NYT article on truckers, JIT implications

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Howdy--

First off, Happy Thanksgiving to all out there who celebrate it. Hope everyone drives careful.

Second--interesting article in the NYT. I am unable to give a direct link to article because one must register with the Times (for free).

This article concerns trucking in the US, percentage of freight they carry (81%) and the just-in-time pressures they must cope with. Two issues concern me--glitches in ordering systems, and low supplies of fuel.

Go to NYTimes or cut and paste http://www.nytimes.com

Let me apologize in advance for the possibly poor formating.

Check for trucking article under "National" section at upper left.

Excerpts below:

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(For Educational Purposes Only)

"The reason I'm out here is my kid," said Wheat, who is 36 and earns 33 cents a mile driving more than 120,000 miles a year, or around $40,000. "He's got more than I ever had."

Wheat is proud of the work. "Anything that goes in a store, we carry," he said. And he likes the solitude. "You get your whole life in perspective," he said.

These are busy, good-money times for the nation's nearly 600,000 drivers of large trucks, those weighing more than 10,000 pounds.

High employment, easy credit and free-spending consumers may be prosperity's engines, but these men -- nearly all are men -- are its mules.

Truckers lug 81 percent of the value of all the nation's freight, and 60 percent of the tonnage.

Trucking is more hectic than ever, in part because the economy of the 1990's has assigned trucks a new function. They have become warehouses on wheels. Stores and factories, many tied to the Internet, have found they can cut costs by shrinking the warehouses where they store the materials they use in production or the goods they sell later to consumers. Instead, they rely on trucks to deliver the goods the moment they need them.

Propelled by this "just in time" method of inventory control, trucking company revenue is up more than 60 percent in this decade, to more than $400 billion, according to the American Trucking Associations, and the number of big trucks has risen 18 percent, to 1.7 million.

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Best regards to all,

-- William in Dallas (bcheek@onramp.net), November 24, 1999

Answers

Got gas?

Got Beano?

-- nothere nothere (notherethere@hotmail.com), November 24, 1999.


Go talk to some truckers on Channel 19 CB. They are working, but they are also very disgruntled about many issues. They are carrying our society's economic fate in their trucks, but they feel stepped on by everyone- that they, as 'rednecks' are objects of scorn by the SUV driving yuppies who depend on them.

If they are stressed out and goaded by Y2K trouble, they might strike. And the NG couldn't do anything about it, not like Truman and the coal strike. There are too many too spread out to corral, and there is no hope of either hiring scabs or replacing them with NG.

Angry proleteriat indeed.

-- Forrest Covington (theforrest@mindspring.com), November 26, 1999.


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