eNewsletter Vol 10 No 4 August, 2022
Supply-Chain Problems? Teenage Truckers to the Rescue! The New Yorker by Oliver Whang, May 23, 2022 Mr. Forry’s driver’s-ed class, in Pennsylvania, is training eighteen-year-olds to drive eighteen-wheelers as Congress lowers the minimum age for driving a big rig across state lines, in an attempt to ease the country’s logistical woes. Shortly after sunrise on a recent Tuesday, seven students, all guys, gathered in front of a twenty-six-footlong box truck in the parking lot of Northeastern High School in Manchester, Pennsylvania. Chad Forry, a driver’s-ed teacher, popped the hood, exposing the engine—a mess of metal pipes and plastic wells. Forry pulled out the oil dipstick and waved it in the air. He turned to his students and said, “Trucks are not exactly like cars.” Four years ago, Forry got his commercial driver’s license and started a truck-driving class at Northeastern High. He wanted to teach “real skills, transferable skills that students can take to the workplace.” There are around a hundred thousand biologists in the country; there are three and a half million truck drivers. For the past couple of years, groups like the American Trucking Associations have been making the argument that a national shortage of drivers has amplified supply-chain problems. In January, Congress announced the start of an apprenticeship program that will allow some eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds to drive trucks across state lines. (Currently, you have to be twenty-one to do so.) Critics have objected that teens driving eighteenwheelers will make roads more dangerous. Chris Rotondo, of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, disagrees. “For a hundred years, we’ve left this whole generation of kids out there who can fight our wars but can’t drive a truck when they come back,” he said. The kids in Forry’s class were largely oblivious of the new rule. Each had some trucking aspiration— agriculture, diesel mechanics, travel—but the most immediate goal was, as one student put it, to “make it through the morning.” On the day’s parking-lot agenda: how to get in and out of the vehicle safely. “I can’t stress enough how many people take a step out, and it’s icy, and then, whoop,” Forry said. “One step, three points of contact,” Forry muttered, as a student climbed into the driver’s seat. “I know it’s a simple thing, it’s boring, but if you do the simple things you’ll get work. They have awards for safe driving.” Students wouldn’t be allowed to drive the truck until the end of the semester. A general tip: avoid honking the horn. (“Company’s gonna get a call: ‘This driver scared me with his horn and tailgated me.’ ”) A few years ago, with help from the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association, Forry raised money to buy a Virage VS600M, a truck simulator. It now sits in the back of his classroom: a bucket seat on a small stage, surrounded by three screens. Among the donors listed on the machine: FedEx Ground, Commonwealth Trailer Parts, Frock Bros Trucking. After the first-period bell rang, some students stuck around and took turns on the VS600M. Continued on page 7.