Trucking, labor groups clash over hair-based drug tests for drivers

William B. Cassidy, Senior Editor | Aug 25, 2015 3:15PM EDT

When it comes to drug testing, the nation’s largest trucking lobby wants to split hairs. Specifically, the American Trucking Associations wants hair-follicle testing, considered by many to be more accurate than urinalysis, to become part of motor carrier drug screening programs.

Several labor groups, however, prefer cups to clippers. A coalition led by the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department wants Congress to reject a hair-follicle testing provision in the Senate’s highway bill, calling hair testing “an unsubstantiated method” of screening.

Large trucking operators, including Schneider National, Knight Transportation and J.B. Hunt Transport Services already use hair-follicle testing to screen job applicants, but Department of Transportation standards for driver drug screening programs require urine tests.

Hair-follicle tests, which have been used for decades and often opposed by groups such as the Teamsters union, can detect drug use over a 90-day period, compared with several days for a urine test. Hair tests are claimed to be better at uncovering chronic or multiple drug use.

However, hair-follicle drug tests are not currently recognized as an alternative to urine sampling by DOT, and positive truck driver hair test results could not be reported to subsequent employers or included in a drug and alcohol testing clearinghouse being set up by federal regulators.

ATA wants Congress to fix that by passing the Drug Free Commercial Driver Act, one of several truck-safety-related bills blended into the six-year Senate highway bill known as the Developing a Reliable and Innovative Vision for the Economy Act or DRIVE Act.

The bill would direct the DOT and Department of Health and Human Services to issue rules permitting hair-follicle analysis an alternative to urine testing for motor carriers, both in pre-employment testing and random screening programs. The DOT and Department of Health and Human Services would be required to develop rules and procedures for validating hair follicle tests.

The result almost certainly would be fewer job applicants at truck terminals, and more positive tests that would disqualify some current drivers from working behind the wheel.

“Hair follicle testing, combined with the drug-testing clearinghouse, will have a greater impact on truck capacity long-term than electronic logging devices,” BB&T Capital Markets transportation analyst Thomas Albrecht said at the NASSTRAC Shipper Conference in Orlando in April.

“ATA is aware of thousands of truck drivers who have tested positive for illegal drug use on hair tests and have obtained driving positions with other carriers because they were subsequently able to pass DOT-required urine tests,” ATA President Bill Graves said in a letter to House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee leaders Bill Schuster, R-Pa., and Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and the Senate Science, Commerce and Transportation Committee's John Thune, R-S.D., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla. 

It’s not every day the head of the largest U.S. trucking lobby tells Congress thousands of drug-using drivers that slipped past company urine tests are out there on the highways. “Several of these drivers have had crashes and, of course, future ones are likely as a result,” Graves said.

Labor groups, however, said hair testing could lead to many “false positive” results. “It is widely known that hair specimen can test positive for a drug that its donor was merely exposed to but never actually ingested,” TTD Vice President Ed Wytkind said in his letter to Schuster, DeFazio and House Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chairman Sam Graves, R-Mo., and ranking Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington, D.C.

Introducing hair-follicle testing, which isn’t cheap, would also put smaller carriers at a disadvantage, the TTD executive argued. “Carriers that choose to continue testing the only HHS-approved specimen (urine) may be labeled as ‘less safe’ than those testing hair.”

"We urge the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to reject efforts to allow hair to be used for federal drug tests before the validity and reliability of this testing method can be determined by the Department of Health and Human Services,” Wytkind said in the letter.

ATA’s Graves said claims of external contamination of hair samples and the allegation of racial bias in hair tests are “based on false notions and outdated science.” He said the HHS Drug Testing Advisory Board recently recommended hair testing as an alternative to urinalysis.

Those recommendations included creating performance standards “that sufficiently address external contamination and hair color impact,” the ATA pointed out. The DRIVE Act would press HHS and DOT to move quickly to complete such standards and issue new regulations.

The battle over hair-follicle drug testing is part of a broader struggle over trucking-related provisions attached to the highway bill. Carriers and shippers are squaring off against labor and advocacy groups in battles over driver hours-of-service rules and truck and trailer lengths.

That struggle extends from congressional offices to the editorial columns of newspapers such as The New York Times, which recently published an editorial highly critical of the trucking industry by former ATA executive and Journal of Commerce editor Howard Abramson.

The surface transportation spending bill has evolved over years from a highway funding mechanism to a vehicle for transportation policy changes. The 2012 bill included provisions mandating electronic logging by truck drivers and ordering DOT to issue a rule preventing carriers or shippers from coercing drivers into breaking rules. 

The future of all the trucking provisions, riders and attachments to the DRIVE bill, passed by the Senate last month, is up for grabs when the House of Representatives returns from its recess in September.

The House is expected to craft its own multi-year surface transportation bill. Expect the battle over multiple trucking initiatives to intensify as the debate develops this fall.