Comments By RookieTrucker

Swift loans you $3900 for school and $500 to cover the lodging, which they payroll deduct when you get in your own truck. At CDL school they buy you lunch from the roach coach the first couple days and then you are on your own. They pay the bus trip to training. Then you go through a week of non-paid orientation, but they do put you in a motel and buy you lunch. When you go out with your trainer you make minimum wage for your state of residence while on-duty not driving and $1 more while driving.

So I can't help you with phase 1 but I might be able to get you for the TNT phase.

Wait. You get to play with explosives at Prime?? What's the recruiting number there?

Speaking of regional not being what I was told... I was told that regional pays 34 cpm. And I was told it's more than normal to make up for the short loads. So, OK, 34 cpm is base for a driver with 3 years in and I only have 1, so that's better, right? Depends. I make 32 cpm...if I'm running out West. East I make 34 cpm. So, that's not any better than I would make on a lot of my loads. But then it gets worse. I just verified this against my pay stubs for the past 2 weeks. On regional you get paid 34 cpm no matter how long the trip is. OTR if the trip is less than 300 miles I make 38 cpm. It keeps going up to 50 cpm for 1-25 mile loads. (Unless they are deadhead or trailer moves, in which case I get 32.) All of my loads lately have been between 150 and 300 miles. So I'm not getting more on regional because the loads are shorter. I'm getting paid a lot less.

OK, for those of you who are still skeptical about what I've been saying about things around here, go ahead and skip over this reply because you aren't going to believe any of it, either.

I took you guys' advice and talked to my DL today. (Actually, I sent a message to my fleet manager saying I wanted to talk about the miles I'm getting and what I need to do to improve things and apparently he told my DL to talk to me.) I've actually talked to her about a lot of these issues before, but not really in the sense of having "The Talk." She's telling me the same things today that she has told me before.

"What am I doing wrong? What can I change to get better loads and more miles?" She said I'm not doing anything wrong. That's just how the freight is. They have no control over the customers and their needs and we get the loads and plans they have. Company drivers don't get to choose the loads they get. You take what they give you. She even confirmed what I've been saying when she told me that teams and O/Os get the long miles. She says that's because customers don't want to wait 5 days for a cross country delivery and only teams can get there on time. (And remember, mentors and students run as teams.)

I told her ever since I started looking into trucking people have told me that OTR I should expect to average a lot more miles than I'm getting. She strongly suggested that I had unrealistic expectations and that I'm not getting low miles. (But then she kind of contradicted that later. I'll get to that in a moment.) She also said basically that I can't believe what you guys are telling me about miles because truckers lie about how much they are making. Especially O/Os. She said as a solo driver it's unrealistic to expect anything even close to 2500 miles a week. I asked her if the planners or the company in general has any goals for how many miles a driver averages a week. She said planners don't have goals because that's none of their concern. She then said the company doesn't necessarily have any firm goals that they have to reach. I pressed her on it and said "This is a performance based job and trucks only make money while they are rolling. Surely you guys have marks you're trying to reach." Finally she admitted that they do try to get their solo drivers in the 1800-1900 mile range. (This is the contradiction. She said I'm not getting low miles with 1700, but that's below the 1800-1900 range.) So I wasn't too far off on that guess.

(Side note: Good grief. I turned down a load tomorrow because I can't do an 8pm Eastern delivery. So they just turned around and sent me a load going somewhere closer...with an 8pm Central delivery time...which is 1 hour later...)

She went on and on giving me all the reasons why we can't control freight and how the customer's needs come first and sometimes you get stuck doing trailer moves and doing loads with too much time on them and everything else that I've already heard and that I totally get. But you guys are telling me that 1700 miles a week OTR is way too low and she's telling me that I'm not doing anything wrong and Swift isn't doing anything wrong and this is exactly what I should be expecting in trucking. So, yeah, something is not meshing right here.

She also wanted to yell at me a bit for turning down that load earlier because I put in the notes that I didn't have the hours to do it and I was expecting home time tomorrow. She told me I have to put in times I can pickup and deliver the load. I said, well, I don't know when I can deliver it if I have to take it home with me tomorrow. And she said, "You aren't going home tomorrow. GLR works Mon-Fri." I said, yeah, I'm planning on working all of my hours tomorrow and then going home. She said, "That's not how it works. You work Mon-Fri and go home for the weekend." I said, "If I don't go home Friday night, how do I get home on Saturday." She said "you bring a load back close to here on Saturday and then go home." I said, "If I'm expected to pickup and deliver loads on Saturday, that's not working Mon-Fri. That's working Mon-Sat." She said, "No, you're going home on Saturday, taking a 34 and coming home Monday." I said, "Now, wait. You're going home tonight. Are you saying you're not working today?" She said, "Well, no, but..." I said, "Then how is my working up to 14 hours on Saturday NOT working, but your 8 hours today IS working?" She said, "Well, this is how it goes. You don't get 2 days off. You work Monday-Friday and go home Saturday." I finally gave up. This is just another example of life at Swift. They promise you one thing and it ends up being something else. They say on regional you work Monday-Friday. It's really Monday-Saturday, but that's not how they see it.

