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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Your Safety is at Stake
More than 5,000 people are killed every year in crashes with big rigs on the nation's highways, and a major cause of these accidents is fatigue -- that overworked truck drivers are forced to drive way too many hours at a stretch. Now Congress is poised to make matters worse.
The Bush administration put us all in peril with a change to the rules governing the number of hours that truck companies can force their drivers to work. The Bush administration's rule allowed companies to game the system and force truckers to work up to 77 hours in a seven-day period. When the rule was rejected by a federal court, the administration ran to Congress and won a temporary legislative reprieve. Instead of taking the time to devise a better rule that would keep America safe, the administration has been pushing its vision of a free-for-all for trucking companies. The White House endorsed industry's request for a Wal-Mart rule -- special rules for companies not specifically in the trucking business but which hire drivers -- when compiling its latest anti-regulatory hit list, and it used Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to waive hours of service regulations for operations related to Katrina recovery.
Now the heat is on, and Congress is responding. Public Citizen and other highway safety groups have called on Congress to resist pressure from the trucking industry to codify the administration's rules in the Transportation/Treasury appropriations bill. Click here to find out more about the issue, get the latest developments, and take action.
Posted by Robert Shull
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