An advocate for women truck drivers and the subject of a recent POV film, Desiree Wood is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

A single mom who did not want to work in an office, she got into trucking and began blogging about her experiences.

Her firsthand accounts of sexual harassment and questionable training practices would become the basis of a Dan Rather investigative series and lead her to launch her own advocacy organization for women truck drivers.

Now the focus of the POV nonfiction film Driver, Desiree Wood, Founder of Real Women in Trucking, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

(Desiree Wood) Thank you for inviting me.

-What did you think of the nonfiction film?

That's what POV says it produces, so sort of like a documentary, but maybe a bit more theatrical?

-Yeah.

We filmed for several years, and I think we filmed probably over 700 hours of footage.

So how do you put all of that into 90 minutes?

There was a lot covered, but I kind of wish there was a lot more into the advocacy details to tell the story.

And you know, there were some parts that were missed, you know, that occurred during the filming, such as my trailer being hijacked, which kind of was the catalyst for some of the events that happened in the film.

-Why do you think that was not included, and what happened?

When did that happen?

-It happened shortly after I met the filmmaker and started talking to her.

I didn't really want to do any more filming.

I'd been interviewed a lot, and I just felt like, gosh, we're not really getting the point across.

But I said, I'll just do this one more thing.

And I had come home for Fourth of July.

I was living in South Florida and parked behind a supermarket where I had been parking for over a year without an incident, and someone came and dragged my tractor out of the way with a chain and stole the trailer, which was loaded with Campbell Soup product that was headed to a supermarket.

So you know, that put the truck in the shop.

They ripped the differential out when that happened, and that ended up putting me behind on payments.

And it just sort of snowballed after that.

-How common is that?

-It's a rising problem.

Cargo theft has increased over 20% and is expected to continue to increase a lot, because we have a lot of foreign influence in our domestic supply chain that people have not been really paying attention to.

In addition, we have a lot of training programs that bring people into truck driving jobs and logistics jobs that sometimes they want to make some money on the side, and they tell somebody this trailer is leaving from this place at this time and it's going in this direction.

Or in my case, I do believe somebody put an air tag in my trailer, because I normally never pulled food.

It's just a hassle, and it takes a long time.

But that time I did, and I always was like, how did they know there was something in there they could unload quickly?

-When you talk about people that work in the trucking industry, you learned quickly that you would be encountering people, some people with criminal pasts.

Take us back to that.

How old were you, and who did you have to work with and why?

-So I became interested in getting into trucking in my, I want to say, late 40s.

My kids had grown up.

They were gone.

It was just me, and I wanted to move around.

I wanted to go different places.

But as soon as I started at my CDL school, I-- Everybody there was pretty much just out of jail.

It was like a who's who of criminal activity at my starter company, and you were required to cohabitate with somebody you didn't know as a condition of employment.

-In the truck?

-In the truck, living and working and changing your clothes and sleeping and everything.

You were unsupervised for weeks at a time.

So I didn't understand this when I entered.

This was the situation, and they don't really tell you this either.

So the difficulty I encountered right away was that I was being asked to drive and live on a truck with somebody who had been in prison for attempted murder, who had formerly been incarcerated for pandering, trafficking, people with mental health issues, and it was just like one dangerous situation after another.

And a company, although they said report to us right away, whenever you report to them, they start coming after you.

So that's kind of what led me to start writing about my experiences and then learning it was not just that one company.

It was happening at many that have this business model.

-CDL stands for commercial driver's license.

And you have to go to a school to be trained and get that license.

There are issues even with the schooling, the training.

What did it include for you?

-So there's really been an increase of what they call CDL mills around the country.

And they make a lot of money selling this dream of being a truck driver, and they charge anywhere from 5,500 to $10,000, whatever they can get a lot of times.

But they don't really teach you how to be a truck driver.

They teach you the general skills to pass the test to get the CDL.

In my case, you know, I had only driven around the block three times in an automatic, so they were just looking to see if I hit a tire on a curb.

And then the next thing you know, I'm driving in snow in, you know, Wyoming, and I don't even know how to do a proper lane change in a vehicle that big.

A lot of the people I went to CDL school didn't even make it through the first six months from various accidents and incidents they had.

I was lucky.

