Truth Be Told, Politics Be Damned
When speaking her truth separated her from a contingent of the industry, truck driver Desiree Wood went her own way to advocate for women in trucking.
By Monica Dutcher
Desiree Wood is eating a bowl of cornflakes during our phone interview. As two women working God-knows-how-many hours per week in separate time zones, we’ve had some trouble syncing our schedules. But here we are, finally synced, and I don’t mind the crunching at all. First, I’m a big fan of breakfast for dinner. Second, she’s a woman on the go, and she’s hungry. Multi-taskers unite!
Desiree is a truck goddess. She had a rough start at the beginning of her career with a harassment claim that she says went ignored by those in the industry who could help her most. But she forged onward, equipping herself with knowledge and expanding upon her experience until she achieved what is considered the pinnacle in truck driving: owner-operator, or independent driver, status. This means more choice in what she will haul and where. And with whom. Karma is always there — both the good, metaphysical kind and the loyal four-legged kind.
Karma is the name of the once-feral mutt she adopted from a junkyard adjacent to a parking area for trucks. There were signs posted warning drivers not to feed the stray dog. It didn’t matter — no one could resist the crusty canine when she came begging. “One day she looked like she was going to drop dead,” said Desiree.
“She was really weak, and I caught her. I kept her in a body harness for two weeks and eventually tamed her. I saved her and she saved me.” That was in 2009. Desiree and Karma — who has her own Twitter page featuring a dog’s life on the road — then began trucking together.
There’s a glamorous grittiness to it all. A girl and her dog rolling from town to town, roadhouse to diner. Motels that run a fine line between nostalgic and seedy. The freedom of the road. A journey that will have you chasing blood orange and magenta-tinged sunsets in West Texas and tiptoeing through disgusting truck stops in Grunge County, U.S.A., making contact with as few surfaces as physically possible.
Desiree’s blog posts became the basis for Dan Rather’s four-part investigative series (2010) on truck driver training.
A divorced mother of two grown children and six grandchildren, Desiree began writing about her experiences as a single female entering trucking in 2008 on the “Ask the Trucker” blog. Her posts became the basis for Dan Rather’s four-part investigative series (2010) on truck driver training, a topic about which Desiree is extremely passionate.
Poor CDL training not only poses a safety risk to all involved, including the public, but also sets new drivers up for failure, which often drives them out of the industry.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, “turnover rates are over 90 percent for large long haul carriers and over 72 percent for small carriers, meaning that drivers are regularly leaving companies or leaving the industry altogether.”
Trucking — often referred to as the backbone of infrastructure and therefore more than worthy of our attention — doesn’t have a recruitment problem as much as it has a retention problem. That’s why Desiree founded the non-profit REAL Women in Trucking (RWIT) in 2010. Lately, advocating for mitigating the industry’s workforce challenges has been her focus.
RWIT’s mission — supported by members and corporate sponsors who must meet RWIT’s ethics criteria — is to reduce the turnover rate by helping new CDL students understand how to avoid a “debt-bondage” situation (explained further later in this article) with CDL schools or training carriers. Desiree also created RWIT to establish a cohort of industry champions who aren’t afraid to demand accountability for the unsafe practices that can include violence between trainers, students and/or co-drivers at troublesome carriers.
Unfortunately, there’s a swath of the industry that Desiree doesn’t jibe with because the questions she asks make people uncomfortable, threaten their business or partnerships, interfere with politics and special interests. Regardless, she fearlessly calls into that megaphone on behalf of thousands. Desiree has more than 14,000 followers on both Facebook and Twitter (@TruckerDesiree), where she often shares insider advice and cautionary tales of many other truck drivers, especially women, who have also taken to social media seeking a supportive network and a platform for their voice.
Then there’s RWIT, composed of several hundred working female truck drivers. Members of RWIT have gone to Washington, D.C. on several occasions to advocate for truck drivers and to meet with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and other elected officials regarding unchecked sexual misconduct and harassment in truck driver training fleets.
Members of REAL Women in Trucking have gone to Washington, D.C. on several occasions to advocate for truck drivers and to meet with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and other elected officials regarding unchecked sexual misconduct and harassment in truck driver training fleets.
