“I’m takin’ little white pills and my eyes are open wide.” Remember that? “Six Days on the Road,” composed in 1963. An anthem celebrating the great American truck driver, knight of the road, proud and free, lean and mean.
The era of little white pills probably ended about the same time as the advent of random workplace drug testing. Today’s truck driver is more likely than the rest of us to be overweight and out of shape, and has a good chance of suffering from sleep apnea. An argument is raging between truckers and federal regulators about whether to force overweight truck drivers to take sleep tests.
Dr. David Lyman of Concentra Medical Centers spoke about this recently to the New Mexico Workers’ Compensation Association. He said truck drivers over a certain weight and neck circumference have a 94% likelihood of sleep apnea. (I hid the tape measure in my purse.)
The U.S. Department of Transportation, Dr. Lyman says, wants to add new requirements to the mandatory screenings for over-the-road drivers, who are required to have medical clearance. The industry is resisting, he says. The tests are expensive. So one area of discussion is whether to test only overweight drivers or all of them.
Nobody is in favor of truck drivers falling asleep on top of 18 wheels, just as nobody is in favor of truckers suffering heart attacks while driving. We can agree on this.
However, it is possible to hypothesize that seasoned drivers may have enough knowledge, experience and well-honed instincts to compensate for the effects of poor quality sleep. It is predicted that the U.S. will face a national shortage of an estimated 400,000 professional truck drivers by 2011 or 2012; this is according to reports from FTR (Freight Transport Research) Associates. One reason given is the disqualification of drivers for health reasons.
And we could observe that every time a new safety requirement is added to trucking or any other industry, it adds cost that as a nation we can’t necessarily afford. The cost of transportation ends up not only in your grocery bill and my grocery bill, but in the price of the groceries you and I are increasingly asked to donate to help feed Americans who are out of work because the economic recovery demands that business operate more efficiently.
This is a familiar argument. New safety rules are always being proposed, not necessarily in response to a new safety threat, but because improving safety is some people’s job, and it is not their job to assess the costs or the social and economic impacts.
This pattern recurs over and over. A change is made in the economy to improve efficiency and another change comes along and sops up all the savings. Sometimes the result is a net improvement in our overall wellbeing, and sometimes it isn’t. The rules that are enacted may depend not on their merit or value but on who has the more powerful lobby. This is the economic equivalent of watching a cat chase its tail — only it’s dizzying, not cute, it’s deadly serious and it is a vital concern for the future of our nation.
America needs to figure out how to be lean and mean again. In the case of truck drivers, that’s not metaphorical.
Triple Spaced Again, © New Mexico News Services 2010; posted in 2011