Bud Shuster: “I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the gentleman's amendment. It does remove the confusion with…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the gentleman's amendment. It does remove the confusion with the industry stakeholders, but the hysteria that the other side is proclaiming, that roadways are going to become a slaughterhouse because if this goes away or it is clarified, truckers are just going to be out there running into people left or right, I mean, it is ridiculous. It is not a good business model for any company to want to have an incentive, which the other side has, I think, said, to hire unsafe drivers. That is not a good business model. In fact, you will go out of business, most likely, if you go out there and hire drivers who are bad drivers, dangerous drivers. The facts don't bear that out. Of the auto accidents that include trucks in it, over 75 percent of them are not the trucker's fault, it is the person in the car's fault. Truckers are professionals, and to have impugned this whole class of people, this whole group of people that go out on these roadways and work hard every day and try to do it as safely as they can, is just plain wrong. Again, as I said, truckers are professionals. Seventy-five percent of those accidents that truckers are involved in, it is not their fault. We continue to hype up and to put these things out there for, again, another class of worker out there, and that is the trial lawyers.…”