LTL Seniority boards

It depends on the company and what their policy is. I cant say about most companies but by me with two years in I cant even see the top because at my company out of 35 drivers you have to go all the way down to driver #16 to find a guy who has been here less than 20 years.

 

It goes from barn to barn. Line and P&D drivers are usually always separate entities. I swapped from line to P&D two years ago, I pretty much had to go through a company transfer process without moving. My prior years didn't do crap for me and I still ended up at the bottom of the seniority board (I was outranked by a driver with less than two weeks with the company).

For line, you have the bid drivers and you have your extra board drivers. Bid just means they have a dedicated route with a start time... plus a set weekend off. With extra board they send you whichever direction the wind happens to blow that day. With P&D I would assume it is the same. Not positive since our barn is not big enough to have extra board P&D. All of us have a set route

 

When I was extra board I always got worked back to my home terminal for the weekend but during the week I never knew where I was going .
Nice part of extra board was I usually had 2nd day freight and nobody cared what time I got there .

 

that guy was yanking your chain i sit around trying to trick ups drivers to build my set all the time saying im new and never done it before it works once in a while this guy just tricked you into sliding his tandems

 

Dayton Freight has terminals in both locations you mentioned, and I'm sure there are many other LTLs in those cities to choose from.

Most companies have some sort of penalty for switching job classifications. Some will have you starting all over at the bottom when you switch boards. In that case, your company seniority would only count for bidding vacation time, for example. Other companies (Dayton, for instance) will have you go to the bottom for a certain minimum amount of time rather than immediately bumping other drivers down. That way there is a commitment involved. And in our case, the only way a driver can switch boards is if there is an opening. They will post the opening to see if anyone wants it before hiring from the outside.

Either way, they do it to avoid the chaos that would occur if people could just hop from one job classification to the other without consequences. Imagine how people's lives and incomes would be affected if you had one board and a senior driver who decides to switch could bump someone into the other classification. I know plenty of linehaul drivers who would quit rather than do city work, and many city drivers would do the same if they were forced to do linehaul.

I understand the strategy you are thinking of: gain seniority doing city work then jump to linehaul when you can steal a daytime run. Honestly, it's not very realistic for the reasons mentioned in previous posts (the rarity of those bids and the number of years required to get them). And if you did happen to get lucky and end up at such a company in such a scenario, it would probably end in a fistfight and lead to a perpetually hostile work environment.

 

What @Bob Dobalina said. Many years back we had a linedriver that swapped to P&D. He somehow got to use his seniority to bump himself to the top of the board. He even went so far to kick a fellow driver out of his truck and route.

Eventually he racked up enough preventables that he disappeared. The fallout and bitterness he caused reached corporate and they changed it to where your presumed hourly pay and vacation benefits would be the only thing to carry over.

 

Seniority only sucks if you don't have any.