My response to an article from a recent NPR story about the campaign to lower the age to earn a commercial driver’s license.
See> To Get Big-Rig Drivers, Senate Bill Would Give Keys to Teens
Notice I used the words “earn”.
My answer? No.
My reason > Because, I think CDL licensing should be a graduated process for the adults who are being recruited now. The stages of learning and responsibility should come in phases. I also do not believe that the commercial driver’s license learner’s permit should allow new drivers to also get their hazardous materials endorsement processing before they have even passed the skills test to drive the truck in the first place. It’s unfathomable to me that few people realize this.
Training carriers bring in hundreds of new CDL Trainee’s each week and most of them get poor and unsafe training. For women this sometimes means sex assault. There is no accountability of the mega training carrier’s turnover, there are no exit interviews of the trainees, and there are no caps on how many students can be recruited each year.
The industry that has a despicable 100% turnover rate and congratulates itself when it dips (according to them) to the high 80’s is never asked why it should continue to be fed students of any age when they are not able to be retained. Would you send your child to an academic school that has a failure rate of 80 to 100 percent without wanting to know what the problem is and how it is being corrected?
Why would anyone want to send a student of any age through a training system like this?
In the trucking industry, the solution is to launch a campaign to have access to indoctrinate teenagers. (more…)
