The Driving Jobs Nobody Wants - How Labor-Intensive Transport Creates a Demand For Drivers We Don't Need
When transportation work involves backbreaking labor, companies desperate for workers and drivers desperate for jobs create deadly combinations
The garbage truck was doing 68 mph when Danny Glen Tiner looked down at his phone to scroll through TikTok videos. In the seconds it took him to swipe past dancing teenagers and viral challenges, five people died in the twisted metal ahead of him on Interstate 10 near Chandler, Arizona. Tiner's deadly distraction was the inevitable result of a transportation system that pairs the most dangerous drivers with the dirtiest, most demanding jobs in America.
Municipal waste hauling represents the bottom rung of commercial transportation, where companies scraping for workers meet drivers scraping for employment. It's a world where 15-hour days wrestling with rotting garbage, methane exposure, and broken equipment become acceptable trade-offs for drivers who can't find work anywhere else. When you combine desperate workers with dangerous jobs, people die.
Tiner was driving for Mr. Bult's Inc., the nation's largest semi-truck waste transportation company, when he plowed into stopped traffic that January morning in 2023. The FBI's analysis of his phone revealed this wasn't an isolated lapse. Tiner had a documented pattern of posting TikTok videos from inside his truck while driving. This behavior should have been identified and addressed during the hiring, training, or supervision process. Instead, he found sanctuary in an industry that has become a refuge for drivers nobody else will hire.
The economics of garbage hauling create a vicious cycle that almost guarantees safety failures. Mr. Bult's operates over 1,300 tractors hauling more than 80,000 tons of trash daily, but driver reviews paint a picture of an industry built on exploitation. Eleven to fifteen-hour days are standard. Drivers report constant exposure to hazardous fumes, equipment that breaks down regularly, and pay structures that work out to barely above minimum wage when calculated hourly.
"I work hard, smell rotten garbage all day except while driving, methane gas ect. I do three loads a day. I work 11 - 12 hours. I make anywhere from $175.00 to $190.00 a day. That works out to $16.00 - $16.50 an hour at straight time," one current Mr. Bult's driver posted online.
These conditions repel experienced, safety-conscious drivers. What remains is a workforce of people with nowhere else to go, new CDL holders with no experience, drivers with safety violations that disqualify them from better carriers, workers facing immediate financial desperation, and career refugees who've been terminated from respectable companies.
The problem extends far beyond garbage trucks to every transportation sector that combines driving with demanding physical labor. Household goods movers load furniture while working through residential streets filled with children and bad customers. Construction material haulers work under crushing deadline pressure in active work zones. Scrap metal drivers handle hazardous materials in industrial areas with poor visibility and crumbling infrastructure.
Each of these sectors creates the same toxic dynamic, difficult working conditions drive away quality drivers, forcing companies to lower hiring standards and accept workers that better carriers reject. The result is a transportation underclass where the most dangerous drivers operate the most dangerous vehicles in the most demanding conditions.
The moving industry exemplifies this perfectly. Experienced drivers avoid household goods because of the physical demands, irregular schedules, and constant customer complaints. What's left is often a workforce struggling with substance abuse, criminal backgrounds, or other issues that prevent employment elsewhere. These drivers gain access to families' homes and possessions while operating commercial vehicles through residential neighborhoods, yet federal oversight remains minimal.
The training crisis makes everything worse. Commercial driving schools have become diploma mills that graduate drivers with minimal competency after just four weeks of instruction. For labor-intensive sectors, the preparation gap is even worse. Drivers receive no training on safe loading procedures, hazardous material handling, equipment maintenance, or fatigue management for combined driving and physical labor. A driver can graduate from CDL school having never loaded a single piece of cargo, then immediately begin hauling hazardous waste or moving families' possessions with virtually no supervision.
Technology that could prevent these disasters remains absent from dirty job sectors. While long-haul trucking increasingly adopts collision avoidance systems and driver monitoring, municipal waste trucks and moving vans typically operate without basic safety equipment. The industry's resistance isn't just about cost, it's about a business model that prioritizes operational efficiency over accident prevention. When profit margins are razor-thin and competition fierce, safety investments become "luxuries" that companies convince themselves they can't afford.
The insurance crisis created by poor safety performance has spawned an entire ecosystem of regulatory manipulation. Companies create shell corporations to avoid consolidated safety records, shop between states to escape oversight, and misrepresent operations to obtain coverage. Lucky Dog LLC's creation of CWI of Washington exemplifies this shell game approach to avoiding accountability. After Lucky Dog’s fatal crash, which killed Ashley Chapman, the company faced mounting insurance challenges due to historical failures. The fatality just happened to be the confirmation the world needed to kill the Lucky Dog noncompliance machine, finally. The operation was sold to Mr. Bult, Inc., rather than address the underlying safety deficiencies and try to find insurance.
MBI itself has become a case study in how dangerous carriers survive through corporate restructuring rather than safety improvements. Beyond the Arizona crash that killed five people, MBI's operations have generated a pattern of serious incidents across multiple states. Each crash represents the predictable outcome of pairing inexperienced drivers with demanding jobs under pressure to cut corners and maximize productivity.
The human cost multiplier in these sectors extends far beyond typical traffic accidents. Moving trucks operate in neighborhoods where children play, creating risks to the most vulnerable populations. Heavy vehicles operated by inexperienced drivers cause disproportionate damage to infrastructure and complicate emergency response efforts when crashes involve unknown cargo or hazardous materials.
Federal regulations fail to account for the additional risks created when transportation work involves physical labor, hazardous materials, or operation in residential areas. The regulatory framework was designed for simple freight transport, not the complex operations that pose multiplicative dangers. Meanwhile, customers shopping for waste hauling, moving services, or construction transport typically choose based on price alone, creating a race to the bottom where companies maintaining higher standards lose business to competitors willing to cut corners.
The international comparison is wild. European countries have successfully improved safety in labor-intensive transport through mandatory specialized training, regular competency testing, required safety technology, and coordination between transportation and workplace safety regulations. American policy, by contrast, treats a garbage truck driver the same as a long-haul trucker despite vastly different risks and responsibilities.
Breaking this cycle requires comprehensive reform that addresses both driver shortages and safety deficiencies. We need sector-specific training and licensing requirements for drivers in municipal waste, household goods, and construction transport. Safety technology must be mandated rather than optional. Economic incentives should reward companies that exceed minimum standards rather than those that race to the bottom. Tiner is serving 22 years in prison for the AZ crash. Criminal accountability must also extend to executives who knowingly hire dangerous drivers for high-risk operations.
Most importantly, we need to acknowledge that the current system isn't broken, it's working exactly as designed. Companies have discovered they can externalize the actual costs of unsafe operations onto the public while privatizing the profits. Until that fundamental equation changes, more families will pay the ultimate price for an industry's calculated decision to prioritize profits over the safety of everyone sharing the road.
Danny Tiner's TikTok-fueled crash in Arizona traffic was entirely preventable. He should never have been hired, never allowed to develop dangerous habits, and never permitted to operate a commercial vehicle while distracted. Tiner was the predictable product of a system that creates toxic combinations of desperate drivers and demanding jobs, then acts shocked when tragedies happen.