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Originally Posted by charnock The trainer is responsible for the load. As a trainee you are under the ausposes of the trainer. This company pulled a foul.  |
Sorry to say but I have to side with the others on this thread. Regardless of whether you are a trainee training on an trainer's truck, a trainer training students, on your own truck or on a company truck, any load that is sent to that truck and accepted, no matter who accepted it, immediately upon acceptance becomes jointly and severally the responsibility of each and every driver seated and registered on that truck. Everyone on that truck at that point has a responsibility to work with the others to ensure that that load is picked up from the shipper and delivered to the receiver safely, intact, and on time before anything else (quitting, hometime, whatever) is done. That's the job the company hired you for and is paying you to do. After that is done, and only after that is done, can a driver or drivers, if he/she/they so desire, terminate the employment relationship with that carrier. Anything short of the above IS a load abandonment, and devil's advocate, in all fairness, the company has every right in the world to list that on your DAC, and your prospective employers have every right in the world to refuse you employment if you have done something like that. You have no one to blame for that but yourself. If you don't want that to happen, then you might want to start showing a little adult responsibility and do the job you are being paid to do before you up and quit. If, like a child, you've turned tail and run from that company-regardless of how legitimate your reasons may have been-and you left them "holding the bag" on that load, then you have basically screwed your own self out of the trucking industry. That's nobody else's fault but your own, and you'll just have to go get a job doing something else. There's a real good reason for this. That trucking company has customers who are paying it a lot of money to move their freight to and from where it needs to be, and if the company does'nt do that, then they're basically in breach of written contract and that customer can sue that trucking company for it and win. That's why you as the driver MUST get that load, and that truck, if it's a company truck, where it has to be before you resign, and why the carrier has the right to report it to your DAC if you don't and why prospective employers have the right to refuse to hire you if you've got something like that on your DAC. I mean, I'll be the first to stand up and say that there are a hell of a lot of carriers out there (CR England, JB Hunt, Covenant Transport, and Central Refrigerated are just a few that come to mind, but the list goes on and on) that treat their drivers like dog poop on the bottom of their shoes, but two wrongs don't make a right and that does'nt justify any driver abandoning either company-owned truck or load anywhere except where they are supposed to go. 'Nuff said.