My Experiences at Tribe Express

I have been working for Tribe for about 3 months now as a company driver. Before I started I was excited since they paid 50 cents per mile, which is higher than any of the previous six companies I drove for in the past 6 years.


During orientation our instructor told the class that they have no trucks available for us at orientation and that we would all have to recover a truck for them to give us. Our instructor said there is always work available for anyone willing to help recover abandoned trucks. I have never been to orientation at other companies where this was the case and we all had our suspicions as to why Tribe has so many abandoned trucks, more on that later.


From the start I was given a truck with a broken APU. When they got around to fixing it I was out of work for 4 days which I received no breakdown pay compared to other companies paying me $100.00 per day. I also was not put up in a hotel room like the other drivers at Tribe when their truck was being repaired. I don’t know why I was discriminated against by Tribe, albeit I am Filipino and there are not many Asian truck drivers.


Dispatch is horrible and my dispatcher, a.k.a. driver manager, is the worst of all the seven trucking companies I’ve worked for so far. I don’t know where to start but can give a few examples, such as you are given your next load at the last minute or while driving to pick up a load you are called and given a different load to pick up so it is always a crisis situation working for Tribe in one way or another. Another example would be, at the last minute you are sent to rescue a load by swapping with another driver because their driver managers don’t keep track of their drivers’ hours of service and they run out of hours of service. The delivery and pick up of your next load will be placed far apart so that you will use all of your 14 hours of available work allowed by the department of transportation ensuring that you will be in constant fatigue and your life will be miserable. To sum things up, Murphy’s Law, which states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, pretty much applies to everything at Tribe.


To top it all off and put the nail in the coffin, you will be given on a typical week 4 loads to run with short miles adding up to slightly over 2,000 miles per week leaving you with an anemic paycheck.


At best, I worked for companies in the past in which you are given three loads all at once so you can plan your life and get adequate rest while the loads given to you are spaced well apart from delivery to pick up, which amount to a lot of total miles for the week leaving you with a great paycheck. Of course, you are doing all the labor and risking your life every day on the road as I learned when I was in a car accident when I was 10 years old and watched my biological mother die.


I don’t know if it is that my driver manager is mediocre at best and/or the load planner is terrible at planning loads that creates an environment of high driver turnover leading to the unusual high amount of abandoned trucks, albeit I believe all this creates such a depressing culture in which drivers at Tribe have instilled in their thoughts the question of whether life is worth living or not.


There has always been a shortage of over the road truck drivers, recently made worse by the pandemic, as few are willing sacrifice their life and risk their life on the road everyday.


It appears that the decent pay per mile and nice trucks at Tribe are necessary to lure drivers to fill their abandoned trucks. It is hard to fathom but since my first day at orientation life has been a never ending crisis situation working for Tribe where like Murphy’s Law states anything that can go wrong will go wrong.


Despite all it’s shortcomings Tribe is an okay temporary job in case of an emergency in life like the Coronavirus pandemic.