(Cont)

Since so much of this discussion comes back to logging, what would you guys do? Go off duty as often as possible and hope you don't get audited or that they don't do much to you? Seems like they audit a lot because I'm always hearing about it and my terminal manager has mentioned firing people who keep logging off duty when they aren't supposed to.

What else do I need to work on? I'm not pulling off to the side of the road taking pictures and sunbathing. And I'm well past the point that I'm doing a drop and hook and thinking, "OK, what do I do next? Oh yeah, lower the landing gear."

So if you are a shipper for 5 hours waiting to be unloaded and you lay down in the sleeper you can't log it as sleeper berth? If that is the case that is illegal as hell. Anytime your butt touches the bunk its sleeper berth.

They have told us time and time again that if you are at a customer and the customer has not released you to leave the property and pursue your private interests, you are to be on duty, not driving. Being a runner, when I deliver to retail stores, I'll often ask if they mind if I do some laps around the parking lot while they are unloading. If they say that's fine, then I can log off duty and go do my thing. But if we have to stay in the truck or in a waiting area, we are to be on-duty. But I thought that was right in line with the way the FMCSR states it anyway.

The other point is, if you go to sleeper berth, you aren't on duty, and you won't get detention pay. I guess since they hardly ever pay detention pay even if you are there for over 2 hours, it doesn't usually hurt anything. But if I end up being there for 5 hours I'm going to plead my case for it. That's $40.

One thing I've been curious about since I started looking into this is, what is the functional difference between being on sleeper berth and being off duty? Don't they pretty much count the same way unless you are using the split sleeper berth rule? Is sleeper berth a way to say "I'm off duty, but still in the truck" whereas off-duty could be doing anything?

passed all 5 written test, now on to driving. The fun begins tomorrow

Awesome! Congrats! The fun really does start now. This may sound stupid, but the first time I was in a truck at training (which was actually the first time I'd ever been inside a truck ever) we started out just doing straight line backing. Put the truck in 2nd gear and idle forward. Put the truck in idle in reverse. We weren't allowed to touch the throttle while on the practice pad for two weeks. I did my first 15 minutes idling a big truck backwards and forwards and when I got out I was all smiles. It felt really cool.

They are very specific about it here. Around the time the new rules went into affect last summer they sent out a lot of messages and we were required to watch a few training videos about it. At the customer has to be on duty not driving. Not off duty, not sleeper berth.

I guess it helps to know i start out in 3 gear if heavy and 5 gear or 6th if empty.

Wow. I guess I do suck. I start in 2nd with heavy loads, 4th empty, and 5th bobtailing.

When I first got this truck with the 10 speed it must have been pretty funny to see me leaving the terminal the first time. They put you in a new truck and give you just enough time to throw your stuff in it and head out on a load. I got this truck and couldn't get any info on how to shift a 10-speed and asked around and couldn't find anyone with any experience with one. Company drivers also can't leave terminals unless they are on a dispatched load, so I couldn't go anywhere to practice with it. Yard speed limit is 8 1/2. I get my empty and head out the gate. I grind a couple of gears and can't find the next one to save my life. Ended up having to come to a complete stop in the road, put on my flashers, and start from a dead stop to get going down the road. It also didn't help that this thing had a completely different engine brake on it and I didn't have time to look at the manual before I left. Didn't realize the last driver had left the engine brake on in the max setting. Really hard to float the gears in an unfamiliar transmission with the engine brake full on. Felt like a complete idiot until I got down the road a ways.

Old School, you bring up another good point. I don't know how it is at other companies, but Swift does not seem to want drivers to have much control over appointment times. Like I said, they don't tell you the window. Even if it's someplace that is first come first serve, they make the appointment time seem firm. Also I've figured out that most of the DCs will take loads any time the day of the appointment but will refuse anything a day or more early. (So, even if it says 1800 delivery, I'll show up at 3am if I can get there. Never had a problem with that.) JIT loads are the same way. And on top of that, the comments in a large percentage of our loads say, "Do not deliver early, you will get a service failure!!!" and/or "Do not contact the customer about appointment times!!!" And yes they really do put in a lot of exclamation marks. Which is why I've been afraid to try to deliver early at these places. It seems like Swift really means it. I haven't had the nerve yet to try delivering early at the places with those comments.

And don't feel bad, Old School. I appreciate all of the suggestions. I've learned so much from this site and people like you on it who are willing to help out. Unfortunately, it just seems like so much of it won't work at this company. Which is really baffling. Why is Swift so worried about giving drivers any leeway that they discourage people from working hard and maximizing their time? It seems like they would want to reward people who drive hard and get places as quickly as possible, but honestly, there are cases where charging hard actually works against you. I don't get that.