The left is furious that the Trump administration is officially enforcing (effective date: June 25) the longstanding law that truck drivers must be proficient in English.
The left claims that you don’t need to speak English to drive; this must be bigotry against immigrants, or against Spanish speakers, or against the uneducated, or against certain ethnicities.
It’s not.
Whether one is an immigrant or a native American, whether one has a college degree or just a high school diploma, whether one’s skin color is black or white or plaid or polka-dotted — none of this matters to the question of whether a person can be a safe truck driver.
What does matter?
Whether the person has quick reflexes, respects the rule of law, respects pedestrians and other drivers — that all matters. Whether one respects the cargo one is hauling, whether one respects his employer and client — that matters.
Whether one has decent vision and hearing, is attentive enough to make that myriad of split-second decisions between potholes and curbs, between red light and yellow, between debris in the road and people or animals who don’t belong there — that matters.
Whether one is capable of being fully attentive for hours at a time without being distracted by music or cellphone or scenery or a cute girl across the street matters. Distractions like these are among the biggest dangers.
And yes, whether the driver speaks English — the lingua franca of our very diverse United States — is at the top of the list as well. It’s not about prejudice; it’s about functioning in the job.
Not everyone is cut out for being a truck driver. There’s no constitutional right to drive a 60-foot-long, 80,000-lb vehicle full of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of other people’s goods down a road at 70 mph, putting countless people at risk every day.
And if part of government’s job is to protect the public from reasonably controllable dangers — and yes, it is — the restriction of commercial drivers’ licenses has to be among these.
If you allow the opposition to establish the premises to an argument, you are sure to be manipulated. The left argues that only bigotry would cause you to restrict CDLs from non-English speakers, to force the rest of us to spend our time proving that we aren’t bigoted, and to keep us from discussing why a driver’s language is a critical aspect of his job.
So why does it really matter?
Some things are obvious:
Road Signs: Speed limit signs don’t require English proficiency, but many other warnings do. They’re not all simple things to memorize, like “bridge out” or “one way.” Many road signs are one-of-a kind instructions, specific to a location, construction site, or circumstance. You need to be reasonably fluent. With the spread of customizable electronic road signs, we can expect such a need to grow as the years go by.
The Rules of the Road: These differ from state to state, relatively little for us car drivers, but considerably more for common carrier regulations. States have various weight limits depending on the type of road or bridge, different rules for parking, idling, even turning. This stuff isn’t posted on any sign; they expect truck drivers to know it. The more states you drive in, the more reading you have to do.
Hazardous Materials Regulations: As cordless technology grows in popularity, and as America’s manufacturing sector rebounds, more loads are defined as HazMat every year. The HazMat regulations are in English — as is all the documentation, from the Hazardous Goods Declaration to the Safety Data Sheet, which gives instructions on what to do in case of a spill. There is no time to look around and find someone else to read the paperwork for you when your vehicle is on its side, flooding the road with a liquid that could be flammable, corrosive, or toxic. You must be able to read that SDS yourself.
Vehicle Maintenance: Vehicles break down, and there’s more to go wrong in a truck than there is in a car. Truck drivers need to read and understand owners’ manuals and talk through breakdowns with mechanics; order repair parts by phone or online; and deal with not only their local “home base” dispatch team, but also the teams in often distant regions.
That’s just the obvious stuff. Those of us in the logistics sector will recognize a host of other reasons why drivers have to speak English.
Understanding Directions: Many of us expected directions to become easier when we moved from maps to cell phone GPS, but we’ve all encountered times when GPS hasn’t kept up with road changes. This problem is turbocharged in the transportation industry, where an outsized percentage of deliveries are to either brand-new industrial parks that aren’t in the GPS yet or empty fields that won’t be in the GPS for years.
Understanding Instructions: The Bill of Lading that takes goods from point to point includes a host of critical information, often telling the driver whom to contact, which entrance to use, which gate to pull into. The BoL may require an advance phone call an hour ahead, or a day ahead, or a week ahead, to secure and keep appointments. And the BoL’s instructions section often specifically explains the need to disregard incorrect GPS directions.
Communicating with Customers: As much as we’d love for every shipment to be problem-free, there are damages and shortages every day, caused by anything from theft to poor stowage, from forklift strikes to faulty packaging. A driver must be able to communicate with shippers and receivers to confirm or correct a damage or shortage notation, or discuss a full or partial refusal of delivery.
And even that’s not all. “Project carriers” must coordinate with local police and utilities to obtain and obey permits, design routes around low bridges, work with police escorts, even have power lines and telephone lines moved in order to allow overheight, overwidth, or overweight cargo to be transported. Extremely hazardous cargo requires working with local health officials to have roads cleared for safe transport. There are virtually unlimited specific instances besides the common generalities mentioned above, requiring a driver to be able to communicate clearly with strangers.
The need for a single common language for truck drivers should be obvious, by now if not before. And in the United States, that common language is, and must remain, English.
So the question is, why does the Trump administration have to make this change? Why wasn’t it always the case? How did this problem of non-English-speaking truck drivers — at least 100,000 of them at last count — grow so widespread?
The Obama administration just changed it, by an administrative rule, a decade ago. The law is still in place, but it was intentionally watered down. The DoT was purposefully instructed to stop enforcing it.
Simultaneously, the federal government allowed millions of illegal aliens into the country.
Simultaneously, the federal government scared employers out of any kind of H.R. policies that might land them in trouble with the Department of Labor or the Department of Justice for anything that might look like racism.
Like so many other problems America faces, this problem was intentionally caused by Democrat administrations who had other goals in mind — political, societal, electoral — happily allowing the goal of road safety to suffer in the process.
And so the Trump administration continues, day after day, fixing problems one at a time, navigating the minefield of intentionally broken systems left for it by the willful malfeasance of past administrations.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his most recent collection of public policy essays, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
Image via Pexels.