Voices from the Open Road: Utilization, Shippers, and Driver Quality of Life

David Correll:
Welcome to what I think is a very special edition of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics podcast, because today we are talking to a panel of working American truck drivers about their lives over the road. I am very excited to meet in person Desiree Wood, known to many people as Trucker Desiree. I've followed Trucker Desiree on social media for a long time to learn from one step removed on what driving life is like. Desiree has 15 years in the industry where she not only carries loads, but she also is a real vocal advocate for positive change in the industry through an organization that she created and leads called REAL Women in Trucking. Desiree, thank you so much for joining us.

Desiree Wood:
Thank you for inviting me. And I've been in the industry a little bit less, I think it's 13 years now, and I really appreciate you guys inviting me.

David Correll:
Oh, thank you. We are honored to have you. So oftentimes when we think about truck drivers, we think about the term knights of the roads, the heroes who are out there on America's transportation network, carrying the loads, but also keeping us all safe. And we're joined by a real knight of the road today, Mr. Mark Cavanagh, who has won multiple awards, but the one that I'm referencing there is a Goodyear Highway Hero Award in 2016 for helping to rescue a fellow driver in an accident. Mark, thank you so much for what you do for the community and thank you for joining us today.

Mark Cavanagh:
Thank you. It's my pleasure.

David Correll:
We're also joined by Paul Marhoefer, known to many of his adoring fans as Long Haul Paul. Paul has spent decades as an owner operator crisscrossing the country carrying freight. But in addition to that, he's also a beautiful recording artist, recording songs about the trucking life under the name Long Haul Paul, and he's also the host through Overdrive Magazine of a podcast I highly recommend called Over The Road. So thank you Paul very much for joining us.

Paul Marhoefer:
Thank you for inviting me. Hello Desiree, hello Mark.

David Correll:
My name is David Correll. I'm a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, where I also co-direct something called the FreightLab that studies all sorts of freight transportation with a heavy emphasis on trucking. A project that I'm leading as part of the FreightLab is called the Driver Initiative, where what we want to do is understand the working lives, the utilization, the quality of life of America's truck drivers. You all have several years experience in the industry and not everyone in our listening audience knows drivers or knows what it's like to be a driver. Could you tell us a little bit about what brought you to the industry and then you've been in it for a while. So what keeps you in it too?

Desiree Wood:
The thought of working in an office just made my skin crawl. So I was really trying to find something, I was moving around and using my skills. And I found trucking and I loved driving as soon as I started learning about it.

Paul Marhoefer:
Well, Dave, that was always a hard question for me and my daughter loaned me her copy of Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. And page one of Travels with Charley explained my whole life to me. And Steinbeck said from the time he was a boy, he had this disease, and the name of the disease was anywhere but here. So by the time I was 16, I was a guest worker in Germany. I still proudly have my [inaudible 00:03:44] papers. And I suppose if I had lived in Gloucester, I'd be on some ship somewhere. I don't know why. It's possibly a personal deficit, but I got to be somewhere other than here.

David Correll:
Thank you. Mark, what brought you to the industry and what keeps you in it?

Mark Cavanagh:
I was in construction before I started this. Physically, it was real demanding and I wanted to find a stable career because I don't go from job to job to job. And I love to drive, so I put myself through school and in March of 1999, I obtained my CDL and I've stayed in it ever since. I enjoy seeing the country and I get paid to do it. There are places that most people won't see that we've been to, and we can take time off anywhere in the country we want. I love this job. There's nothing else I'd want to do. And after 22 years almost now, I'll continue to do it until I retire.

David Correll:
Thank you. Let me jump right to the other side of that then. What's the worst part of making a career in trucking?

Desiree Wood:
Well, the worst things are, is a lot of misinformation. When you enter the training is absolutely horrible. And some of the people that survive it are just from sheer dumb luck, that they just happen to get a trainer that taught them and they were working for a company that they were able to get through the first year. So there's a lot of people that go with all their hopes and dreams, those orientation centers, thinking they can do this. And then they find out they get a horrible trainer, they're assaulted during training. They don't know what they're doing and when the first winter comes, like what's going on today, they're involved in a big pile up because nobody taught them how to drive in the winter.

Mark Cavanagh:
Well, I agree that the training that's given today is absolutely horrible and that really needs to be revamped somehow. But my hardest thing because I've been doing it for so long is not being home. Mind you, that's this by choice. We have regional loads, we have dedicated loads. You could be home more often. So being out on the road is my choice. To see my oldest niece now she's in her mid thirties and planning to get married. And I remember holding her as a baby, and that was probably the most time we spent together. That's the hardest part.

