So you want to drive for Schneider?

So you want to drive for Schneider. The Big Orange, The ride with pride. What a great life that will be.
Driving around, no bosses, meeting interesting people, seeing great things and making LOTS OF MONEY.
Yeah all that great trucker pay. WOW
Well first you got to get educated. So that means school. If your lucky Uncle Sam or the state pays the fee
but, if your not, you pay and it's not cheap. You got to pay to play, right? Private schools range from $8000
to $6000. Community colleges around $1600 because their subsidized by your state. So if you live in a state
that supports the trucking industry, your lucky, but fewer and fewer states do. So, after getting your cdl
permits, which is another expense, your off to school. At the school you shine, you get a great instructor.
You clutch like an expert and back like a pro. You calculate time and the log book like an old timer and you
graduate at the top of the class. Now the company recruiters show up.
It used to be that there were good and bad companies. They all had lousy pay for new drivers but some
were outright liars and some were straight forward. You could usually tell or get an opinion. Now they all
shine you on. To them all drivers are just another cost of doing business and they want them as cheap as
possible. If you go with the great pumpkin. They claim to reimburse driving school, although it's with an
eyedropper, and pay you .29c a mile with a quick upgrade to .30 and then .32 after you prove yourself and
survive. So you sign up and are off to training.
At Charlotte the pumpkin uses Red Roof Inn and it's not the Ritz but it's not bad. If you have high standards
you might not be happy but it's better than the england dorms or an old mobile home. Schneider used to have
a training academy at most OC's but now there is only a vestige of that left. At orientation, they indoctrinate
you into the schneider way. The training is still good and the instructors are thorough and not abusive in an
abusive region of the country. Their bonuses are dependent on you passing so this isn't magnanimity.
Everybody in this company lives for their bonus.
So you pass with flying colors and are assigned your truck. This is the luck of the draw. You might get one
that's like new or one that pig pen lived in for years. The service group cleans them but not really. Most have
about 400000 miles and the reliability will be a matter of luck too. If you get a turkey you can trade it in,
maybe.
Now you get your first load and accept it and download the route. The pumpkin Navego gps is configured to
get the shortest possible truck route, GREAT, maybe. It also avoids toll roads. This means that you will be
on state highways or two lanes even though an interstate runs the same way but it's a little longer, if you
pick the interstate your out of route and bye bye bonus. If you've always wanted to drive all the local roads
across NJ and eastern pa, this is your big chance. There's a section of highway where I-70 meets I-85. The
navigo gps routes you down 340 and 7. That's 100 miles of traffic lights and two lane that eats up your hours
and drops your average speed to 25-30. You will be hard pressed to make that time up since the trucks are
governed at 60mph. You can stomp the pedal and get to 62mph but the overspeed kills your bonus. You can
try racing down hills to make up the time but anything over 70mph really sets off all the alarms and kills your
bonus. The navigo routes can be convoluted and outright bizarre but any other route is OUT OF ROUTE and
the computer will tell you about it. The pumpkin training calls the voice in the computer Jill. You will quickly
call it something else. A talking company computer is a true mechanism of torture. They should use this one
on Al Quada. It's very similar to being locked in a closet with your mother in law. You can turn the voice off
but for navigation it's better to get the voice prompts instead of squinting at the screen and with the voice off
you might miss a very important email from the dbls. You will be bombarded with emails. This company is
now run by and for the cubicle trolls. This is an office company that happens to have drivers. The
dispatchers, dbls, managers and recruiters are college people. There isn't one dispatcher that's an ex-driver.
These people don't know or even like drivers. They might as well be making widgets and to them you are a
widget. Widget number 24567. That's you.
As a new driver, you are on the 90 day board. This board is supposed to help the clueless newbies survive
the harsh cruel trucking world. In reality it's the blind leading the blinder. Some of the dispatchers are helpful
and all touch type like champions and zip through the schneider IS like a video game but for the new driver,
for any driver, the 90 day board is a bigger challenge than shifting or navigo. The 90 day board brings the
driver, without realizing it, into the culture of the OC. Some OC's, like Carlisle, are benign. Some OC's, like
Charlotte, are mendacious. Dallas, Memphis, Fontana, Indy, Green Bay fall higher and lower in between.
This is office culture and the word frienemies comes directly to mind. With every phone call into the board
your exposed to this culture. You have lived your life to be away from offices and office people but here your
up to your eyebrows in it. This is the next facet of schneider problems, practically every load needs phone
calls. The load planners don't plan and the box schedulers don't have any idea where the trailers are. You
will get a work assignment that looks good and is covered with numbers. You then roll up to a customer and
not one number is right. If your lucky, the customer will help puzzle it out and, through the destination or
trailer number, work out your load. Mostly the customers just cuss about schneider and document other
schneider screwups, wasting your time. So now your on the phone to the 90 day board, on hold, waiting, for
10,15 20 minutes or more. This time comes off your 14, so their burning your time, eating your lunch and
pay. Wasting your hours and phone time. So now your stuck. Emails don't work. While the board blizzards
you with worthless emails, they ignore yours. When finally you get connected maybe you'll get help maybe
there will just be more miscommunication. This is once more where luck is all. You may be assigned a good
or bad dbl. You might be assigned a steroid pumped control freek or a Mr Rogers clone. Luck is all. This is a
#### happens kind of company. If you get a bad dbl you either tough it out, try for a replacement or walk. In
this instance your first and only mistake was showing up.
All this will be ok once you open that pay stub and see that big pay check. Right? Well once you have
finished orientation training, you get the news that, by the way, you are required to be a per diem for the first
6 months. This means you make .27c per mile. That's $8 less on a 400 mile run. It's like working one hour
for free at your last job. You did that all the time, right?
While we are talking about pay, let's do some figuring. Truckers work long hours. That's given, but used to be
made up by decent pay. Now with the low pay and the HOS rules it's almost impossible to make a living
wage. If you can run 400 miles a day, and that's hard with traffic, live loads and unloads, heavy loads, 60
mph governed trucks and everybody wasting your hours like a free lunch, you will make $756 gross, in 7
days. That's almost $19 an hour at a normal job, but this isn't a normal job. Your on the job 24/7 for however
many days your out. If you work regional you get 34 hrs at home at week. Most of that will be used getting
home. If you work national, you get 1 day off per week. Maybe. If your dbl sucks you get less or use most of
your time at home just getting home.
So let's be generous, even though the company is not, and figure your 10 hour break is time off. Even
though your locked in a truck in a nasty truck stop, rest area or at a customers yard. Paying good money for
crap food and peeing in a bottle. On a 14 hour day running 400 miles a day, you make $7.71 an hour.
Minimum wage. Less in some states. The girl cleaning the showers in Pilot makes more than you.
If you figure on working 24/7 your pay drops to $4.50 an hour. That was minimum wage in about 1979.
Schneider pay is in the cellar and their planning to keep it there.
While Google and Apple recruit workers from Ireland. Schneider recruits from english speaking Africa. They
sponsor them for work visas and train them to drive. Ready made slaves. I talked to one and he said " I can
make what I made in a year in a month here." Great, America, what a country. While your trying to figure
how to afford that car your wife wants and pay the mortgage too. This dude is thinking about a tar paper
shack and the price of monkey meat.
This is why all truckers hate Schneider and will generously abuse you at every chance. Schneider drives the
price of freight into the basement and they do that to pay too.
So you want to work for Schneider, Good Luck. You'll need it.