Truck driver safety histories will soon be available from NIC Technologies for pre-employment safety checks. This will play a key role in CSA 2010.
10/21/2009 NIC Technologies Wins Contract to Build Pre-Screening SystemNIC Technologies, which provides official government portals, online services, and secure payment processing solutions, has been tapped by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to create a National Motor Carrier Pre-Employment Screening System. The company was awarded a contract with an initial one-year term, with four, single-year renewals.
On Oct. 7, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced plans to give carriers access to portions of the Motor Carrier Management Information System - the database that police and roadside inspectors use to check on drivers and carriers. The program is scheduled to begin in December.
The new service is designed to distribute commercial drivers' safety performance history as part of the pre-employment screening process. The system will assist the motor carrier industry in assessing individual operators' crash and serious safety violation inspection history as a pre-employment condition. Drivers will also be able to obtain their individual history from the service.
"Safety is our number one priority at the Department of Transportation," LaHood said. "This new initiative will help trucking companies ensure the safest drivers are behind the wheel of commercial trucks and buses. Making this information more transparent will make our roads and highways safer for everyone.
"It is anticipated that users of the service will pay a subscription fee of $100 per year and a $10 transaction fee for each record pulled. There will be additional fees for records requested via fax or mail. Individual drivers requesting their own record will not be subject to any subscription fee.
The system will adhere to all other federal privacy requirements to ensure the privacy and security of a driver's personal information.
More info: www.nicusa.com
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9 comments:
Why not go after the four-wheeler drivers who cause most of the accidents?
These idiots that conceived this idea have "NEVER,EVER" sat behind the wheel of a Tractor Trailer or much less rode in one to see for themselves what a Trucker has to deal with on a daily basis just to earn a living. These DEMOCRATS need to adopt the intelligence of REPUBLICANS and begin a crusade to educate the motoring public of the dangers of cutting off a Tractor Trailer at highway speeds just because he/she does not want to drive behind the Tractor Trailer. Being a Trucker myself, I really prefer to drive at night when most of the motoring public are in bed asleep instead of slowing well below the posted speed limit to talk and sending text messages on their cell phones. It sure would be nice to see Truckers all over the country unite and simultaneously take a week off from work!!!
none of these laws address the poor sucker duped into working for these rackateer companies that hire rookies and starve these drivers if they dont break the rules and starve them if they do break the rules and make it impossible for them to make a living turning a decent well intended person into a bitter battered death machine.
Companies will hire an army of lawyers to find ways to ultimately rig thier contracts to make sure they can continue to abuse drivers and thrust the blame on the shoulders of the drivers and simpley replace these drivers with an endless pool of naive and gullible beginners. Not only that..the government will subsidize the training and keep the pockets of these companies fat. While sucker after sucker watches his career sink and families suffer. Dont you for a moment think that one word of this is anything less than the absolute truth! You want the truth get the truth. Take your studies on the road, door to door and ask the drivers out there who need to pay thier bills and just wanted a job what it cost them and what they lost. Start with the endless list of unemployed Swift and CR England and Central Refridgerated Drivers and remember these arent objects. They are human lives torn and ripped to hell by the legal abuses these companies get away with. If you want to punish drivers then made damn sure you are punishing them for violations they could control and investigate the entire picture! What were the circumstances that led up to this. Make laws that require all exchanges between driver and companies be documented and held accountable. Stop making laws that pit the driver in the center to fix the trucks the loads the shippers the recievers the carriers and the public. They simply cant bear the burden and you will destroy the attraction for any quality human to enter this industry.
I can assure you few if any of these law makers could survive very long out on the road without severe regret for lack of insight into the position they place these drivers in. Try going home with a paycheck that couldnt feed a cat and face your wife and try to justify the 2 months of dispair you spent on the road facing hell. Driving through icey roads because if you dont you will loose your money. And if you do no matter how good you are, you risk your life and the others around you. But you were sold a bill of BS by the company promising endless support and assistance. Glorious speeches and elegant safety lectures that suggest and imply you dont have to take risk. Its all a front and a facade to get you to sign on and once you are out there with no place to turn in dire need and indebted into a system of servitude. Its easier just to strike the gabel, look away and shun the consquences of the truth. Put one of these plush living bums behind the wheel and leave them stranded in the city center of new jersey for a night and see how look at the laws they impose on these drivers meeting impossible deadlines under impossible circumstances. If they fail. They go hungry! Go home and face the wife and explain to her why you cant pay the bills and look at the heart broken faces of the children who have missed you so much and see the months of your absence toll. Make the laws that make you look good but you will be damned for years if you fail to see the whole picture.