Paul Marhoefer:
I get it, you're you're away from home. Everyone signed up for that. Trucking, especially LTL, especially reefer trucking, refrigerated freight trucking, can make a liar of you when you didn't want to lie. You tell your daughter I'll be home tomorrow and then some knucklehead has got two pallets of cheddar and that you're waiting on and he's still in Kenosha. And so LTL freight made a liar of you because you got blindsided. Everybody knows there's time away from home, but when you make promises and for whatever reason there's a systemic failure that prevents you from keeping your promise, that's hard.

David Correll:
Oh gosh, thank you. That plays right into the next side of my question. One of the things that I'm really interested in, in this conversation, is understanding what shippers and receivers do that can, on the one hand, maybe make a truck driver's life better, improve quality of life, improve utilization. Or the flip side of that, what is it that shippers and receivers do that sometimes makes quality of life worse or take home pay lower?

Mark Cavanagh:
You show up on time for your appointment or even early and they get you right to a door within two hours, they've given you a green light and given your paperwork and you're back out again. That's perfect and that's starting to happen more and more often. But they bring your paperwork to your door for you, so you don't have to go back inside. So that's my ideal customer service.

Paul Marhoefer:
I'll tell you about the greatest food warehouse I've ever been to, was 14 years ago, is when I still found my own loads. It was Sysco Foods in Alachua, Florida. And whoever designed and implemented that warehouse was to food warehouses and trucking what Temple Grandin is to cows and slaughterhouses. They design the most perfect food warehouse. You got there, you checked in with the guard. He said, "At three o'clock in the morning, I'm going to call you and we'll assign you with a door." Boom, three o'clock in the morning, here comes your call. They put you in a door and by the time you could even use the restroom, you're empty. The person who designed that should be canonized. There should be a votive candles of that individual for sale at every truck stop. So truckers like me could light a votive candle and quietly meditate by it.

Desiree Wood:
Right. So a good experience for me is when you arrive and they're ready for you and they have a door for you and they have a bathroom for you to use and a clean driver lounge, where you can have a seat or microwave something and get some snacks out of the machine if you need to, have a place to walk your dog, getting you in and out of there is probably the most important thing. Treat you with respect, a lot of them don't. Signage is a big thing. And if you're out of hours having a small area that you could park the truck and do your 10 hour break so that you don't have to be violating your hours of service, trying to find your way to a parking and then truck stop and then find out there's no parking there. So those are the big things. You go someplace like that and you're like, "Oh, I'll come here again."

David Correll:
It's so valuable what you said, treating the driver with respect. What's an example of doing that?

Desiree Wood:
When you come in, sometimes just the way they talk to you is just like you are dirt. You'll see signs in there, "No bathrooms for drivers. This lounge is for our workers, no drivers allowed." The first thing you have to do after you've been driving for a long time is use the restroom. But you got to sign in on the board. Another thing that they do is they want you to give them your CDL. Every where you go, you're giving people that you don't even know, the most valuable thing that you have, your licensed to do your job that has all your identify. You have to write it on some clipboard and leave it there. They've got pages and pages of people's personal identification. And you've got somebody that's like, "We'll call you when we have a door." And three hours later, you're sitting there and you're like, "Am I going to get a door? We said we'd call you. Back to your truck, back to your truck."

Desiree Wood:
So just the very way they talk to you, it's very degrading at a lot of these places. And I recently, in one week, had two places I went that kept me 10 hours. I have unloaded freight, I have loaded freight. I've loaded these trailers. I know how long it takes. It doesn't take 10 hours. So when I'm having to sit in my truck, now I got to go out on the road and drive like that the middle of the night and I'm tired and I'm stressed. I haven't been able to eat anything except for butter that I've got in the truck. So there's so many things that could be improved to bring the stress level down on, off the drivers.

Desiree Wood:
And when you're an owner operator, you have the luxury of saying, "Well, I'll never go there again," and write a bad review on Google tell other drivers that are considering going and picking a load from. But when you're a company driver, you're at the mercy of the dispatcher. You don't know where you're going until they give you the address and then you don't have time to say, "Yay, nah." You don't have a choice a lot of times.

Mark Cavanagh:
As she was saying, the attitude that you're given, it can be horrible. If they say anything to you at all, you don't even get a hello, or they'll just take your paperwork and then tell you your door and we'll call you. And you could be there for six, eight, 10 hours. I was at one customer for as many as 18 hours. And I got paid for the detention time, but that is stressful on a driver. But they should at least have a bathroom for the drivers. That should be a fundamentally right. Women's and men's bathroom. We're there for hours on end, but they expect us to use a bottle in the truck or a bucket or a portajohn that hasn't been cleaned in two weeks. And some of the places you go to are really disgusting and they really should be cleaned up and the health department should be notified.

David Correll:
That's a great point. How often your experience, Mark? How often do you go to a place that does it right and how often do you end up going to a place that has some of those horror stories?

