<6 months results

In my comment, I am picking on you! Please don't take it personally I am not attempting to be malicious.

Right now with your limited time driving a truck do you think you could take a 53-foot trailer into a heavily urban area with a lot of traffic and back that trailer into a garage-type dock? You are going from sunshine into darkness. Do you think you could do so within a reasonable amount of time?

Do you think you could make a back that also required you to back from a busy road into a driveway with several curves in it? You have to back in because you have no place to turn around at that dock! Same situation doing so within a reasonable amount of time.

Now this next question is one that can throw people off. I will attempt to set the situation up. You have been assigned a door in a large warehouse where they don't require drivers to drop and bobtail to a parking area. There is not a lot of room and the margins of error are almost non existant! You are going to have to back around a tractor still hooked up. Would you be able to make that back in such a way as to not have your parentage disputed by the yard man at least twice?


EVERY ONE of the above has resulted in preventable accidents on drivers. That last one I was struck by the trailer. The driver was so scared after that I got out of my sleeper, unhooked my trailer, and dropped it. And it was still almost 20 minutes before the guy got in.

The first one I saw was a driver who had backed into the dock at an angle and hit a VERY expensive specialty forklift. I was waiting to get in. IT was almost 2 hours before I got in and busted my 14 because of that guy.


Do you want to know why carriers want some experience what I just wrote plus a thousand other situations is the reason? Again I am being direct and to the point! You don't know what you don't know. Putting a driver into a road tractor OTR or even regional with NO experience is almost like having an airport ticket agent attempting to fly a Boeing 747! Please don't take my comment personally, I am not trying to be malicious. Sometimes the truth simply hurts!

 

80-90% of new CDL holders leave the industry before they have 12 months experience. 2 big trucking companies, according to their own officials, have the majority of their company drivers with less than 90 days behind the whel. New drivers, IMO, don't have 10% of the seriousness they used to have. Many new drivers just take it as normal they will be getting various tickets running into things and have accidents. WTF! If you talk to them eventually they may say something like "yeah, I don't want too many of those things." Imagine someone in any other job talking casually about killing people or getting fired like it's just one item on a drive-thru menu. Young and new drivers, IMO, don't have more than a clue about how casually they either make decisions or understand the world is not some school where a helicopter parent can prevent you from ever having a difficult day.

What if staring at a smartphone isn't the key to success in life?

 

common sense should have answered your question.

 

Most of the megas are self insured. If they're unwilling to hire someone that has less than 6 months experience, that seems contradictory considering they will train someone with 0 experience at all to get their CDL.I think most of them quit because they believe they were lied to about how much they would be making once they were in training after getting their CDL and/or how much they were making when they were on their own in their own assigned company truck. To many people want to do this thinking they will make $1500-2000 a week right out of the gate.

 

The publicly traded trucking companies publish quarterly and yearly reports on their operations. You can do the math yourself. Will you? How important is the answer to the question, really? Nothing I've seen suggests that whatever level of profit at the companies with mostly newbies is caused by hiring newbies. Moving freight is a commodity business, as in one carrier moving your freight is virtually the same as any other carrier moving your freight. Each trucking company, event the top 20 big companies combine, control too tiny a portion of the freight moving business to have power in the market, except in rare isolated cases, such as a customer in a remote area, or a customer with very specialized needs.

Individual fruit picker's can't set the market price for picking fruit. Watch the classic movie The Grapes of Wrath. When the fruit-picking market is flooded with excess capacity fruit pickers have no market power. You can take any dead-eyed slacker and turn him into a Werner-bot in 3 weeks and pay him little, because that is what the market will bear, and you may, or may not, make a profit. The big companies, the ones that hire many thousands of drivers every year, because they lose many thousands of drivers every year, have streamlined the hiring process and know the clueless newbies will be gone in 90 days. Other truckign companies are happy to watch Werner and CR England eat the difficult first 90 days experience curve and then scoop up 90 day wonders if they will stay in the industry.

 

First, you have to find the common sense. Second, they have to know how to apply it.

 

"Might as well jump...."


-- Van Halen