Anyone familiar with the trucking industry in the USA, knows that the workplace is not located in just one warehouse,or one retail outlet or, manufacturing facility. It is not confined to the city, or some rural address out in “hometown” america, nor is it bound by state boundary lines. The trucking workplace is found in every home,business, and every other place where physical goods are used or stored. It is not discovered only on the interstates of America but on every back road and city street in all of our major cities as well as each and every rural area in all of the states in the union. No business,no home,no retail outlet and no person would exist quite as well as we do without the trucks who deliver our goods and services.
However,the trucking workplace is not just the eighteen wheelers you see driving down the interstate or backed up to a dock in the industrial part of town. The trucking workplace is also located in offices, huge warehouses,restaurants, and of course, on practically every highway in Ameria.
Trucks are dispatched, monitored by satellite technology, and in some cases, operated by drivers using the latest GPS equipment to direct them. The cab of that eighteen wheeler is no longer a “sweat box” where someone toils away for eighteen to twenty four hours a day trying to deliver a load on time that was probably late when it was picked up. The trucking workplace has changed more drastically inside the cab of these big trucks more than any other area in the transportation industry. With the advent of new technologies like qualcomm, cellphones, and laptops, truck drivers today resemble “techies” instead of the traditional unkempt unshaven burly truck driver from many years ago. Add this to the new ecology friendly engines and the on board power units installed on most of the new big rigs today the drivers are much more relaxed, and less stressed out than the drivers of fifteen or twenty years ago. As you may have noticed, the trucking workplace has improved tremendously over the last few years, and it is a very different environment than it was not too many years ago.
Now let me switch gears here for a moment, with all of these technological improvements to the communications, and the trucks and the way they operate, this has made for safer drivers,resulting in safer, friendlier, highways for the motoring public. Simply stated, today’s drivers are better equipped to do their job than ever before, and the simple truth is, they are a more conscientious breed of driver than those of years past. Here’s what I mean, the drivers today are just as concerned about their loads as at any other time, they are just not as willing to sacrifice safety, and the abuse of their own bodies to perform unsafe driving acts in order to deliver their loads. Look at it this way, there are more single women, and husband and wife teams driving today and they demand safer equipment, better communications, and loads that are dispatched with safety in mind.
And make no mistake, the trucking companies have been right at the forefront of insisting on safety in the trucking workplace. Dispatchers no longer try to get the driver to “just do the best he can” when it comes to violating his or her safety rules of the road. Safety today is a team effort starting with the company policies and enforced by everyone in the process of getting each load delivered to its destination safely.
What’s this got to do with you? Safety on the highway is everyone’s concern, not just the dispatcher, or the truck driver, it is everyone who ventures into the “trucking workplace”.