Don’t have one?
Posted on Nov 09, 2009 - 8:02pm by Marshall J. Gruskin in Trucking
Of course you don’t. The government doesn’t want truckers to have one. Your carrier certainly doesn’t want you to have one. And most assuredly, there is not one shipper or receiver that wants you to have one. OOIDA and the ATA – the Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson of trucking – have no idea what one is, or so they tell us.
Let me tell you about the last three days in my trucking life. This past Friday, I was dispatched to pick up a load in Schaumberg IL. The load goes to Dallas. I have “serviced” this steel manufacturer for about ten years, working for four different carriers. They’re one of the few large steel companies left in the United States. They’re also one of the worst to do business with. They have little or no respect for truckers. It doesn’t matter if you’re an owner operator or a company driver. They have no concept of time or efficiency. It’s a wonder they have any customers.
Now while I’m telling you this little tale, let’s assume that I have a “real” job. So when I get to the shipper at 6 PM, which is when they “demanded” I be there, let’s punch in. I check in with shipping and they tell me the factory is running late. The factory and their amazingly lazy arrogant union workers are always running late. I go back to the truck to drop the trailer and do paperwork while I eat dinner – just like you would do at the office. And, let me just say here I’m not picking on the union folks – it’s the management that is pathetic. No wonder they are unionized.
Fast forward. Seems business isn’t as good as it used to be, so the factory doesn’t run a third shift anymore. But despite the drivers waiting and having to go in every hour to check on their loads, at 10 PM nothing is ready. The doors are closed so drivers can’t look in on the progress of what’s happening. 45 minutes to closing time. 15 minutes from closing time. The doors open and 5 loaded trailers are brought out. Now every driver is told to drop everything and hurry to the shipping office before they’re locked out to get their paperwork – or wait till Monday. Right. Some drivers have been here since the morning. And, I find out, everything was ready earlier – about 9 PM, but the union guys were sitting on the loads until the very last minute doing nothing for hours. FYI – they’re average hourly pay is $27.35. The drivers – zero.
I work along with every other driver there until about 3:30 AM to secure and tarp the loads. Each trailer is loaded with very oily steel of every shape and size and everything seems to be just thrown on without rhyme or reason. It is up to the driver to move and shift everything and make sure it doesn’t fall off the truck in transit. I finally get some sleep and by nightfall I’m almost 600 miles South – 1/2 the trip complete. I’ve been on the job, in my office so to speak, for about 24 hours. During my 10 hours required break, the load and the truck remains my responsibility, therefore, despite sleeping, I am very much still on the job.
Sunday night. I arrive at the consignee, aka – the receiver. It is the Dallas branch of the same steel company. My pre- set appointment is for 10 AM the next morning. A knock on my door at 5 AM. “We need you to get off the street and pull into the yard. We’ll get to you ASAP.” Again, fast forward – they finally unload me at 4 PM that afternoon. I have all my equipment put away, thrown away the dunnage and other garbage they don’t want and paperwork done by 6 PM. Remember I got to work at 6 PM three days earlier on Friday. 36 hours earlier. I punch out, albeit, in spirit. My pay for this trip is $380 – that $.40 per mile times 950 miles. It used to be more, but I got cut a few cents by my carrier so they could drop their rates and get more freight – which FYI never happened. So, for the 36 hours, I made $10.55 an hour – that’s without any overtime, waiting time or detention. And I was fortunate this weekend. Lately, the trips have all been in the 350 to 500 mile range.
We all know our government has done nothing to re-classify truckers away from being unskilled labor. That’s not even on the list for the Obama administration. As a OTR driver, I work four weeks at a stretch, well over 70+ hours a week. On average, my hourly pay is about $8 an hour. The ATA and OOIDA never talk about driver pay. The government at the State and Federal level spends billions on funding a bloated bureaucratic DOT to collect fines, fees, registrations and taxes from us, tells us we need to have more and more cumbersome and costly equipment to keep the public safe and the air clean, but does NOTHING to see that we can make more money to earn a decent living. That makes the carriers, shippers and receivers very happy. That’s why I call us slaves with benefits.