I never had an accident or incident.

But you do not graduate from these schools ready to drive a tractor-trailer.

-That's what you told Dan Rather in that series; you literally had driven around the block.

And then you get a job, and you're still training, right?

You're working with someone who, as you're driving, they're sleeping.

-Mm-hmm.

-When you sleep, they drive.

-Right.

-You're isolated at times.

And you receive threats?

-Yeah.

I had a couple of different incidents.

I had one guy that was just really pushing me, trying to find out what kind of men I like to date.

Just really a lot of inappropriate conversation.

And when I was not responsive, he kind of lost his temper, which caused me to then have a physical reaction that my hands started shaking and I couldn't shift the truck.

I took myself off the truck for that incident, but I had a couple others.

One, one co-driver was angry that I suggested we park in winter conditions.

This actually happened in Northern Nevada.

And the fact that I was a woman telling him that just enraged him.

And so he-- It was his turn to drive, and he drove over Donner Pass just going around the corners way too fast, you know, to scare me, which he did.

Probably the worst one, though, was a guy that I had to co-drive with after that that got really drunk in New Mexico and threw my stuff out on the ground and sprayed me with bleach.

The security at the casino, it was a Native American casino, they just could not comprehend that I was a truck driver.

They were convinced that I was just soliciting in the parking lot.

And they drove me to town, left me there.

I was out there for five days with no money, no money for food, and they let him drive away after he had drunk six Long Island iced teas in a tractor-trailer.

And at that moment, I was just like, I wonder if the people that hire this trucking company to pull this high security load understand what goes on with these team driving student fleet loads, that their load is right now going down the highway on I-40 with a drunk truck driver and the person that was safe to drive the truck just got left behind in the desert with no money.

-The Dan Rather series, so about 15 years ago then, how much has changed as far as cohabitating, training requirements?

-Unfortunately, I think it's gotten worse.

The companies, instead of admitting they have a rape problem, are now just putting women on waiting lists to hire them, telling them that they have to wait longer than their male counterparts.

That violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Our organization has a couple cases against carriers for doing this.

They don't want to do the hard work to eliminate sexual predators from their training program.

And in the rare case that they do fire them, they give them a verification of employment to go work somewhere else.

And these individuals tend to go to other training companies where they have a clean slate and they can do it again and have access to new entrants that are unaware of this problem.

-Knowing what you know, if you could go back and choose a different career path, would you?

-I think I would still want to be a truck driver, but I would have made better choices.

I would have went to a community college that generally has more thorough training.

And, you know, at that time, I did a lot of internet research.

I'm good at the computer, but I couldn't find anything on the internet about this problem.

I think that people need to understand that when you're an over-the-road truck driver, you go through many states in a day.

So if you have sex offenders that are maybe on a registry that are supposed to notify the community where they live, if they're an over-the-road truck driver, they're just driving around.

So they're a threat to all communities, not just somebody that's forced to live with them inside the truck.

So the trucking companies need to be more accountable.

-Last topic: You have advised lawmakers, policy makers about this issue.

Of everything that you have contributed, what are you most proud of having accomplished in this space?

-Well, one of the things that I got involved with that came as a result of my social media activity was becoming aware of the murder of Jason Rivenburg who was a truck driver who was murdered for $7 when he parked, staging his truck to deliver milk in South Carolina.

It's a common practice that shippers and receivers will not let drivers park on-site if they're early for their appointment, and they will fine you if you're late or too early, so you are kind of a sitting duck out there trying to find a place to park.

His wife was pregnant with twins at the time when he was murdered, and her and her family immediately started awareness and a bill called Jason's Law.

I was part of the organizing grass roots efforts when the bill became a law and have continued to be a truck parking advocate.

I'm very proud that I have been able to speak nationally on this subject to educate people that drivers deserve a safe place to park.

They have driven 11 hours a day, and they are the reason that things are in your supermarket and that you don't have to go down to the rail yard and buy things and they need somewhere safe to go.

And they spend money in your communities when they have a safe place to go.

Las Vegas is a great example.

I mean, this is a great town to get stuck in and go, I can go to a restaurant tonight and not eat a Subway sandwich for a change.

-Desiree Wood, Founder of Real Women in Trucking, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you.

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