New CTHRC tools to help trucking companies hire and retain newcomers

Gordon

Just focusing on getting and keeping newcommers is a very short sighted solution to a complex problem that been plaguing the industry for years.
The trucking companies also have to do their part by making the job more attractive to potential local employees and then finding ways to retain those employees but also keep them in the business because many new drivers get discouraged within weeks of either looking for work or having companies taking advantage of their inexperience after they get hired.
Bringing in foreign labour has only made things worst for drivers making them more disposable due to the fact that companies can replace them with foreign labour, the companies are too reliant now on foreign labour to the point where now they there is a whole system in place where companies are posting job ads with no company name, address or wage paid looking for drivers just to satisfy the requirement of the LMO (Labour Market Opinion) or AEO(Arranged Employment Opinion) some even say it on there ads that they are LMO available, the many web classified are full of those kind of ads and they are not interested in hiring local drivers and refuse to even disclose their name, address and wages paid to applicants while still asking for resumes, driver abstract, port pass number and fast pass number which of course any intelligent truck driver would refuse to send without getting all the info from the company first.
Many of those companies also have very high expectation of their local applicants, minimum of 2 years experience, a clean driving record, transport of dangerous goods cert., WHMIS training, port pass, fast pass I can't really think of many jobs that has such low wages but all these requirements and I seriously doubt that the newcommer does too, but the companies will look passed all these requirement for a newcommer.
But in the transport industry that’s the name of the game, getting cheap labour to work long hours with often broken equipment, keep maintenance cost down, create sweatshops on wheels or face bankruptcy.
Since the Motor Vehicle Act of 1980 the carriers and drivers lost lots of power with the de-regulation of motor carrier which brought in the owner operators and made transport cheaper for shippers but significantly brought down the driver's wages when the trucking companies passed down lost revenues to truck drivers and the wages never recovered since, even with driver shortage wages remained low when they should have been going up, now with the hiring of more foreign workers the sweatshops on wheels are here to stay I guess because often time when truck drivers report the companies that make them work over their HOS, hauling overweight cargo and using dangerous equipment they are quickly fired and put on the Professional Drivers Bureau databank, a databank where trucking companies for 29.95 a month can access complaints and how many companies the driver worked for, that sounds ok in theory but the fact is that the information on the databank is not verified and dispatchers can destroy a drivers career by adding that they failed a drug test and PDB don't need any proof to add it to their databank, although this is not well known by Canadian truck drivers the DAC report in the U.S. is a very well known fact by American truck drivers.

Posted February 1, 2013 06:34 PM