Well, I say we all start by putting in a time clock in our trucks and get paid like the rest of the world does – on an hourly basis – overtime and all. Just watch and see how fast we get loaded and unloaded then.
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You’ve hit on the main reasons why I’ve gotten out of trucking after 15 years – detention at customers and ever-increasing scrutiny and enforcement by both the trucking companies and the law-enforcement agencies.
The detention time at customers had gotten completely out of hand many years ago and simply continues to get worse. Unfortunately, because of the hyper-competitive nature of the industry there is nothing that trucking companies can realistically do about it. If they begin pressuring their customers, the customers will simply switch trucking companies and go with someone that will tolerate the waiting times – simple as that.
Government is always trying to find a system that will allow our freight to move efficiently and safely, but unfortunately they only seem to focus on the logbook. The 14 hour rule has made a mess of things because of the detention time at customers. You get 14 hours in your workday, but often times anywhere from 3-10 hours per day can be spent at customers waiting in your sleeper to load and unload – and splitting sleeper berth time is much more difficult than under the old rules.
If government wants safety and efficiency, limiting the detention times at customers would be a huge benefit to the entire economy. It’s very tough trying to enforce hourly work limits on drivers that are spending a huge number of hours sitting and doing nothing while not getting paid for it, and then getting paid by the mile, not the hour.
Realistically, the only way to solve the detention time problem is through government intervention. Trucking companies competing fiercely from coast to coast can not “band together” to fight this – it will never happen. Somebody is always willing to let their drivers sit for free, hours on end, to get more freight.
With modern technologies like electronic logbooks and GPS, maybe the government will someday come up with a better system of keeping drivers from working dangerous hours than trying to limit the number of hours a driver can work in a day – that just isn’t working well for anybody. And they definitely need to find a solution to the detention problem at customers – that is killing the efficiency of the economy and throwing a wrench into everybody’s plans. The money that it’s costing drivers, trucking companies, and customers in the form of higher prices for goods must be staggering.
Welcome back to the 1950’s and 60’s.Remember the Steel Haulers Strikes?This is nothing new!
Until there is some kind of regulation that says you have to be paid a reasonable amount for detention pay, nothing will ever happen. When freight is good, they move faster – or the carrier charges them. When freight is bad, the carriers slack off on detention charges and you sit for free. The carrier doesnt need the truck freed up for more freight, so it really doesnt cost them anything to leave you sit – shippers know this. But dont ask that they reclassify truck drivers as skilled labor without some real teeth in driver training/qualifications; otherwise, you’re just replaced with a visa import who’ll work cheaper. Visa workers cant be imported to do unskilled, ‘entry-level’ jobs and that’s all that has prevented a thundering herd of them being shipped in to take our jobs due to the ‘driver shortage’. This is the real reason they squeal about a driver shortage – they want the laws changed on visa workers. The big carriers have been trying to finagle a change in the law to do this for years . . the unskilled labor classification is all that has stopped them so far. As the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for . . you might get it!”
After 31 years I still find it hard to believe that so many drivers have the answer for all of this wait time, bad laws or bad companies by blaming everybody else but the drivers. Let me tell you, the driver, how to fix the problems. 1. Get to know your local politicians and vote, write letters on your down time instead of blaming someone else, if you don’t vote then shut up about the laws and politics. 2. Inform your company that you will not sit for more then one hour with out being paid, sit a reasonable amount don’t overprice yourself. You are the one sitting in your truck with your mouth shut and saying nothing, grow a pair if you know what I mean. The company uses you because you let them. 3. If you can not make a living running legal then find a company where you can. By sitting there on your butt and saying nothing is making the company more money, more then likely they are getting paid for their equipment sitting and not telling you. 4. If you run illegal and get tickets for log books and speeding please don’t whine to me because you are the one driving the truck not the company. Learn to tell the company when to make an appointment instead of just saying “yes boss”. 5. And please O/O please don’t cry to me about cheap freight when “you” drove “your” truck to pick up this cheap load. Grow a pair and say no to cheap freight.
The bottom line is if you the driver will not stand up for yourself then how in the he** can you expect someone else to do it for you. Grow a pair if you know what I mean or shut up. You might be surprised by how much more respect you get from your company when you grow a pair.