https://www.thetrucker.com/fmcsa-reminds-truckers-drug-alcohol-clearinghouse-coming-soon/

The clearinghouse will be a professional truck driver database that will serve as a centralized record of all failed drug or alcohol tests, whether from pre-employment screenings, post-crash tests or random. (©2019 FOTOSEARCH)

Remember two years ago, when it seemed like the entire trucking industry was counting down the days to the ELD deadline?

Well, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) wants drivers to be aware of another countdown happening right now, although with much less hoopla than the Great ELD Panic of ’17.

At the recent Mid-America Trucking Show, Joe DeLorenzo, FMCSA director of enforcement and compliance, gave a presentation to raise awareness about the soon-to-be launched federal CDL Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse.

Mandated as part of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, or MAP-21, in 2012, the same piece of legislation that bore the ELD mandate, the drug and alcohol clearinghouse is scheduled to launch January 6, 2020.

The clearinghouse will be a professional truck driver database that will serve as a centralized record of all failed drug or alcohol tests, whether from pre-employment screenings, post-crash tests or random. All refusals to take a drug or alcohol test will also be recorded.

“I came here with a bit of a mission on the drug and alcohol clearinghouse rule,” DeLorenzo said to the MATS audience. It has come to the agency’s attention the clearinghouse has been flying under the radar, a bit, and not enough drivers seem to know about it or they haven’t gotten a full explanation of what the clearinghouse will contain and what it will be used for.

DeLorenzo said drivers have said to him, “Well, I don’t do drugs, so I don’t have to worry about this.”

“Actually, that’s not the case,” DeLorenzo said. “Everybody needs to know about this and get going on it.”

Starting in January, carriers will be required to query the database as part of the new-driver hiring process to ensure that the candidate does not have any failed tests or refusals in the previous three years. Carriers can only gain access to a driver’s record and make the mandatory query with the consent of the driver, and the only way a driver can give that consent is to be registered in the clearinghouse.

So, technically, drivers are not going to be required to register in the clearinghouse, DeLorenzo said. However, if you ever want to get hired anywhere again you’ll have to be registered in the clearinghouse.

“If you’re just kind of staying where you’re at, no intention of leaving, or if you are working for yourself, or if you are nearing retirement, you may decide not to register,” he said. “But in an industry with 100%-plus turnover, I know people are always looking for a new job, a different job, a better job. Any driver who’s going to apply for a new job after this rule goes into effect is going to have to have an account and is going to have to be able to go in.”

DeLorenzo explained why the clearinghouse has been set up this way. Today, when someone applies for a job, they get tested as part of the process. They fail the test and the carrier doesn’t hire them. Three months later, they stay clean just long enough, the apply somewhere else and that company hires them, not knowing about the prior failure.

Starting January 6, carriers will be required to upload notices into the clearinghouse of all failed drug tests by drivers and driving applicants, as well as all refusals to test, as they occur.

The database is designed to go back three years. At first, employers will have to conduct both electronic queries within the clearinghouse and manual inquiries with previous employers to cover the preceding three years to meet the mandated hiring requirement. As of January 6, 2023, they will only need to check the clearinghouse.

Drivers’ records will only contain positive tests and refusals. When a prospective employer makes a query, they will be told if the record is clean. If there are entries, they will be able to get more details.

If a driver has a failed test, the database will also record whether that driver has completed the return-to-duty process.

Drivers will also be able to review their own records, DeLorenzo said, which is another incentive to register. If a driver finds an entry they wish to dispute, they can file a DataQ request to have it corrected.

The clearinghouse website is already up and running. Drivers can go to Clearinghouse.fmcsa.dot.gov to read about the clearinghouse and to register their email addresses for any updates. Actual registration is scheduled to begin in October.

DeLorenzo said he is hoping to raise more awareness about the clearinghouse now so they start registering in October instead of finding out the hard way come February when they try to apply for a job.

“What I’m trying to avoid, actually, is human nature, which is to wait until the very last minute.”

Originally published here.

Truckers hauling agricultural products and livestock have received further reprieve from compliance with the U.S. DOT’s electronic logging device mandate. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced Tuesday that such haulers will have until June 18 to adopt an ELD. They can continue to run on paper logs in the meantime.

Ag and livestock haulers had already secured a three-month compliance extension beyond the mandate’s December 18 compliance deadline, giving them until March 18 to comply. However, the agency decided to provide such truckers an additional 90 days to comply so it can “continue to work on outreach and communication with the ag community so they have the fullest understanding of the rule and regulations,” said FMCSA head of enforcement Joe DeLorenzo.

This article can originally be found here.

Chad Boblett is the owner and driver of Boblett Brothers Trucking of Lexington, KY. Chad also founded the Rate Per Mile Masters group on Facebook, a communications hub for more than 18,000 members, including owner-operators, truck drivers, and other transportation and logistics pros. 

It might seem counter intuitive, but I always make sure to post my truck on the load board when there’s plenty of freight to choose from. That’s the best time to get calls from brokers who are willing to pay higher than average rates for loads that are going where you want to go.

A lot of carriers don’t want to post their trucks in a hot market. They worry that they’ll get bombarded with too many calls. My advice: Include more detail in your truck posting, and don’t forget to include your destination.

A lot of truckers will say that they leave the destination blank because they will go anywhere for the right money. That could be true, but it also opens the door to receiving calls about a broker’s “problem” loads — the ones that are hard to cover. Brokers have two main problems when covering loads: either the rate is too low, or the load is going to a dead market that no one wants to go to, or both.

