A Matter of Non-interest: Gracias But No Gracias
Kenton,TENN,USA -B4T -(originally published) May 2011: -- What if the U.S. finally opens its borders to Mexican trucks and they don’t show up? ... Ironically, the long simmering feud between the U.S. and Mexico over letting Mexican truck companies carry Mexican goods to U.S. destinations may be a matter of little interest to Mexican truckers... Didn’t anybody ask Mexican truckers if they were interested? ... The first clue that this might be a non-starter was in September 2007, when the Bush administration decided to try a one-year pilot program limited to one hundred Mexican trucking companies. They finally got twenty-nine, which ultimately resulted in only 98 Mexican trucks on American highways... Herb Schmidt, president and CEO of Con-way Truckload, the truckload unit of Con-way Inc., which has interline relationships with 80 Mexican trucking companies, estimates that only 5% of Con-way’s Mexican partners have even considered serving the U.S. beyond the twenty-five mile commercial zone... “Mexican truckers are scared to death of our tort system,” says Schmidt. They’re deterred by the cost of obtaining insurance plus the risk of being hit with a massive jury award in the event of an accident... Then there's the expense. Mexican carriers who choose to expand into the United States face significant upfront costs for labor, maintenance, facilities and equipment. The typical Mexican trucker has a fleet of six trucks, hardly enough to justify the kind of capital investment needed to play in the world's biggest economy... Why then have the Teamsters so actively opposed cross-border trucking? “That’s a good question,” says Lana Batts, a partner in transport advisory firm Transport Capital Partners and one-time vice-president for government affairs for the American Trucking Association. “I have no idea why the Teamsters would waste their political capital on this issue” ... We Americans can be pretty chauvinistic about our country, superior in so many ways to other countries... And frankly, the trouble with Mexican truckers is they can be so un-American!...Labels: mexicans' trucks debate
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