Former Truck Driver Writer Reveals the Unreasonable Situation in the Workplace Before the “2024 Problem

They say that parking on the street in an unsolicited manner is as good as the shipper implicitly instructing them to do so. If they are told to wait where they can come right away if called, they have no choice but to park on the street.

The driver is the one who gets a ticket for that. Unless we fix that, the working environment for drivers will not improve. However, the industry itself is closed, so the unreasonableness of the drivers has not been exposed to the public until now. If a driver complains, he or she is simply told, “That’s okay, I’ll find someone else.

The drinking in the cars that can be seen at SAs and PAs also has a story.

Truck drivers have no problem not drinking alcohol. But legally speaking, it is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a rule that when a day’s work is over, they must rest for at least eight consecutive hours before the next day’s work begins. During those 8 hours, they are supposed to go home, but they can’t actually go home. Since the car is their home, they tend to drink in the car.

But if it’s an SA or PA, I think to myself, why not drink at a restaurant? I think that I confuse public and private matters when I am in the car. The car is your castle, so the place to work, sleep, and eat are all in the cabin. Some people have refrigerators and microwave ovens in their cars. And in the fridge, there is always a bottle of ice-cold beer. Especially in this hot summer, many drivers who work hard and sweat enjoy drinking after work, but if they mix their public and private lives, some of them will worry about the beer in the refrigerator when they are on the road.

In addition, many of them drink in their sleep because of their short and irregular sleeping hours. Because of a profession that becomes in a sense very compatible with alcohol, it is easy to fall into alcohol dependence when the public and private life are mixed up. That is why, says Hashimoto, people who cannot do without drinking every day should not become truck drivers.

In fact, trucking is not an easy job. Trucks are vehicles that kill people. And for that reason, the social status is too low. Other jobs that require a distance between alcohol and work include doctors and pilots, but the difference in status between them is obvious. There are people who say they can’t do without drinking because the working environment is so bad, of course there will be people who say that. But I think that’s why we have to distance ourselves from alcohol.