U.S. trucking bosses—with the active connivance of the federal government—are set to squeeze even more sweat and profit from the labor of their freight workers, both union and non-union. Come January, all freight drivers may be compelled legally to stay behind the wheel for up to 11 hours, instead of the present 10 hours, a limit put in place in 1939. If that sounds outrageous because of the vast increase in freight industry productivity in the past 60 years due to modern highways and speedier and larger vehicles and trailers, think about this: Real wages for freight drivers are lower today than they were in 1980. Teamsters Union truckers earn nearly 20 percent less, and non-union drivers earn more than 28 percent less than they did almost 25 years ago, according to industry analysts.

The onset of the loss of real wages (what the dollar actually buys) for freight workers, as well as American workers in general, coincides with the strengthening of European and Japanese capitalist competition, once their war-torn industries were rebuilt.

Even before the projected lengthening of driving hours, the largely deregulated U.S. trucking industry had rightly been compared to a sweatshop on 18 wheels. Most often paid by the mile, drivers cram 100,000 miles or many more into a work-year. Federal statistics show that truck drivers lead the nation in the number of occupational illnesses and injuries requiring lost work time. While the number of truck crashes per million miles may not be increasing, the number of miles driven is going up, increasing the likelihood of still more truck related injuries and deaths.

Accelerating the dog-eat-dog competition within the trucking industry by 10 percent more hours behind the wheel is sure to increase driver fatigue and that means greater danger on the highways, says the Teamsters Union. The rank and file caucus, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, agrees, noting that the change in permitted driving hours “benefits industry profits, not highway safety.” The New York Times reported on April 25 that, “In 1990, a National Transportation Safety Board study found that 33 percent of crashes in which truck drivers died involved fatigue. A study done in New York in 1997 found that 47 percent of truck drivers reported falling asleep at the wheel some time in their driving career and that 25 percent reported dozing off at least once in the previous year.” A spokesperson for a highway safety group told the Washington Post (April 24), “We are talking about a profession where fatigue is a major safety problem. If airline pilots were falling asleep on the job, I doubt we would add more time in the cockpit.”

Many drivers fight the inevitable over-the-road fatigue with harmful drugs, at the same time that they try to counter falling real wages by driving even longer than present regulations permit. The federal government says it relies on drivers’ logbooks to monitor drivers’ hours, but it’s common knowledge that drivers, even union drivers, falsify their logbooks and their bosses know it. For the fast growing number of so-called owner-operators, who are their own nominal bosses and who must earn a living as well as keep up their truck payments, the last thing on their mind is to pull over for some shut-eye when they’re facing losing their “investment” in their truck. With the “free market” regulating competition, the downward pressures on earnings are also forcing workers to quit, a loss of over 100,000 jobs, according to some analysts.

While some truckers are paid by the hour, many more drivers are paid by the mile or the load, a form of piecework. The whole point of piecework is to induce workers to “sweat” themselves, in order to maximize productivity and profits. The Teamsters Union routinely negotiates by-the-mile pay rates for its members, who would object if they didn’t; if only because their real earnings are falling—and are certain to continue to fall as competitive forces strengthen their grip on the industry, and on the nation’s economy as a whole. While the Teamsters Union thus far has kept its ever-smaller share of the trucking workforce from falling as far back as freight workers in the non-union sector, the union has no strategy for regaining its once much-heralded and much-feared (by Corporate America) position in the labor-intensive trucking industry, as union companies transfer work to their non-union operations, or close down.

At the same time that the feds lengthened freight workers’ driving time, they shortened the maximum workday by one hour to 14 hours. That means that a driver may work another three hours loading or unloading or whatever, in addition to his maximum 11 hours driving time. Federal officials said they expected the new rules would save money for the trucking companies. While trucking bosses generally hailed the longer driving time, it’s clear that the bosses want still more leeway to change working conditions. An Oklahoma trucking executive told the Times, “It’s not everything we wanted, but it is much better than we had.”