OOIDA outlines priorities

Members of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association had an opportunity to have their voices heard on March 25 during the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky.

The OOIDA Town Hall Meeting was a chance for members to learn about initiatives the Association has been working on and its top priorities moving forward. Additionally, members were offered a chance to ask questions and get answers from top Association executives.

The panel discussed issues that OOIDA’s advocacy had helped to improve over the past year, including:

• Defeating mandates that would increase minimum insurance levels, require speed limiters, and limit the use of personal conveyance.
• Pursuing dedicated federal funding for truck parking.
• Finalizing hours-of-service reforms that provide truckers greater flexibility.
• Implementation of the entry-level driver training rule.

Solving the issues that affect drivers can seem like a big undertaking. However, according to OOIDA President Todd Spencer, doing the little things can ultimately have a big impact.

“Do the easy things, and things start getting better,” he said. “We’re open to any ideas anywhere that can make things better.”

Despite the uphill battle, Spencer said he believes in the power of numbers and that working together is the way to enact change in the industry.

“We’ll always have challenges, and we’ll always have people on the other side of the issues,” he said. “But if we’re smart, and we get together, we can have good people carrying our story and moving to a fairer deal.”

Doug Morris, the Association’s director of safety and security operations, said that the Association’s impact can’t be understated.

“If it wasn’t for OOIDA right now, we’d have speed limiters on trucks, we’d have insurance (minimums) over $4 million, and to be quite honest we wouldn’t have a lot of owner-operators,” Morris said.

In addition to discussing the work OOIDA has done over the past year, members were kept abreast of the issues the Association will work to advocate for in the coming year.

Among the Association’s top priorities for 2022:

• Defeating government vaccine mandates.
• Refuting the driver shortage myth.
• Repealing the current law that denies employee drivers guaranteed overtime pay.
• Advocating for improved working conditions for truckers.

The perceived driver shortage has been blamed for many of the current supply chain woes. The Association has been steadfast in refuting this notion, citing driver retention issues such as pay, parking and detention time as contributing factors to drivers leaving the industry. Bryce Mongeon, director of legislative affairs for OOIDA, said that he’s seeing some headway when it comes to dispelling the driver shortage myth.

“It’s frustrating on Capitol Hill. Everyone likes to talk about a worker shortage,” Mongeon said. “They’ve been hearing about it and convinced about it for so long that it’s something we’ve really been working to rebut. We are seeing progress on that, but as there’s interest in supply chain issues, that’s something that we have to keep pushing back on.”

Members can receive updates on these issues, as well as others affecting truckers, by signing up for the Association’s action alerts at FightingForTruckers.com. LL