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Trump and Trade

Image via Twiiter @realDonaldTrump

President Donald Trump has moved quickly to keep key campaign promises on ending or altering U.S. international trade agreements. During the campaign, Trump insisted that these agreements have hurt American workers and cost jobs, while unfairly benefiting foreign countries such as China and Mexico.

On Monday, Jan. 23, President Trump pulled out of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), an Asia-centric trade agreement designed to bolster U.S. trading interests in the region at the expense of the Chinese.

The president has also said he will renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada “at the appropriate time.” Trump has also threatened to levy “major taxes” on U.S. companies that shift jobs to foreign countries.

Such moves are highly popular with his supporters. But some trade experts argue that the moves could ultimately backfire and slow U.S. economic growth.

Outlined below are views of several experts, from in and out of trucking, on these early trade moves by the Trump administration excerpted (along with their accompanying quotes) from a US News & World Report post

Winners and Losers

Marina Whitman is a professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the University of Michigan who has long been a proponent of free trade agreements. Today, however, she says that while she still believes free trade agreements are beneficial to the U.S., and cites polling showing a majority of Americans support free trade agreements, she thinks the “unexpected” emergence of China as a major trade rival in the 1990s-- along with the failure of the American labor market to adjust and create new jobs for workers displaced by NAFTA-- have poisoned the free trade well for many Americans.

Whitman says that while there are many more American winners benefiting from free trade agreements, the negative impact from such agreements on the ...Read the rest of this story

Old Dominion Dominates Data

Data from PeopleNet units on trucks plus external information, like weather reports, generate graphics on the big wall map. Dispatchers can see it all from their nearby work stations. Photo via Old Dominion Freight Line

When you have some 7,000 trucks on the road at any one time, things like winter storms that close Interstate highways have a ripple effect across the network like cancelled flights at Chicago's O'Hare airport. And the amount of data available on those trucks via telematics is a gold mine waiting to be tapped.

That's why the less-than-truckload carrier Old Dominion Freight Line got its IT staff to work with PeopleNet to develop better ways to analyze and use all that data. The centerpiece of their efforts is visible as the “command center” at its Thomasville, North Carolina, headquarters.

At any time of day or night, the five dispatchers in the center can glance up at a wall of TVs and get a birds-eye view of the entire network, including any weather delays, accidents or breakdowns, and hard braking/stop incidents.

“We look at ourselves as the conductor and all 230 service centers out in the field as the orchestra,” says Hugh Morris, vice president of transportation. “Anybody here in the corporate office that is sharing information out in the field can walk by, look inside our big glass bubble, and in 30 seconds know just about anything and everything going on in the entire network.”

The data flows into the system from PeopleNet units on the vehicles, as well as external information such as weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“PeopleNet is an external partner that is working with our internal IT department, and they're actually working together to help make this reporting more dynamic,” he says.

WIth the two-way flow of communications though the PeopleNet units, Morris says, ...Read the rest of this story

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