Yeah i think the guy should get paid his normal daily wage. It isnt his fault that the truck broke down.

Tscottime trucking companies do charge detention pay, whether or how much the driver is paid is up to the company. I agree with tscottime on everything else with one cavet. You and the comapny signed a contract on what will and wil not pay for. If you have to to pay for it (fuel,hotel rooms, and some other things) its a business expense and its tax deductable.

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Outta here

Scuby and Curiosity, I'm trying to emphasize one particular thing and that is the legal requirement for any of these items or situations we are discussing. For each of those items I debunked in my previous message I am fully aware there are plenty of companies that choose to pay them. My point is that whether they pay or don't pay any of them is not a matter of law. As general rule in trucking almost none of the employer/employee issues are covered in law or regulation outside of minimum qualifications, HOS, inspection items, drug testing, and the like.

It's very important to always have in mind if you are talking about a real legal requirement, a company policy, a common unspoken rule, or the like. My previous field was very, very detail oriented and this field is much more of a "slap dash" sort of field.

This distinction comes up very often in training or when changing jobs. Newbie drivers and experienced drivers routinely tell me all sorts of interesting things they claim are in the law or regulation when in practice the person telling me doesn't hardly even understand the distinction between what the law requires, what the company prefers, what the trainer prefers or expects, and what other drivers are doing. Whether some practice is a matter of law or someone's preference makes a world of difference on how you handle that situation.

If oyu are a newbie riding with a trainer, if he says the law requires you touch your nose with your finger before you back up, do it, and recognize you've got a yahoo for a trainer. Hardly a month goes by that some other employee will swear on a stack of Bibles that since this customer pickup is just across a state boundry then he is required to log the trip, almost all of our trips are 100 air-mile exempt from logging. State boundaries are irrelevant to 100 air-mile log book exemption, BTW. There are probably 40 logging habits that even old time drivers will claim are written in the regs when what they eventually mean is, repeat after me, "that's how my first company trained me."

I humbly suggest that since a critical portion of this industry is recruited from fields with little regard for "book learning" it's more rare than hen's teeth for drivers to turn to the actual regulations to settle a question about so many things. In my previous field almost every operator carried with him a book, size of a medium-sized city's phone book, with half of the book devoted to "good practice" and the other half devoted to the text of the actual regulations that would be used to crucify you if you screwed up.

Our regulations are not only online and instantly searchable. They are small enough to save to a few text files if internet access is a problem, and they fit in a tiny little green and white paperback book available at almost evry truck stop. Rather than "RTFM", dirvers prefer to ask some stranger in the CB, who will always give the wrong answer or the conventiona wisdom from back in 1908, or tell the driver what he wants to hear or what gives the driver the most leeway to do something easy. If you recognize the rulebook as not a hammer that those mean cops and employers use to abuse you but the use the book as a recipe for being left alone.

If the boss, trainer, cop, or customer is asking for something that is a matter of their preference you should try to do it to make them happy, if it doesn't get you in trouble. But don't let people use the trick of pretending anythig they want is a matter of the laws and you have no choice. Knowldge is power and it's better to be armed in a battle of wits than disarmed. There were plenty of things my trainer "required" I do and I did them. His truck, his rules. But his bad ideas were tossed out the first day I had my own truck and his good ideas were improved upon if possible.

Every driver should have the FMCSA regulations, the online version fo the green and white book, bookmarked and read through one or more sections regularly. We complain car drivers last worried about their driving when they were 16 years old, we don't need permission to read the regulations.

Company is definitely trying to make it up to me. They got me home to the Waco-Central TX area. They have offered to find me something to do at the end of this particular ad campaign to make up the lost days of work. And for routes I do here that are more than 50-60 miles from home, I get a hotel room and the $20/day. Now I gotta buy an ink cartridge for my printer to print out the next few routes and figure where my hotel needs to be!