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Truck drivers beware: If you don’t speak and understand the English, you may find yourself out of a job. As part of his plan to make America America again, President Donald Trump earlier this year ordered that commercial truck drivers need to be proficient in English to be able to drive in the US. According to a White House press release from March 1:
“From the founding of our Republic, English has been used as our national language. Our Nation’s historic governing documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, have all been written in English. It is therefore long past time that English is declared as the official language of the United States.”
The directive was signed on April 28 and changes the penalties for violations of the rule requiring commercial drivers to be able to “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records.” During former President Barack Obama’s time in the Oval Office, he relaxed those penalties that would have taken drivers off the road and instead they were issued citations.
On Tuesday, June 3, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy officially signed a directive for his department that will take drivers off the road if they are not fluent in English. “We are issuing guidance that ensures a driver who cannot understand English will not drive a vehicle in this country. Period. Full stop,” he said during a news conference in Austin, Texas.
Obviously, there are plenty of people and organizations who are not too thrilled with this. Mannirmal Kaur, senior federal policy manager for the Sikh Coalition told NBC news that she’s concerned this will be another way to discriminate due to race. She said that from 2016 to 2018, there were about 150,000 drivers of Sikh and Punjabi backgrounds. “Is it someone who has an accent or maybe someone who wears a turban?” Kaur asked, questioning how inspectors will decide who to pull over to give a proficiency test to. “Being ordered out of service could potentially be unemployment for the truck driver … with potentially limited recourse.”
Millán Chavez was worried about the economy, saying, “If they follow through as planned and start removing drivers who don’t speak English, this will lead to a collapse in the economy. Currently there is a need for 56,000 truckers in Mexico, and about 200,000 in the United States, so cutting out truckers now in service would hurt the economies of both countries.”
Most road signs include a picture to fully instruct drivers what to do or expect. Sometimes they can be confusing, like a bunch of squiggly lines resembling a den of snakes slithering across the road, but for the most part, people don’t necessarily need to read English to understand what they mean. But that’s only one issue.
In the Trucking Truth online forum, drivers discussed the problem of their non-English-speaking fellows. One poster, Big Scott, wrote: “The other day, once again, a driver shows up and shows me his cell phone so I know what he’s picking up. It is almost impossible to understand what they say.” If you’ve ever ordered anything from ridesharing or delivery, such as Uber or DoorDash, then you likely know the pain.
An analysis of Department of Transportation data by the Women of Trucking Advisory Board to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration estimates about 3.8% of the commercial driver license workforce is limited in English abilities.
FTR Intelligence provides economic forecasting for the trucking and freight industry. In an article published in May, the outlet reported that the FMCSA recorded about 15,200 violations due to English barriers over two years. The most violations came from truck drivers operating vehicles with Texas license plates, about 16%. California was next with 9.8%.
The relaxed regulations, thanks to Obama, made it easy for non-English speaking drivers to pass their tests and become hired. The result, according to multiple sources, means there’s a lot more truck drivers on the road who can’t speak the language. With Trump restoring the former mandates, not only will it remove some drivers from the roads, it will also make it more difficult to find work for some. “It’s already hard to get a job if you don’t have at least a year of experience,” Kevinson Jean, a Haitian immigrant, told NBC News. “Now imagine adding English fluency on top of that. It’s going to take people a lot more time to find work.”
However, adding “English fluency” is not new. It’s always been the law. Obama just relaxed it so that all drivers got was a slap on the wrist.
The American Trucking Association, on the other hand, is thrilled with the mandate. In a letter to Duffy in April, the association expressed its concerns including one of their top worries, schools that fast-track training for commercial drivers’ license. After Trump issued his order, the organization thanked the president in a statement, for “responding to our concerns on the uneven application of this existing regulation.”
When the president said he was returning the country back to its American values, he hadn’t been kidding around. From mass deportations to officially naming English as the designated language for the US, Trump has been systematically reshaping the nation. Now, I would like to know how long will it be before ridesharing and delivery companies give in to their customer complaints and make sure their drivers speak the country’s language?