“Many people that are entering the industry are former incarcerated, homeless, and /or drug users,” said Desiree. “They’re vulnerable and uninformed; they’re just looking for a way to get back on their feet. They see the ads from companies offering free tuition, claiming how much new drivers can be earning in just six months. The ads have people thinking you can just go to school for three weeks and then be driving on Walmart's private fleet. No. It doesn’t work that way.”
It takes time, education, savvy, and some financial investment to become an experienced driver who enjoys a lucrative career. Like many things in life, it’s a process. To make a true go of it, one should attend a comprehensive eight weeks of training at a reputable CDL school or community college, ride with a training fleet for a year or two (at which point they become insurable), and then either pull for a company that offers good benefits and cares about its drivers or become an owner-operator.
But, according to Desiree, the reality is that CDL scams abound, costing students as much as $10,000 to receive training that doesn’t educate on the business aspect of the industry, fails to teach the intricacies of operating a big rig, and falls short on the driving hours students need to actually get hired onto a training fleet. Many people are barely making it to the training phase and countless more are stuck in the cycle of jumping from training fleet to training fleet.
“The system in place allows carriers to use students to move freight really cheaply,” said Desiree. “There are companies more interested in moving freight fast for cheap labor instead of investing in experienced drivers. They say, ‘Let’s get students and pay them nothing, tell them they’re getting on-the-job training.’ In reality, that student is paying them, especially when that government subsidy kicks in for the company.”
Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the trucking industry, put a fine point on this issue in a recent Planet Money newsletter article, which NPR republished in May 2021. "We have millions of people who have been trained to be heavy-duty truck drivers who are currently not working as heavy-duty truck drivers because the entry-level jobs are terrible," he said.
Further, he said, companies have been "systematically degrading trucker working conditions." The article continues: “Viscelli says the industry is rife with minimum wage violations and what he calls ‘debt peonage.’ Basically, new drivers become indentured servants, going deep into debt to get training and to lease trucks from their employers.”
“When drivers get out into leased trucks, it’s a sharecropper trucking situation,” explained Desiree. “They’re working all the time to pay for the truck but they’re not going to get the title. It’s like an Uber driver renting a car.”
She continues: “Taxpayers need to have more awareness of how much waste is going on in this sector. They are feeding a monster that is not producing qualified candidates. If a company funded a certain amount in state and federal tuition grants, we need to know what happened. Where are those drivers now? If they’re dropping out in record numbers and / or are filing complaints, if we keep hearing the same story, those companies shouldn’t have access to government subsidies anymore.”
Fortunately, some of these shady businesses are being called to task. Take for instance the owner of a California truck driving school who pleaded guilty last year to defrauding the US Department of Veterans Affairs out of more than $4 million in an elaborate CDL training scam. He is serving 48 months in prison and paying $4.1 million in restitution.
RWIT’s pressing priority right now is to actually to axe House Bill H.R. 1341 “Promoting Women in Trucking Workforce Act” from the infrastructure package. Desiree has sent letters to more than a dozen members of Congress, writing, in part:
“The special interest lobby groups behind this bill have done nothing but enable bad training fleets, where hundreds of women have been sexually assaulted during truck driver training... Recruiting in trucking is monetized, so without a tie to retention, this bill just pours more money for recruiting into training, where there is a 200% turnover rate in the first critical year...Unfortunately, rape and sexual misconduct have been enabled by the very lobby groups who are behind this fox-guarding-the-henhouse bill…”
On Oct. 12, 2021, the National Minority Women Association in Transportation Inc. (NMWAIT) published a press release indicating their strong opposition as well — especially to Section 5: Women of Trucking Advisory Board. “The appointees that would be proposed to the board have not implemented diversity, equity and inclusion into their own business practices,” NMWAIT states. “These are the same companies, organizations and individuals that have been the voice for many years without reproach.”
RWIT and NMWAIT are taking this position on the legislation largely because Desiree and the likely appointees were on opposite sides in the landmark rape case Jane Doe v. CRST Expedited Inc. Desiree served as an expert witness on behalf of the plaintiff, who received a record-setting $5 million settlement.
There are things that the public can do, Desiree encourages. “Realize that you have the power to put pressure on companies. If a bad training company is pulling freight for consumer brands that you use, know about it.” Take a hiatus from buying that brand; write your representative. Have a voice. Work with Desiree to be your megaphone. She can be reached at realwomenintrucking@gmail.com.