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TRUCKERS' STORIES * Trucking in the U.S.A. with Russian's Accent
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, believes many foreign-born drivers are simply exploited by the industry
New York,NY,USA -Time, by Pat Dawson & Simon Shuster (Moscow) -Sep. 4, 2010: -- No one quite knows how many of them there are out on the roads. But you can usually hear who they are when they talk, when they've taken a break from hours and hours of driving on America's highways... Every working day at my job at the postal processing center in Billings, there are drivers speaking Slavic languages — for the most part, Russian — making drop-shipments of pallets loaded with bulk mail... The Russians come to trucking with some tradition — it is very much the way their huge ancestral nation, with its system of badly maintained roads, takes delivery of its necessities. Indeed, many may have come over to join relatives in the U.S. after the global financial crisis in the fall of 2008 depressed the Russian trucking industry: out of the more than 10,000 companies that operated in Russia before the crisis, only around 8,000 survived... As with all immigrant groups trying to make it in America, there are problems to do with acculturation and, more seriously, the law. Many drivers demonstrate limited English-speaking and comprehension skills; some have trouble reading Latin script. A few that I have talked to admit that they are much more used to reading Cyrillic... But Todd Spencer, Executive Vice President of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which has 154,000 members, believes many foreign-born drivers are simply exploited by the industry... Finally a trucker concluded,"For me, this is the nicest country. I saw more discrimination against foreigners in Russian than I do here"...* New Jersey - Not your typical delivery
Cherry Hill,N.J.,USA -Today's Trucking (CAN) -31 Aug 2010: -- For J.B. Hunt driver Hawthorne, trucking is a laborious job -- literally... After dropping off his last load of the day in Baltimore, Hawthorne figured he had time for one more delivery... As the Courier Post reports, the trucker pulled over after being waved down by a frantic man. He walked to the panicked man's car where in the backseat the man's wife was in the last stages of labor... Hawthorne delivered Jennifer Lynn Price in three minutes... Tying the umbilical cord? Hawthorne, reports the newspaper, ripped off a shoestring from a new pair of shoes laying in the back seat of Price's car... Shortly after, local police and EMT units arrived to assist and get the new parents and baby Jennifer to the hospital... You have to wonder if Hawthorne is the world's most heroic driver or whether he's a doctor or paramedic moonlighting on the open road... Not only is this the second baby he's delivered (the first was at a California truckstop 11 years ago), but over his career, Hawthorne also saved a man from a heart attack and came to the aid of another elderly man who collapsed from heat exhaustion – earning him Highway Angel Award honors in 1999 and 2002... (Image from JB Hunt)Labels: truckers' stories
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