Test drivers by the federal rules and the dock by its own risks

I think many freight carriers have let the federal drug and alcohol testing programme for commercial drivers become the template for everyone they employ. The habit is understandable. The federal programme is detailed, well understood and defensible, and extending it looks prudent. My position is that a carrier should run the federal programme for drivers exactly as the rules require, design separate testing for other roles according to the risks of that work and the law of each state, and be able to explain the difference to the drivers who will notice it.

Two programmes that had become one

When I arrived at Brennoway in 2019, everyone we hired was tested the same way. Drivers took the federal pre-employment test. Dock workers, technicians, dispatchers, sales staff and payroll clerks took a company test using the same urine panel, cannabis included. Driver and dock applicants also took a company hair test reaching back about ninety days. Nobody had ever decided that a payroll clerk should be tested like a driver. The practice had grown because one policy was simpler to administer than several.

The cost became visible as states in our network legalised adult cannabis use. By 2022, 7.6% of dock applicants in those states tested positive before starting, against 3.1% elsewhere, and about one in five dock applicants withdrew once told about the hair test. With our academy drawing dock workers into driving, dock vacancies had reached 8.8%. Service centre managers were filling the gap with overtime, which carries safety costs of its own.

What the federal rules ask of a carrier

For drivers who perform safety-sensitive functions, federal rules require a testing programme covering pre-employment, random, post-accident, reasonable-suspicion, return-to-duty and follow-up tests, with prescribed collection and laboratory procedures and review of results by a medical review officer. Carriers must query the federal Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse before a driver starts and at least once a year afterwards, and must report violations to it. The Department of Transportation has long said that its rules prohibit marijuana use by covered drivers regardless of state law, and our programme follows that position. A driver who violates the rules cannot return to safety-sensitive work until completing a return-to-duty process overseen by a substance abuse professional.

None of that is optional, and at Brennoway none of it changed. We keep the federal programme separately administered, with its own records and reviewing physician, so that company decisions about other roles cannot blur it. We also kept the company hair test for driver applicants. It sits outside the federal programme and cannot replace any part of it, but our safety team values its longer window for people who will drive a forty-ton combination on public roads.

Safety-sensitive describes the work, not the company

For everyone else, we asked what each role actually involves. Dock workers drive forklifts among pedestrians and load trailers whose weight distribution affects how a truck handles at highway speed. Yard workers move trailers with yard tractors. Technicians road-test vehicles and work beneath them. Those roles are safety-sensitive by the nature of the work, and we kept pre-employment urine testing, post-incident testing and reasonable-suspicion testing for all of them. We dropped the hair test for dock applicants, because the urine test covers the period that matters for a forklift operator starting work.

Office, sales and customer-service roles are different. Impairment at work remains a disciplinary matter for everyone, and a manager who suspects it can act. But we stopped testing those applicants for cannabis before hire. Several states in our network limit what employers may do about lawful off-duty cannabis use for roles outside federal testing, and our policy had to respect those limits in any event. More to the point, we could not explain what safety purpose was served by testing a payroll clerk before hiring her.

One group needed particular care. A dock worker may apply to our academy, and from the first day of training the federal rules apply, cannabis included. We tell every dock applicant in writing, at the start, that this is so. A colleague who uses cannabis lawfully off duty in Illinois while working on the dock will have to stop before entering the academy, and deserves to know that long before the day of the test.

Our vice president of safety argued that one rule for everyone would be easier to defend after an accident, and he had a point. Our excess liability insurer asked for a written rationale, which we supplied. Two drivers wrote to our chief executive that we had created a double standard. I met them and explained that the standard follows the work: they are under federal rules because they drive heavy vehicles on public roads, and so is anyone who joins them in that work.

From October 2022, dock offer-to-start conversion rose from 61% to 76%, and dock vacancies fell to 4.0% by the end of 2024. Post-incident positive results among equipment operators were 1.1% before the change and 1.0% after it. I would not claim the policy improved safety. The data suggests it did not make safety worse, while it made a large difference to hiring.

The weak point was reasonable suspicion. We trained dock supervisors to recognise impairment four months after the policy changed, and before that training they referred almost nobody. A policy that leans less on screening applicants leans more on supervisors who can spot impairment and act on it. That training has to come first.

I would ask a carrier's board to review three things: which roles are tested under the federal programme and which under company policy, the reason recorded for testing each group of non-driver roles and how many reasonable-suspicion referrals supervisors made last year. If every role is tested alike and referrals are rare, the company is relying on screening it has not justified and on supervision it has not trained.