Who wants to get calls on a broker’s problem loads? If you’ve positioned yourself in a market with plentiful freight, reward yourself by getting calls on loads that you really want. Believe me, brokers would much rather call a carrier on a load that matches what the carrier is looking for.

The first thing I learned using the DAT load board was how to get positioned in a hot market. This was because I knew the negotiating power of receiving a call from a broker that needs my service versus calling on loads with less priority.

It Pays to Be Flexible

If you were a broker, would you make the most calls on loads that have to get picked up today or on the loads that can get picked up some time in the next three days? You’re going to call about the one that’s more urgent.

As a carrier, if you are not posting your truck, then you are making calls on load posts. Those loads might be the ones that are less urgent. Rates and negotiations favor the side that has more flexibility. When the broker calls you about a load that needs to move today, there’s not much flexibility. That’s when you can negotiate for an above-average rate.

Contact us today to learn more about DAT load boards, or call 800.551.8847.

By: AJOT | Aug 17 2017 at 09:27 AM | Intermodal   | Transport Intermediaries

“Uber for trucking,” long considered a freight-matching unicorn, has come to a kind of fruition, with the ride-sharing giant today unveiling its brokerage’s Uber Freight matching app aimed at the owner-operator market with a focus on dry van and reefer loads.

The unveiling comes as one of the company’s other initiatives, its autonomous vehicle development subsidiary Otto, is embroiled in a lawsuit with Google, who claims Uber and Otto stole trade secrets related to autonomous truck tech.

Uber Freight Senior Product Manager Eric Berdinis says the company leaned on its expertise in matching supply and demand and building pricing algorithms in the passenger market, transforming that process into matching freight with owner-operators and small fleets.

“We’re technically a brokerage,” Berdinis says, “and we do that so we can take ownership of the freight and pay our drivers and carriers quickly.”

That aspect, Berdinis says, is what Uber Freight believes will differentiate the company from similar services already in the marketplace.

“We value [prompt payment for delivery] as one of our big promises to our app users,” he says. “Regardless of when the shipper pays us, we’ll pay out for any load that is taken out on our app within a couple days, no questions asked.”

Launched in Beta mode last year, Uber Freight partnered mostly with Texas-based owner-operators/small fleets to refine the platform ahead of Thursday’s public debut.

Caty, Texas-based Minnie Gilmore, owner-operator with her husband, Edwin, of Gilmore and Long Enterprises, came to Uber Freight via load boards she commonly utilized to book loads to fill their 2012 Freightliner Cascadia and dry van. They got a call from an Uber Freight sales rep early on, then “saw a load on a board and it turned out it was an Uber load,” Minnie Gilmore says.

Since, she and Edwin have relied on the Uber Freight app for a lot of their loads outbound from the Houston area, utilizing other brokers or load boards to get back. (Minnie says they stay mostly regional – venturing into Arkansas, Louisiana, and occasionally Memphis, where the couple lived until 2013.)

Interest from carriers “has been overwhelming,” Berdinis says. “The challenge has been scaling out to meet the demand” with freight. Owner-operators and fleets nationwide interested in matching with loads through Uber Freight can now start the process of signing up with the brokerage via this link.

“We are a registered broker so we do go through the normal vetting process,” Uber Freight Director Bill Driegert says. Uber Freight will not work with Conditional or Unsatisfactory-rated carriers. Others, once approved, will be able to see available truckload dry van and reefer loads, paired with non-negotiable fixed rates to the truck. However, Driegert adds feedback from beta users could warrant the company considering rate flexibility and in-app negotiation tools later, as have been utilized by a variety of other brokers in the tech-enabled “uber for trucking” space to date

Gilmore, who works the phones at the home base in Caty while her husband operates the truck, says in-Texas freight is somewhat plentiful, at least in their area. Gilmore and Long relies on the app today for most of Edwin’s outbound hauls, and Minnie Gilmore appreciates the quick book-now options in-app, which cut out most needs for a phone call. It’s taken a bit of the home-dispatch burden off of her shoulders, as Edwin’s better able to do a lot of it on the road. Constant check calls, too, are eliminated under loads booked through the app, as progress on the load is automatically tracked. 

Minnie Gilmore adds that rates delivered by the company’s pricing algorithm, thus far, seem to be “a little better” on average than what she’s been seeing from brokers working the load boards.

Uber Freight inks contract rates with its shippers but delivers more dynamic, market-based pricing to carriers, Driegert says, based on proprietary algorithms developed in part by the company specialist who led development of the surge-pricing methodology in Uber’s passenger vehicle service.

With launch today, the app enables searches for nearby loads based on a user’s current location, and likewise in origin/destination pairs, making some modicum of advance load planning possible. Berdinis says that more sophisticated planning features will emerge as the inevitable result of taking user feedback into account.

The primary limiting factor, at least as of now, Minnie Gilmore says, has been freight availability outside of Texas, something Berdinis suggests is changing with shipper interest around the nation.

In some ways, Uber Freight’s betting on the owner-operator base to answer the chicken-egg question of any freight-matching platform – which comes first, the freight or the driver?

“One of the tenants of building out Uber Freight is making drivers’ lives easier and helping them grow their business,” Berdinis says. “Our users are everything.”

“Our goal is to keep any of our users completely running and completely utilized,” Driegert adds.

If freight was plentiful enough in the network, via the app, to keep the Gilmore and Long van loaded all the time, would they use it exclusively? Yes, Minnie Gilmore says, believing “it’s always easier if you stick with one broker rather than having to be all over the load boards. Right now, they don’t have the freight to do it, but if they did, we would.”