Posts Tagged ‘Trainers’

BRING IT ON
– Who is responsible for Sexual Harassment Training?

Let’s face it, Women are naïve and add a good amount of pride they sometimes do things which get them into some bad situations.

I had hoped to complete a post called “The Wild West” which examines the similarity of the American West and Trucking with regards to the introduction of Women but I was distracted yet again.

Sweeping things under the rug just makes a big lump in the rug. Eventually, people trip some may fall and others might try to sue! Some legal action may be warranted from that lump of dirt but leaving it there makes it visible to others who might see an opportunity for a frivolous lawsuit.

When is it time to pull that rug outside? Sweep the dirt out, shake it and beat it with a broom? After the first lawsuit? 10, 20? 265?

I worked at Disneyland and boy people sure want to sue them. Some folks save all year, sometimes a few years to take the family on the great American Road Trip to see Mickey. The reality check comes when they arrive & Goofy does not open the front doors for them and they have to walk a mile from the parking area to the hotel with all the kids screaming to go potty.

Enter the Hotel Lobby to see 800 other families with screaming kids who are hungry, hot and come to find out Pluto does not swim in the pool like he does on your brochure, your room is not ready and it will be several hours because the 800 families who came last week have not checked out yet. OH BOY! Guess who gets yelled at?

There are a number of things going on in the scenario above:
1. High Stress Level
2. Disoriented Environment
3. Miscommunication
4. Misleading Advertising
5. Being Naïve

Who has the power to control of this situation? This is where good training comes into play when things get heated.

I use this “G” rated example to lead into truck driver training purposely because I see the same thing with Women entering this industry who have been misled from advertising and recruiters to think its one big party to be a trucker.

I see recruiting techniques that advertise both trucking jobs targeting women and “Date a Trucker” on the very same sites. I see job placement agencies encouraging “Displaced Homemakers” who are Women who have maintained a household for many years and for whatever reason are now unmarried and have little or no job skills.

Enter Job Placement recruiters who offer a free voucher to pay for CDL School making light of the REAL work required to become successful in this industry.

While it’s true that anyone with the ability to listen and learn can become a trucker in my opinion there are other elements to this job that Women may not be prepared for.

I’ve covered the obvious in many of my other posts but let’s talk about some other scenarios:

A Woman recently Divorced after 25 years of Marriage has little experience and is encouraged to go to CDL School from her Unemployment Office. She gets a good Male trainer and he teaches her everything she needs to know. She begins to romanticize about his concern for her learning. He does not make a pass at her but this makes her like him even more. She initiates sex and wrongly assumes they will ride off into the sunset together. At the end of her training period she assumes they will drive as a team together but he has no intentions of running as a team. She is hurt and angry and feels used. He goes to pick up another female student and she becomes angry and reports him for harassment.

Was she naïve? Yes
Who is in control here? Both of them
Who is the professional here? He is, he is the teacher, she is the student. Proper training for him would help him recognize the situation he was about to get himself into and get her off his truck before it got out of hand.

Anyone from a corporate environment who has had Sexual Harassment Training has learned this but it does not exist in trucking yet increased recruitment of Women does. See a potential problem?

Who knows trucking?

Even a street smart gal gets her heart broken from getting too caught up in a tryst. Let’s face it ladies, trucking provides a lot of anonymity and that’s a big attraction for a “player” OR someone who thought “YOU” understood it was fun while it lasted.

But let’s get back to “Street Smarts”:

1. Street Law is this: “You Snitch, You Die”

Anyone who has ever been around gangs knows that if you join a girl gang there are only 2 ways to get “initiated”.
1. A gang bang , sometimes watched by other girls in the gang
2. Beat in, where the others literally beat the shit out of you.

In some gangs it is perfectly acceptable to share, sell or trade women amongst gang members with other woman watching and sometimes participating. Is that what Women in the Trucking Industry mean when they say you need “Street Smarts” to be successful in the trucking industry?

Then there are those really “Tough Girls” who think they are “One of the Boys” … Guess what… “YOU are NEVER one of the boys”! I don’t care if you dress, talk, walk or act like a boy, your males buddies are wondering what it would be like to have sex with you and may have discussed it with their friends when you walked out of earshot, and sometimes NOT in a good way.

Some of the toughest bitches I know have been raped because they thought they were “One of the Boys”, got drunk with Guys who were as tough as them who they thought were just like brothers to them.

The “Tough Girl”, “The Woman Scorned” and the “Rolling Cathouse”, all Women, all part of the trucking industry and every other industry as well.

Professionalism, Training and Self-Control alleviates much of this mess.

In my US Xpress comments on the original post I mentioned my conversation with a former Driver/Trainer who told me when he was assigned a Women to train he brought his Wife to meet her. After 30 minutes, his Wife would determine if she was here to Work OR Play. He told me that many times she took him aside and said “If you let her on your truck you will be getting Divorce papers!” He was happy to report he is still married. He no longer trains women at all because the quality of female recruits to trucking has declined and he began to fear for his life and his marriage.

That is the result of misleading advertising directed at Women entering Trucking.

Lack of suitable female trainers? You can refer again to poor recruiting tactics and lack of support from in-house staff. Recruiting Truck Drivers and portraying dating ads only complicates the issue further.

Again, this is an overall industry failure. Recruiting Naïve people has always been a tactic as far as I can tell but this time it’s biting back. Covering up , blaming the student. Who is in the power position?

Consider this scenario:

Single Woman attends orientation. No money, arrives on greyhound with all her belongings in boxes. Safety department person observes her acting giddy and follows her to her motel room. He was formerly in law enforcement in the same city where she is unfamiliar with her surroundings. He drops his pants and tells her to perform oral sex. She refuses but it is clear he will be her superior at this company.

Who do you believe?
The homeless woman who was joking around the night before with “The Guys”?
OR
The former law enforcement professional who is now a safety director at a large truck carrier?

Was he watching her the whole time and knew she was a perfect target because of how “outgoing” she was?

Did she “Bring it on”, Does “She deserve it”?

There are still many guys who think getting laid means getting a girl drunk and hoping she passes out so they can screw her. There are still plenty of Women who believe she “deserves it” and would not step up and speak out.

There are many naïve women and manipulative women who will make false allegations to harm someone but it takes two to “tango”.

Are Women Truckers expected to go to Charm School prior to CDL training?

Additional Reading:
Ethics: When falling in Love falls out of bounds

Stanford University Sexual Harassment Policy Online

Technorati Tags: Anne Ferro, Ellen Voie, Sexual Harassment, Trainers, Truckers, Trucking, Women

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