The Teamsters union is petitioning the new Transportation Secretary, Ray LaHood, to overturn the changes in the truck driver hours of service rules, which were modernized in 2003 and have withstood numerous court challenges already. This seems like pure politics on the part of the Teamsters union.
I’ll give Jim Hoffa this much. The president of the 1.4 million-member Teamsters union is nothing if not persistent.
For at least the fourth time in this decade, the Teamsters union is challenging the legitimacy of the revised hours of service rules governing 7.5 million truck drivers.
For those non-truck drivers out there, here are the new HOS rules:
- 11 hours daily driving limit within a 15-hour on-duty day.
- Drivers are limited to 70 hours of driving in any seven-day period, and they can “restart” their work week at anytime after taking 34 consecutive hours off.
The Teamsters’ opposition to this is purely political. Even though its freight division represents fewer than 70,000 truck drivers (its UPS division represents nearly four times as much), the Teamsters are opposing this for the same reason the snake opposes the mongoose. They always have. So they always will.
The old HOS went unchanged from 1935 until the late 1990s. Then the DOT’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration started to tinker with the rules, and its first results were awful.
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