Am I making a mistake leaving Werner?

Some simple tips:

If you have to pass through a metal detector, or be cleared by a security guard, in order to talk to the payroll office, Safety, or your dispatcher, you work for the wrong company. If you have to talk to them through a tiny hole in a window, this is a bad sign, but if it's three inches of bulletproof glass, this means that they have pissed off enough drivers before you, to the point of violence, that they felt it was worthwhile to spend money to protect their office staff from their drivers.

If you can't just go in and talk to the owner of the company, then something is wrong. You put money in that man's pocket, every day. You shouldn't abuse the privilege, but anyone that is making me money, every day, deserves the right to come in and see me, if he has a genuine problem or concern that he cannot get resolved to his satisfaction, at a lower level of authority.

This is how you distinguish a carrier that makes a practice of treating it's people right, from one that treats them like disposable commodities (read: toilet paper).

 

At the main terminal in Omaha, where your dispatcher probably worked, you talk to him through 3 inches of bulletproof glass. This is (supposedly) because a driver once came in, grabbed his dispatcher by the collar, pulled him over the counter, and started beating the living hell out of him, in the terminal, once upon a time. How badly do you have to piss a guy off, to make that happen? And is a bulletproof window going to keep the next driver from driving his truck through the office?

It serves no one, to make *any* employee that angry. If the guy was wrong, they should have let him go, long before it got to that point. If he was right... well... ???

That's why I even mentioned it. CR England does the armed guard and metal detector thing, and Pitt-Ohio/ECM do the tiny hole in a window thing. These are the companies that I have personally had bad experiences with. Your mileage may vary.

 

Swift had bullet proof glass at every terminal i visited....

 

The rumor is that when the old man ran it, it was a great company to work for. When the sons took over, they were more interested in pretending to be bad-### motorcycle gang people, than trucking executives, so the drained the company dry, and poured the money into their Harley-Davidson dealerships. Eventually, the old man was forced to come back from retirement to try to straighten it all out, but he was pretty senile by then, and he had to drag his daughter in to help - and she wanted nothing to do with it. I imagine that it eventually fell back to the sons, and they probably foisted the day-to-day stuff off to some hired suits, who ran it like any other mega-carrier; money at the expense of everything and everyone that it touches.

It's worth noting that the Flea-Bag motel in Allentown is rarely full; it's much too big, and out-of-the-way, to attract that much business, and although they have a contract with Werner, the terminal can't process that many students, to really fill that place. The terminal manager or training manager probably negotiated that contract with a kickback for doing so, and they're probably ripping off Werner. At the time that I was there, it was owned by a family from India, but if they had any sense, Werner would have bought it from them, or built their own flea bag motel, by now. CR England owns their flea bag motel, in Burns Harbor, next door to a strip club, and they have dormitory housing upstairs in their main terminal building in Salt Lake City, where you are basically forced to buy food from their overpriced cafeteria, or starve. This is another common scam, at training carriers.

 

Note that Werner does not really weed people out during the application or in-processing stage. To get the grants that they are after, they must at least get you to complete the student portion of the grant applications, and you do that during your first three days or so, at orientation. After that, if your drug test comes back bad, or you can't drive, or they find some other reason to dump you, well, at least they got some money for bringing you in, first.

When I went through orientation, there were three guys in my group who spoke Spanish, and very little English. Now, guys like that shouldn't even have CDLs (there is an FMCSR requiring all commercial drivers to fluently soeak, understand, read, and write English), but there they were. My Spanish was about as bad as their English, but I took the initiative to try to help the through orientation. This infuriated the instructor, who held a grudge against me for doing it, the entire year that I worked at Werner. He even commented to me about it, at my out-processing, at the end. I figure that if you bring a guy in, he deserves a chance to make a go of it, but the instructor was determined to set them up for failure. That seems like what autocorrect wants desperately to call a "duck" move... but there it is.

They get less and less grant money for keeping you around, the longer that you stay, but they do want you to complete the grant application paperwork before you go. They especially liked ex- (preferably recent) military members, because they put up with terrible treatment, conditions and pay, and they get extra grant money for them... so don't let them kid you about how patriotic they are, and how they want to do right by veterans. It's bull, and just another scam.