before corporate lobby groups deigned to finally admit there was even an issue to discuss.
Though the ink is barely dry on Trump’s signature, it’s already clear that the EO will face pressure from several directions, including the trucking industry’s largest corporate lobby group, the American Trucking Association (ATA), who did give a (very milquetoast) statement in support of the EO’s solution to non-English-speaking truckers but who a few weeks earlier were claiming there was not even a problem that needed to be solved. Most members of the ATA don’t employ recent arrivals of dubious legal standing and language skills, but those trucking companies who do put pressure on small, family-owned American carriers who are ATA members’ primary competition.
Up north, the analog to the ATA is the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA), whose members have their own problems with insourced labor: Canada’s trucking industry has been fast taken over by the nation’s large and rapidly growing Indian community, many of whom are brand new to the country and unassimilated. Many Canadian provinces allow truck licensing exams to be taken in Punjabi, meaning truckers can get licensed and on the road without speaking English.
Many Canadian truckers are involved in cross-border trade with the United States. How long until the CTA begs the newly elected government of Prime Minister Mark Carney to go to battle with Trump? After enforcement of English standards results in their members’ rigs being stranded all over the United States, such an international dispute will be highly likely, especially since Carney campaigned against the U.S. president, who has waged a rhetorical assault on America’s northern neighbor. Trump ought to use his bellicosity for something productive and tell Carney to clean up his own trucking industry’s act. After all, how controversial is it to ask people to take an English-as-a-Second-Language course, especially if they work in a safety-sensitive industry in a public space where everyone needs to communicate effectively? Doing so could have the beneficial effect of reducing the number of Indian immigrants being used as drug mules.
At least one section of Trump’s executive order could have used some additional, and more specific, provisions:
[BLOCK] Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Transportation shall identify and begin carrying out additional administrative, regulatory, or enforcement actions to improve the working conditions of America’s truck drivers.[/BLOCK]
While the list of problems affecting truck drivers deserves an entire book of its own, there are two actions the Trump Administration could take which would greatly improve the working conditions of America’s truckers, and they are very much related to each other and would be easy solutions to major problems which have begotten so many others.
First, there is a piece of legislation which is languishing in committee that Trump ought to demand appear on his desk: the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers (GOT) Act. One of the reasons that trucking has such a massive turnover problem, which led President Biden to take the misstep of flooding our roads with migrants, is that truckers are in effect considered second-class citizens when it comes to pay. We truckers are exempt from the overtime pay that is given to nearly all other workers in this country who work over forty hours a week. The GOT Act is a one-line bill which would remove that exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Why should truckers, many of whom have supported Trump, continue to be denied this fair pay, especially when we sacrifice so much time away from our homes and families as we do in service of the economy?
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
Solving the pay question of truckers would help solve the second major problem, which even Biden acknowledged in his 2021 “Trucking Action Plan”: the so-called “detention” problem.
Biden’s plan drew on the work of former MIT researcher David Correll, who found that truckers waste an enormous amount of time in detention—i.e., they are held up at the facilities of their customers, waiting to load and unload. Correll’s suggestions for how the government could reduce detention time, thus removing the need for ever more truckers, were ultimately ignored by Biden, who chose instead to reduce requirements for CDLs and give them to migrants and refugees. More low-paid bodies appeared an easier solution than fixing the detention problem, which is quite a critical issue for our supply chains and made more urgent by Trump’s plans for re-shoring.
Trump could even kill these two birds with one stone—addressing both the overtime-pay and detention problems—by demanding passage of the GOT Act, which would force some accounting for drivers’ time into law, as the industry would be incentivized to get trucks moving faster, lest shippers have to pay for trucks sitting idle rather than moving goods across the country. Truckers would finally be paid fairly, addressing one concern that motivated Trump’s EO, and the driver-retention issue would be addressed, as truckers would have less reason to quit, thus reducing the burden on taxpayers, who subsidize driver training. America’s supply chains and economic security would likewise be much better served.