Mark Cavanagh:
I would say maybe 60% of the time they're getting it right, because it's gotten a lot better over the years, a lot better. But the rest of the time, you just have a horrible experience all the way around.

Desiree Wood:
I think it depends on the freight too. Dry freight is a little different than food. Food is the worst.

Mark Cavanagh:
Yeah. Yes it is. It is.

David Correll:
Really?

Mark Cavanagh:
And then you get to a customer to get loaded, they want you to have a feed trailer, so you sweep out your trailer. You go to the receiver, they unload your trailer and it's trashed. All the wood pallet pieces will be all over the floor, boxes that they hit will be on the floor. So now you have to sweep the trailer up because they're not going to do it. But what you can't do it on their facility because they don't want the trash in the parking lot. Now you have to go and find some place to clean out your trailer.

David Correll:
I want to make sure that we bookmark that, shippers and receivers contribute positively or negatively to the driver's quality of life, through the respect that they pay drivers at their appointments. What about your take home pay and your utilization? How do good shippers and bad shippers negatively or positively affect how much driving you get done and then how much you get paid?

Desiree Wood:
So that's a big thing is the way drivers are paid cents by the mile, which really conceals how many hours they work for free. There's only so many miles you can drive a week legally, but there's a lot of other hours you can work for free that don't have nothing to do with your log book. So you have 70 hours you can drive on your log book, but a lot of drivers are working up to 100 hours a week because of this detention time, and like Mark just said, cleaning out your trailer. So you just got a load of something and you got to go somewhere else. You can't just sweep it out, you got to go wash it out. So you go get in the line to wash it out at the truck wash and the line is down the block, but you can't get your other load until you clean out that trailer. This is all unpaid work time. This 20, 30 hours a week of unpaid work time.

David Correll:
Probably a challenge to do. What would you want the shipper or receiver listening to this to know about the working conditions of the drivers carrying their loads?

Mark Cavanagh:
They all around to change their attitude towards the drivers. We're not just hauling their freight. We're also providing for the country. We are essential to this country and they need to understand that and treat us with a lot more respect than what we're getting. That's the bottom line.

Paul Marhoefer:
But I think that you could impanel drivers who would be happy to tell you what would improve your facility from the standpoint of an outsider coming in, because I think what I wish shippers and receivers would consider, is consider everybody. Just pretend that everybody coming in there is from Mars and needs it broken down.

Desiree Wood:
I attend a lot of truck parking meetings on a federal level and on a state level. And when we are doing the first driver surveys, one of the questions to the drivers was will you name the shippers and receivers that are making your life the most difficult? A lot of drivers are afraid to name the shippers and receivers because of retaliation. So what happens is say the upper management learns, okay, these drivers are being detained here, I'm getting pushback from my executive level. So you guys down in the warehouse that are doing these loads in the middle of the night, you have to do better because you're making me look bad.

Desiree Wood:
So then I've been in a situation where they made me sign in at a time that I wasn't there. And if I didn't do it, I wasn't going to get the load. So you get into some situations once you're in the warehouse that whatever the senior level executive's saying, that's not what's happening up on your loading dock, okay? That's not what's happening. Okay. You need to go put on a t-shirt and go down to your warehouse and see how it really works, dude, because this is not working right. There's people that can get this done in an efficient way, and they're not the ones operating your facility.

David Correll:
The audience that we typically have, doesn't have that kind of on the ground level insight. So that is going to be very valuable. Thank you.

Desiree Wood:
That's what I'm here for.

David Correll:
So a second mystery that I was hoping you all could help me unravel and help my students unravel because we're facing it and we can't figure it out is we look a lot at ELD data. We see drivers getting around six and a half to seven hours driving a day on average, when this audience knows a driver could drive 11. So there's a lot of hours left on the table. And we see that, and then at the same time we read the news and the news says, "Oh, there's a big truck driver shortage. There's a big truck driver shortage." I don't understand how something can be both scarce and underutilized at the same time. If we are so short on drivers, why aren't drivers getting all the miles they want to carry the loads?

Mark Cavanagh:
One is the lack of training, the lack of proper drivers getting the knowledge of how to use their hours correctly. And again, it comes back to training. It goes from the school to the trainers they have out on the road. That's first thing. The trainers should be able to show them how many hours they can run without running out of hours. And you can run eight hours a day and never run out of hours. So at the end of your 70 hours, you don't have to take a 34 hour break to regain your 70 hours because you could pick up hours after midnight. Okay, so you don't have to run out of hours.

