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Notice how blacks always complain about having to travel a long distance to buy groceries? They created that situation by these riots and burning down grocery stores near them.
"Blacks" didn't create that situation -- a minority of blacks hiding behind their color did -- with power-hungry politicians and oh!-soooo-insecure elitist "liberals" egging them on.
This will probably turn out to be the stupid question of the week, but where's the edit button? Is it the one next to "My Status"? If so, I don't see "go advanced".
Location: Somewhere gray and damp, close to the West Coast
20,955 posts, read 5,548,997 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bagster
This will probably turn out to be the stupid question of the week, but where's the edit button? Is it the one next to "My Status"? If so, I don't see "go advanced".
You will find it right next to the "Quote" button at the bottom of your post. When you click it, you will see your post in a box and "Go Advanced" is in the lower right corner.
Just about all the rules have changed since "Nader raider" Robert Fellmeth published The Interstate Commerce Omission back in 1970, and since I went to work for the long-forgotten Jones Motor Company about two years later.
At the time, Jones was just creeping into Commercial Car Journal's list of the top 25 highway freight carriers; the story of its rise was typical. It had been started by a local "drayman" making deliveries by horse and wagon in 1894; the expansion came much later. As late as 1960, it served an area stretching only as far west as Pittsburgh, and as far south as the Potomac. But a few years later -- probably aided by a conglomerate known as Allegheny Corporation -- it had invaded markets as far west as St. Louis, and as far south as North Carolina.
A trucking entrepreneur didn't just walk into a new market and set up shop; you had to have a franchise granted by the ICC, and since new authority was very seldom granted, you had to buy someone else's license ("rights") on the open market in order to expand, usually from another carrier in bankruptcy.
And this in turn led to a very sketchy picture of where competition was, and was not present; the expanded Jones had local "rights" in the northern half of Ohio, Metro Detroit, and most of Illinois, but none to Columbus, Cincinnati, or anywhere in Indiana. We had to turn any local deliveries there over to Duff Trucking, based close to our Akron hub.
Trucking is not a healthy occupation; I lost five drivers to heart attacks (three fatal) while on the road in the summer of 1974; the practice of falsifying drivers' logs ("lie books") was also coming under increasingly tight scrutiny. I worked the "trouble desk" -- handling mechanical problems, foul weather, and accidents -- and one responsibility was to make sure a driver didn't get stranded on the road (sometimes, if a driver "ran out of hours" he would be relieved of duty at the nearest suitable accommodation. If a major mechanical problem figured in this, a fresh tractor could be towed out while he slept).
There are lots of stories, mostly "embellished", about the influence of organized crime in trucking; it existed, but mostly at the local level. Freight charges into and out of a roughly 100-block area of "Hell's Kitchen" and Chelsea in Manhattan were automatically increased (ostensibly for the added cost of elevators in lofts) but there were other reasons behind the "Garment District Arbitrary". And one of my fellow dispatchers had a story of the time he caught a dockman running numbers at another terminal in Newark; a visit from a local "underboss" made it clear that "we had the wrong man, and the right man would be turned over", and so it went. I saw a handful of "wildcat" strikes, but they seldom lasted long -- the local union steward and supervision usually found a way to tone things down.
By the early Seventies, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the structure of the regulated motor carrier industry was overbuilt -- too complicated in some markets, a single dominant carrier in others. Deregulation, when it came a few years later, set off a wave of adjustments -- mostly via bankruptcies. An auction of "rights" after the collapse of the notoriously "mobbed up" Associated Transport resembled a who's who of the industry -- but many of those companies, Jones among them, found themselves in the same fix a few years later.
When I started out in the industry, the role models were the giants Consolidated Freightways and Roadway Express (profiting because they had "rights" to just about anywhere that counted) and relative upstart Yellow Freight (touted by several of my former professors as an example of uncorrupted progress. Consolidated eventually broke itself up and sold the rights to several less-unionized subsidiaries while the parent company filed for bankruptcy, Yellow and Roadway merged, but the successor company (YRC) has had to dodge a lot of bullets, and still might not survive; meanwhile, Number Four Arkansas Best (ABF) has gained a lot of ground, mostly through innovations such as successfully invading the HouseHold Goods (consumer moving vans) market.
And finally, a word about diversity (not of employees, but of entrepreneurship.
The companies I've described above were the upper crust of the industry; like the railroads they supplanted, they were regulated just as if they'd laid tracks into the cities, facilities and industrial plants they served. But below that tier lay the "irregular route" and/or "specific commodity" carriers; these firms relied on the owner/operators usually depicted in industry coverage; usually non-unionized, and with sleeper cabs and the like. These are the guys (and gals) usually at the center of a constantly-changing marketplace.
It was a fascinating business, and it was only other personal factors which prompted me to leave it; looking back, I often wish I could have stayed.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 06-14-2020 at 02:46 PM..
Location: Somewhere gray and damp, close to the West Coast
20,955 posts, read 5,548,997 times
Reputation: 8559
Quote:
Originally Posted by hawkeye2009
Indeed-
And insurance companies will cease to insure businesses who are in areas with no police. Businesses and any means of employment will leave these areas, as the cost of doing business will make it impractical.
This is the recipe for creating a third world hell hole, like East St. Louis.
Notice how blacks always complain about having to travel a long distance to buy groceries? They created that situation by these riots and burning down grocery stores near them.
Large % today is carried by independent operators, not employees. An IE can refuse any job, for any or no reason, he or she chooses to.
I would hope the poster you're responding to realizes the error of his thinking re truckers and the trunking industry.
If not, he's just another blind, progressive ideologue.
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