Are You Ready for Roehl's PreNup Agreement?

Is Roehl still paying $0.23/mile for solo drivers, or has that gone up since I last looked 3 years ago?

 

Contracts like this are a joke. Why? They only work one way. How is that? Most states are employment at will...meaning that either the employer or employed can terminate the employer/employee relationship at any time and for any reason.

So...to me...the question is "Why would you voluntarily sign a contract (lol) with a company that can terminate you at any time and for any reason?"

Every employer provides some sort of OJT to new hires. Expecting a new hire to pay you back for company mandated training/orientation/brainwashing is a joke.

 

Yup. There are plenty of carriers out there that don't have this policy. I'm not sure why people settle for carriers like this (unless they have no other options). When I was talking to carriers during my CDL school and they brought up any sort of training reimbursement/contract...I terminated the phone interview at that time.

The whole "truckers quit" argument that people use is ########. I started my first job at age 15.5 and was there two years. I did six years with another employer and five with another. If my employer treated me right...I stuck around.

That being said...I once quit a job after 1.5 days. The boss was a complete ####### and I left things at my previous employer on good terms, so I just went back there. If companies treated their employees right...they wouldn't have a ridiculous turnover rate, regardless of the hours required or type of work performed.

 

Imagine if Wal-Mart required its workers to pay to work there LOL

If a guy/gal went out and spent $3,000-$6,000 on a CDL, They obviously have some skin in the game so the rest of cost is just normal operating costs which is the employers responsibility not the employee.

 

It may not even be a valid contract or enforceable contract if it's one sided like that. I haven't seen it though, so I couldn't say. Anyone who has it feel free to PM it to me and i'll have some attorneys look it over.

 

Guys, I am going to throw this out there because it seems to have ruffled a lot of feathers.

Roehl is charging this to Fresh Grads of CDL school with no real experience. If you guys went to CDL school like I did you will remember how wet behind the ears and truly clueless about how to do the job you were.

To put the cost into perspective, I payed my CDL school closer to 6,000$, I would have been able to get the training cheaper at 1,400-1800$ here locally but would not have had the job promise. The carrier received a portion of my tuition at this school for the training I got after CDL school, and carrier orientation.

Driver retention numbers are terrible, part of it IS the carrier's fault. Pay in the industry has been getting lower and lower. This is mostly thanks to carrier competition, a general lack of brotherhood amongst drivers and carriers, and a heavy influx of cheap poorly trained drivers.

Part of it is advertisement sharking ( NEW DRIVERS MAKE UP TO 50k YOUR FIRST YEAR!). People go into this industry thinking they'll be pulling down six figures driving a box down the interstate. They go into it thinking it's the easiest job they'll ever have. They go into it thinking they can get home whenever they want, park the truck whenever they want. That they will be a 'paid tourist'. The truth is, that the job is mentally demanding, stressful to health in many ways, and low paying. It's hard for someone who has never driven a truck to understand why a week inside a rolling efficiency apartment is so grueling.

So we have false expectations, coupled with low pay, and absolutely staggeringly large companies. The result from this equation is extremely high rates of turnover, and extremely high rates of training cost. This is just an idea based on my own experience with training.

- 400$ a week training pay = 800$
- 350$ a week for additional trainer pay = 700$ (My trainer was making about 350 more a week as a trainer than he had been teaming with his wife.)
- 300$ a week to pay training staff during orientation = 300$. (We had Eight company employees that worked during the orientation process. 1 Guy for Logs, 1 Guy for Company Paperwork, 1 woman to discuss healthcare options, 5 yard trainers to get us ready to hit the road with the trainer. I assume that With 20 odd folks in the class paying in to the salaries 300$ is fair, as that would make the median takehome of the 8 folks 750$)
- 100$ a week for the meals they provided. (They cooked them, would be higher in an orientation that orders out, but they still have to pay the cooks.)
- 100$ for training/orientation materials (logbooks, paperwork, access cards etc)
- 350$ for a week of staying in a hotel during orientation.
- 500$ for a combination of all the background checks, consumer reports, drug tests, physicals and other things they have to file, plus paying someone to actually request and file these reports.
-200$ for fuel used for training purposes (Yard, Road Tests, Backing Practice your trainer gives you etc)
-400$ to have truck detailed twice (Once when you start, once when you quit. They also have to replace mattresses).

Most of these are just guesses and they could easily be wrong on exact number, but they are very real expenses. As listed it comes out to 3,450 I believe.

I'm not saying it is right or wrong, I am just saying that having roughly a 3,500$ investment in each driver, they do need a return from them to be profit as a business.

 

From a Chron article.

If your employer requires you to complete training either as a condition of employment or at any point after you begin work, state law may require your employer to pay the cost of the training.

 

No one put a gun to their head and made them run a trucking company. Oil companies pay way more per new hire than any trucking company has to, same for medical, legal, etc employers eat the cost of training, it's their job to train their employees to do whatever task they want done.

 

That's just the cost of doing business. The recent CDL grad thing...companies can't have it both ways. You can't pay a new guy Jack **** AND expect him to be on the hook for training costs if he decides the job sucks.

These companies know that hiring new drivers is a crap shoot. If they hadn't done the math and determined that it was in their interest to do so...they wouldn't hire new drivers.