The bottom line is you are going to starve. PERIOD!

Statement: We will pay you $400 per week while in training and on the road"
Truth : You will get paid about $300 Now calculate how much you need per day for meals and other incidentals. You will be lucky if you have $100 left!! (Go and pay your bills with that lol)
Now do that for 3-4 months!

Statement: Truckers make great money!! See me roll in piles of moolah with a new shiny truck!
Truth : All lies to the bitter end. I would equate trucking like going to the casino. You occasionally hear about the person that always hits it big. But here is the irrefutable truth!! The trucking companies are the house and you are the player!! Sit down and actually calculate how much you really make given the work time you actually put in. You are nothing but a cash register to these people....pure and simple! They have been out for themselves...and always will!! (Plenty more of you to run through the orientation mill) BTW They get a nice tax deduction anyway for having you down there whether you make it through orientation or not. They actually made money just for you showing up!! lol

Stay close to home and find a regular job if you want to pay your bills, keep your house and keep your car.

 

Moglar you doont know wtf youre talking about.
i have Never made less than 45k a year from day one.
WHAT company puts you in training for 3-4 months?????? the norm is 2-4 weeks.
You must have reeally sucked and really been lazy

 

[QUOTE=MOGLAR;526059]The bottom line is you are going to starve. PERIOD!

Statement: We will pay you $400 per week while in training and on the road"
Truth : You will get paid about $300 Now calculate how much you need per day for meals and other incidentals. You will be lucky if you have $100 left!! (Go and pay your bills with that lol)
Now do that for 3-4 months!

That was pretty much my experience driving the orange truck. I can't say they mislead me in any way. Btw, I ran continuously, and was even shut down once for leaving early (15 min.) to make a deadline, so it wasn't because I didn't work, it was because they were removing the cost of training by reducing the cents per mile. The per diem scam was kinda sad for those that fell for it. Having said that, the training was worth the suffering and loss of wages, I just wish I'd been better prepared to handle it.

My son went to another school and wound up with a trainer that was training two drivers at one time. They wouldn't let him off that truck for two months after school because of the lucrative account it was running. That truck never stopped coast to coast except maybe an hour a day. It took me a long time to straighten out his logging because his trainer didn't understand the 14 hour rule, telling me that there was no way to exceed it with three drivers in the truck. So they just drove when they wanted to as long as it was not over 11 hrs. The qualcom saw it differently and busted all of them eventually.

Some people have entered this industry at better times and in better ways.

 

I have to admit I bristled reading the opening post.

Bear in mind I was a business owner for 25 years and had many employees and several locations. I understand what a job is, and demanded commitment and loyalty from my employees, for which I compensated them well. How I wound up in the trucking industry was a matter of fate....

I had to ask myself why I bristled, because I agreed with the assertions, but I wondered if you reversed this conversation, and posted the opening list as the job description, who'd even take that job? Only the very desperate, or somebody will no other options.

It brought back memories of a day I drove around Atlanta and a couple of other towns looking for empty trailers for about 14 hours (unpaid), which happened frequently, because the company I worked for was publicly traded (I found out later), and there was this lady whose job it was to reduce the trailer count to the minimum to raise the stock price. Brilliant huh? My terminal manager, who was young enough to be my son, who I had a great relationship with, mostly because I did everything that was asked of me, replied, "Well, you chose to drive a truck," when I complained out of frustration of spending hours driving around looking for trailers. Instead of making a call to corporate as to why we never had trailers in Dallas or Atlanta, he chose to blame the driver. I wondered who he was afraid of to not speak up. His words were condescending and It hit me hard. I thought the goal was profit and productivity, but I guess not. It was just the corporate model. I never saw him the same way again, and plotted my escape. I'll be honest, despite all the talk, I felt more like a slave than an "associate" after that. I was called into the terminal general managers office and asked why I was leaving, and he just shook his head, but he was close to retirement and didn't want to call corporate either. So the stupidity continued.....

It never even occurred to me to blame my employees for my bad management.

The train of thought in the opener would never be accepted outside of the trucking industry, but prevails here, and is accepted as "normal," because the government has allowed this industry to violate just about every workplace rule, from overtime to whether a person is an employee or contractor, allowed per diem scams and a host of other schemes to take money from the uneducated. It's just wrong.

I know of one big trucking company that purposely recruits returning soldiers because of their willingness to suffer hardship, commitment to endless hours on the job, time away from family, and eagerness to work for low wages. Isn't that admirable of them to help our veterans out like that.......


That's what I bristled about, not so much about what you could or couldn't do in a truck or what the job requires, but reading the post gave me the same vibe I used to get from time to time in the big box companies.

I'm just being honest.........

 

I was reading through a job searching post a little earlier from a driver with a pretty long list of "must have's" and it got me to thinking. The driver's first paragraph had me wondering why he didn't have a job. He seemed pretty solid, good history and experience, no driving issues. On paper, he looked golden and most companies should be moving quickly to snap him up. Then I got to his second paragraph with all the "must have's" and I realized why he was still looking. At first, I was simply going to roll my eyes and move on. Then I thought about PMing him with some constructive advice, before finally settling on something straight out to everyone because it seems to come up over and over again.

 

Very good post, companies should hire only good drivers, or else there will be huge loss for company and public due to accidents.

 

....... and I DON'T do windows or floors!!

 

Thank you for this article! Really great stuff

 

Slacker, Thank you for being that honest and strong enough to tell us your story. I think we, the drivers, are mistreated and underpayed, because we let to treat us this way. If we have loads with sh..ty rates why do we move them?

 

I realize this post is four years old but 45k ? I wouldn't be bragging about poverty wages.