Summary
Immediate impact on the availability of Drayage drivers on the East Coast.
Increased cost of Transporting Containers as supply of owner operators will diminish quickly and the substitute, if available, will be extremely high cost Truckload drivers.
Analysis
The article illustrates all of the salient points of interest with respect to the cost, impact and likely industry response in an anomalous area: Buffalo, NY. Here, traffic across the border is closely structured as a Less than Truckload Carrier Operation. For the most part, at least on the East coast, the major impact will fall on the Drayage driver.
These drivers are typically Hispanic, Eastern European or other recent entrants to our country. Their command of English is challenged and, as such, many cannot pursue hazardous material certification. These are the jobs that most mainstream Less than Truckload or Truckload Drivers would never consider. There are often dreary days of waiting in line for hours for no pay and finally being able to retrieve a Container load, drop it at a customer and hopefully, jump back into line at the port for hours (wait) again to hopefully retrieve a load before the port closes. Most of these drivers need at least three "turns" a day to survive. That would net them somewhere around $3-$400 per day. They pay their own fuel, tolls, insurance and merely operate under some broker's authority. They own old rigs that are costly to upkeep and this is exacerbated by the fact that many Container Loads are 40,000 pounds and provide a pounding to all facets of the Driver's tractor. The point is, most of these drivers will not be able to survive a deep background check for reasons as diverse as being arrested for a political issue overseas or a past criminal issue at a very young age. At present, this type of background screening is almost NEVER utilized. If you emulated the Less than Truckload Industry background check for instance, you would lose over half of your drivers. These drivers are excellent people with a stoic and irrepressible work ethic. They have simply been born into this country from the poorer areas and have survived with consequences that would jeopardize a background check.
My hope is that Port Security remains a high profile issue but that holding Drayage drivers to the standards of well paid hourly Company drivers with benefits--is a serious flaw and very likely will quickly impact the ability of companies to move the containers as usual from Port to customer and visa versa.
