ATA lobbies for cuts in daily trucking time

The American Trucking Association (ATA) and fleet management owners are having a difficult time finding common ground on how many hours per day of work should be allowed for drivers, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Currently, the country's law allows for truckers to spend 11 hours a day on the road, 14 hours a day on shift and there are no required break times. The new proposal suggests only 10 hours of driving, 13 hours total for shifts and one half-hour allotted for every seven hours driving.

If employees violate any of the rules, they could face fines of more than $10,000.

Although the one-hour changes do not seem like a big difference, trucking business could potentially lose revenue by having to hire additional workers and equipment.

These alterations could affect more than 700,000 companies throughout the country. Most of them are small businesses that would have to reevaluate many of their tactics on productivity.

According to The Arizona Daily Star, more than one billion dollars could be lost by small companies in the trucking industry, and efficiency could drop more than 5 percent per truck driver.

ATA lobbies for cuts in daily trucking time

Friday, June 17th, 2011