You forgot to mention the other companies like Stevens Transport and US Express. Central Refrigerated is another company that starves their drivers and tricks them into leasing a truck and then starve them to death. Their lease program is like hanging a carrot in front of a donkeys face and playing chase the carrot. You complain to the company that your not making money, and they tell you to train new drivers, even if you only have just 6 months of driving experience. Since Central controls all of the drivers aspects meaning they control his miles driven, his pay, his truck payment, his expenses except personal expenses, the driver is left with nothing but some pocket change; or is left with a negative pay check meaning the driver is in debt. The driver is trapped in the contract with no way out unless he can trick another driver into taking over the lease. The lease itself is a fraud. Its pretty much, you sign here and agree to starve to death. Servitude I tell you!! You have no choice to go home to see your family because you have an outrageous truck payment to make, nor does Central offer the driver enough miles or pay to cover the payments and to make an extra buck. So your either stuck out in the road making a truck payment and hopefully seeing a paycheck, but you can't go home to your families. They starve you into submission. Your basically starved and you have no choice but to break the rules meaning go over your 11hr, your 14hr, your 70hr, cut your 10hr break down, and drive in ridiculous unsafe conditions in unsafe equipment. If equipment is damaged and you the driver report it to the company, you are now stuck with playing fix the trailer and lose out on your load and not even get reimbursed for your time. Why is the Truck driver the bad man? These companies drive the trucker insane, the general public drive the trucker insane, the shippers and receivers driver the trucker insane. While you, Mr. Lawmaker who's sitting behind a fancy desk with a fancy fountain pen and a fancy computer who takes home a nice fat paycheck and drives around his fancy automobile and sees his family everyday and gets to take a bath and have a nice home cooked meal write these goofy laws, we the animal truck drivers get to go without a shower for a few days to a week because we either don't have enough time on our load to deliver, or theres no truck parking available in the busy truck stop to take a shower. We are stuck with unhealthy food from fast food restraunts, gaining weight and and increasing our cholesterol levels off of McDonalds McBlubber Burgers, if we can afford it. Heck we can't even stop to take a break anymore because of your goofy laws. We are now slaved into driving our 11 hour drive period because we only got 14hrs to do so. Unlike every job on earth, driving a big rig for long periods of time shakes up your body and challenges the drive mentally and physically. Why don't you, Mr. or Mrs or Miss Lawmaker look at the European trucking rules and see how the driver is driving comfortably and eating well and getting paid well.
Truckers in Europe are respected. Truckers in USA, are neglected. We the truckers in USA are like the monkey butt baboons in the cage getting crackers thrown at us and laughed at by spectators. Take away the truck drivers and see what would happen to this Country. America revolves around truck drivers. We are the missing link. Excuse me, the missing chain with all the links. Waste our tax money by making countless useless laws to get the truck driver in trouble. Open your eyes and look at the truckers that get the accidents, its not the experienced professional truck driver, its the poor sucker who agreed to pay a ridiculous amount to get trained to truck drive and only get trained 2 weeks here and 4 weeks there. Don't grill the drivers, grille the companies our government supports financially for creating new jobs. More like flood out the old experienced truckers with new inexperienced unsafe drivers who don't know what the pay is and settles down with a paycheck half the pay of a minimum wage mcdonalds job. Waste our tax dollars on making stupid studies on truckers who use their cell phones and don't study the dispatchers, the companies, the equipment being offered and the general public. Thank you Mr. Lawmaker for turning down my pride for being an American because in all reality, we suck because of our biasedness against something.
It is a sad day for the truck driver indeed! The bottom line is that it just keeps getting worse, no matter how much we complain. We as truck drivers need to take a step back and look at why this keeps happening to us, we do not stand together on anything, and we do not pull together in bad situations like all the other professions. Until the day comes that we do something about it, its never going to stop. As far as these new laws, it could turn around and bite the hand that brought it about. Its no longer going to matter who the driver is, if he operates the vehicle he could lose his license. When the drivers start refusing to pull the load until properly fixed, it will have an effect on the companies. When the driver refuses to drive past his hours of service, it will have an effect on the companies. When all this costs companies more and shippers more and customers more, then someone will finally look at what is the cause of this. Maybe then the lawmaker who did this will have to go home to his family and say that he doesnt have a job anymore.
Not all trucking companies treat their drivers bad. I have no problem with my company. I tell them all the time that that appointment time is "not going to happen". I know that you truckers in the huge companies do face alot of problems and the huge companies should be under the microscope. The general public should be factored in too. But in this whole situation, I have not seen any way to challenge what goes into the point calculation. A accident that is not your fault and had a DOT investigation filed is automatic points under CSA 2010 for operating in a unsafe manner. Are they holding us responcible for the action of others? Kind of sounds that way.
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