Trucks deliver a Candyland Christmas for Arkansas children in foster care
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- Created: 12.01.2023
LITTLE ROCK, ARK. – Project Zero and Arkansas Department of Human Services (DHS) Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS) will be partnering with trucking to deliver Christmas for children and teens in foster care across Arkansas.
Over the past few weeks, individuals and businesses adopted wish lists of children in foster care. Today, Friday, Dec. 1, at Project Zero’s “North Pole” at EngageMed in North Little Rock, community volunteers will organize, sort and load the donated gifts onto trucks to be delivered to Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, in preparation for tomorrow’s Candyland Christmas.
Report Examines Excessive Towing Rates Faced by Trucking Companies
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- Created: 11.30.2023
LITTLE ROCK, ARK. – Trucking companies are increasingly encountering excessive towing rates and predatory practices by providers. A new report released by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) examines the causes and countermeasures of predatory heavy-duty towing, with the goal of improving the relationship between the towing and trucking industries.
According to the report, the most common types of predatory towing were excessive rates, experienced by 82.7% of trucking companies, and unwarranted extra service charges, experienced by 81.8% of carriers. Most carriers also encountered additional issues such as truck release or access delays, cargo release delays, truck seizure without cause and tows misreported as consensual.
Up Front- Filing Day
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- Created: 11.22.2023
Shannon Newton
President, ATA
Over the next year, we will see hundreds of elements of the 2024 election season play out in real time. We’ll watch campaign commercials until we’re seeing red (or blue). We’ll receive fundraising emails and political mailers. We’ll watch or avoid the debates. We’ll see candidates bow out and primary results posted. We’ll endure awkward holiday conversations or maybe offer heartfelt support to a candidate or cause. Then finally, we’ll conclude with the final task of making selections with a stylus on ballots next November.
All of that starts with the filing period, where candidates officially request their names to appear on the ballot.
It’s like the Rube Goldberg machines you see in cartoons or movies—the contraptions that turn some ordinary event into a series of a bunch of small steps carried out by simple machines. Pull this string that flips the cup that drops the marble down the ramp and rolls into an epic domino formation, and when the final domino falls, it lands on the button that turns all the lights on. It’s something you could do without a bunch of levers flipping, wheels turning, but the machine makes the work a performance to behold. The point of a Rube Goldberg machine is the spectacle, to make some banal task fun to watch.
Election season doesn’t always feel fun to watch, but it is a type of Rube Goldberg machine. It’s a chain reaction that we need to work even when all the little steps feel overengineered and unnecessary.
The Last Word
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- Created: 11.22.2023
Louder than the rest
By Chris Spear
For 90 years, the ATA Federation has been the leading voice of our industry in Washington, D.C. and every state capital across the country. That’s volume, reach and history no other voice in trucking can claim, and few industry associations can match. Today, we can proudly declare our efforts are making a difference.
Our collective voice cuts directly through the rhetoric and emotion peddled by our foes: trial lawyers chasing jackpot justice, self-promoting union bosses, and delusional environmental extremists. Together, they constitute a clear threat to our industry’s ability to grow and support our nation’s economic security.
Union bosses today are emboldened. Pouring $1.8 billion into the last Presidential cycle, they bought access, legislation and regulations. The Pro Act, federal reclassification rules, California’s AB5 and duplicative meal and rest break requirements are all engineered to rewrite a century of labor laws and reverse decades of plummeting union membership.
While union membership shrinks, our industry has grown to more than 8.4 million strong. One in 17 jobs in the United States are trucking related. These hardworking, patriotic men and women are the glue that binds the nation’s supply chain, the backbone of the economy and the heartbeat of this nation. They think on their feet and for themselves. They don’t need some showboating union boss to do it for them.
