Tilting at Windmills - politics

Washington Monthly, June, 2000 by Charles Peters

EXHAUSTED TRUCK DRIVERS cause accidents in which almost 800 people die annually, according to estimates by the Department of Transportation. Drivers now are permitted to drive 10 hours in a row, and after getting eight hours off for sleep are permitted to drive for 10 more. Since common sense suggests that those eight hours aren't all used for sleep, the possibility of fatigue seems very high. So the DOT has proposed that drivers get 12 hours off each day. In an attempt to sweeten the pie for the trucking industry, the DOT is agreeing to let the drivers drive the other 12 hours in a row so long as they don't drive more than 60 hours a week. This seems the most modest of reforms--whatever happened to the eight-hour day and the 40-hour week?--yet the trucking industry is indignant. "The DOT's proposal would force today's sophisticated e-commerce, point-and-click, just-in-time delivery back to old economy inefficiency," says Walter B. McCormick, Jr., the president of the American Trucking Association. He doesn't mention the lives it would save.

HERE'S SOME GOOD NEWS. "The ranks of teachers are swelling with former pilots, lobbyists, and lawyers" reports Mary Lord of U.S. News and World Report. I don't know about the pilots but it's great to see those lobbyists and lawyers find a more decent line of `work. More than half of the students admitted to graduate teacher training programs are career-switchers. Most of them, says Libby Hall, the director of one of the graduate teaching programs, "are drawn by the chance to do meaningful work; they want to do something that really makes a difference."