Bulkmatic / Brenntag Chemical

In the last year Bulkmatic has done little but to cut pay. Deleted safety pay,Deleted overtime pay for saturday, Cut out company paid christmas partys cut out several paid holidays and slowed down the trucks. Also cut 5% of work force in office and shops company wide. Many terminals are nearly impossible to talk to dispatch cause there is only one where once there were two or more. Truck and trailer service has been dragged out to the max and neither are getting washed anymore. Used to be good company but now days near going under I think.

 

funkeytut summed it up, fairly well. They used to be a decent place to work for. Now, they're pretty much a joke. Policies seem to change with the weather & it's blamed on the economy at every chance. I will say the health insurance is fairly good & they do get me home every night, though.

 

I applied with Bulkmatic and they nearly laughed at me. AR pretty much did the same thing. They all looked like deer in the headlights. But this pulling of what made the job worth doing is happening in anything trucking, not just the Pneumatic tankers.

I think many companies have gone into survival mode, and I have been reading reports that fuel is going to continue to rise this year not so much because the price of crude is going up compared with its value but because the buying power of the American dollar is being diminished by inflation.

Sooner or later, companies are going to fail. How long has it been since we have seen any transportation company do anything original? They all follow the same business model and start cutting overhead in the department where they make their profit.....Transportation.

You don't butcher your milk cow the first time you get hungry.

 

What gets me is, two weeks after cutting 5% of the office, doing away with 24% on Saturday, dropping one of the paid holidays, stop matching 401K, the fools have the brass to post in their company news letter, "thanks for the sacrifices, team, we're doing better than we've ever done before." Like you replied with, don't butcher the milk cow ...

I, for one, won't forget how I was treated when the industry makes a shift back to a "driver's market."

 

One thing I think truckers forget is that the whole economy is in a tailspin, and this is pushing an out of work population into a field that normally they wouldn't give a second look at. That is one reason that the companies are in command right now. Too many driver and not enough jobs.

Should the economy pick up tomorrow, experienced drivers would be in huge demand.....That will be about the time frame where corporations will lobby to allow illegal aliens to drive for US carriers. NAFTA is nothing new, it is just another way to introduce a new labor source for Americans to compete with.

A little research in American labor trends might help truckers understand the game they are involved in. Knowing how the corporate game is played would help us understand how to keep our place in it.

What is fun is training someone to drive a bulk tanker and have them walk away from it on the first day!

 

more news from Bulkmatic one of the general terminal managers has now been fired/soon to be arrested for skimming funds from both the company and the drivers at all the terminals he was in charge of. No wonder he seems so happy all the time. Up to know of course.

 

Funeytut, any idea which terminal that was? We used to have a terminal manager on this board and I'm looking into Bulkmatic, myself.

Thing that bugs me, (industry wide) if there isn't enough work for 7 days a week, and we have to cut down to a 6 or 5 day week, why do I have to sit in a truck stop 200 miles from home while all the office/dispatch/sales staff takes a weekend?

Nothing worse than trying to get information on a Saturday afternoon only to find out all the support staff has gone home.

 

The manager I had mentioned to was in the southern area Ky Al Tn etc.....

 

I doubt it, Alan