Mark Cavanagh:
However, a lot of drivers today and it's gone on for years, are lazy. They don't want to drive very far. So if they're not running, they're not making money. It's not the ELDs. All of us have run paper log books before, we run ELDs now. And ELDs actually saves you more time than the paper log books did. Okay. So laziness and lack of planning. You can plan your trips to where you're not stranded somewhere. In 22 years, I have never parked on a ramp, on an off-ramp, on an on-ramp on the ramps to the rest areas. I've always planned my trips to where I know where I can find a place to park safely where there's a bathroom. So it's lack of training, laziness and lack of planning.

David Correll:
But before we go to Desiree, just to follow up there. So thinking about like a young buck coming out of driver training school, they've learned about the vehicle. If they learned nothing about how to plan around the hours of, and how hard of a skill is that to learn?

Mark Cavanagh:
Given the time and their willingness to listen, in an hour, I could give them a pretty good ideas to what needs to get done. But it does take several days to be able to on job training, see what's going on, see how things are working and see how you can run your hours better.

Desiree Wood:
What I find is new drivers, they go where their company has fuel. That's all they know. The first year you're trying to learn your way around this country, where you can park. You may go to a town one time and you may not go there till next year. So you don't really get familiar with the country until after the first year. You might start recognizing places. So when you have a new driver and all they know is go to Pilot, go to TA, and then they're not getting done until the evening, place fills up, there's no place to park. A lot of them don't have the knowledge to go, "Well, if you go one more exit, there's an old mom and pop truck stop there that has a huge parking lot, probably a better restaurant." These are things that they're not taught, they don't have a comfort zone for that.

Paul Marhoefer:
When you get around these major megalopolises in the United States, it's just not conducive to put truck stops in. And so you have this, what I call these like logistical moats. I run that I-75 corridor all the time. And the furthest point, if you're coming out of Indiana, Ohio, Michigan with a load, the furthest point where you can reasonably expect to find a parking space is probably Adairsville or Dalton, Georgia. You can plow into Atlanta and run out of hours or hope to make Jackson where there's probably not going to be any parking. So you have these. I wanted to start a thing, it's like what if we could start this thing and call it parking deserts and just get that into the national lexicon. And I hate this guys, but I have got to take this call, it's from work. I'll be right back.

David Correll:
No problem.

Desiree Wood:
Well, let me pick up where Paul was saying it's the case on a lot of interstates. I'm going to look at my hours and go, "I am not going to be able to make it through Houston, the traffic is unpredictable." So if I get to Houston at this time and get stuck in traffic, then I don't know any places between Houston and San Antonio that I want to be able to park before I run out of hours. Now I've been doing Interstate 10 for many years now, so I know it like the back of my hand. But that was not the case when I was in my first couple years. It took me a lot of years to know. I got a secret hiding place all over the place to stop now.

David Correll:
I have no control over American culture, but if I did, I would hope that everyone would be reminded that in this really strange pandemic year, the role that truck drivers played in getting us through the pandemic and getting the PPP to everyone that needed it and redesigning your networks and your loads as the home body economy really took over the US and we all were able to stay out of harm's way thanks to deliveries, the truck drivers are making. So thank you for everything you're doing. And I hope that this unique American moment is a time when, as consumers, we hear you better. I want to open it up to the drivers on the panel. What did I miss in this conversation? And maybe it will be what we talk about next time.

Mark Cavanagh:
I will say though, that the industry, the trucking industry as a whole, is an excellent place to work. Different things that you can do to fit in with what you want to do, whether it be home, be on the road. And it's very profitable and you can learn a lot and you can be proud of helping to take care of the nation.

David Correll:
Absolutely. Thank you. Desiree, anything that we didn't get to this time that you think we should have, or we should plan for next time?

Desiree Wood:
For me, I would like the supply chain community to start to have some more awareness that they are using a student fleet, they are not using an experienced level fleet. They're saving a few pennies on shipping costs by using these training fleets. There is a lot of rape and assault that go on in these student themes when you're using theme business model student fleets. That's something I would like people in the supply chain to be, have more awareness of when you're using, and consumers, you're saving money on your shipping costs at what person's expense. And you should be able to identify a truck and go, "That's a student fleet, and that's a student fleet that has team driving as their business model." It's very dangerous.

David Correll:
Wow. Thank you. And thank you all for your time. I know that you are on the road doing this job and you carved out an hour for us to help us understand the real working life of American truck drivers. So thank you very much for the time you've given to the conversation, and I really hope you'll stay in touch.

Mark Cavanagh:
Thank you very much. Look forward to seeing you in the future.

Desiree Wood:
Yes. Thank you. Bye-bye

David Correll:
We are lucky enough that Long Haul Paul is going to play us out.

Paul Marhoefer:
(Singing)

Arthur Grau:
All right, everyone. Thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of MIT Supply Chain Frontiers. My name is Arthur Grau, Communications Officer for the center, and I invite you to visit us anytime at ctl.mit.edu or search for MIT Supply Chain Frontiers on your favorite listening platform. Until next time.