I’m gonna be finishing up driving school in a couple of months

It depends. There is loading/unloading the freight plus the time required for the driver to throw chains/straps and the time required to tarp the freight, if the load requires it. With dry van the time required is the time to move the freight on/off the trailer plus any time for paperwork to be completed and handed to the driver. Flatbed and reefer have the load & paperwork time plus those activities for the specific load. With reefer additional time is often necessary for the "lumper service" to count & inspect the freight, time to notify the driver of the required payment for loading/unloading the freight, time required for the driver to request and pay proper amount to satisfy the lumper service, and then the time required for the lumper service to receive the payment, acknowledge the payment is suitable and notify the driver the paperwork is available to be handed over.

It's my understanding that flatbed loads often don't take long at all to load or unload, but the additional time for removing tarps, securement, etc can be trivial or not. Lots of flatbed loads deliver to sites in the process of being completed rather than to up and running warehouse locations. This is why flatbed loads are often not scheduled like dry van loads. In this down market some companies resort to getting random freight from load boards where problems are common. I never worked flatbed, but This is what I have read on this forum over the years about it. There are professional flatbedders on here with a lot more details.

 

Cool, thanks!! In Reefer, does the driver pay the lumper fee or your company pay it?

 

Company pays the lumpers. Usually, an account is already set up with the lumper company, so you won't have to deal with it. Used to be a pain because the driver had to deal with getting the payment numbers, etc for the lumper, but companies don't do this anymore, at least none that I'm aware of.

 

Cool!!

 

Lumper services tell the driver how much the fee to load/unload will be. The driver is in the middle between the lumper service and the trucking company and the company paying for the freight to be moved.
Example, I'm a company driver/W-2 employee of a trucking company and I just delivered to a cold storage warehouse. When I check-in at the warehouse I provide a phone number they use for door assignment, etc. When the lumper service is finished doing their job, they send a text to the phone number provided requesting $ and a link to a web page to be used for payment. In my case, I sent a text/call to my company with the payment amount and waited for a text/call from my company with an authorization number for the exact amount of the lumper fee. Once I entered that authorization number, into the linked web page, I wait for the lumper service/customer to text me that payment was received, and possibly another text indicating I can come to the office and get my signed paperwork. Sometimes the process is completed in minutes after the actual work was completed, and sometimes there were several hours of waiting for a door assignment, then some time loading/unloading, then time waiting for the "pay now" text, the time for your company procedure and entry of the payment info, then hours waiting for the "come get your paperwork" text or knock on the truck door. I had mostly bad experiences with reefer freight. Other drivers have less problems with reefer than I did.

If a driver is a lease-op, owner-operator he may pay the lumper out of his pocket and collect that lumper fee in addition to fee for moving the freight and fuel surcharge. The main complaint with lumpers from company drivers is the waste of time waiting for each step of the above to happen. Some reefer loads will be completed in 30 minutes after you back-in and some could take 2-10 hours. Before you get to the customer the dispatcher will claim "they're pretty good about not making you wait" and then when your dispatcher calls you during your 6th hour waiting for some part of the described process with mention "they usually just take 4 hours, go ask them how much longer it will take." The answer to "how much longer before my load is finished?" is ALWAYS "they are almost done with you" or "I don't know, go wait in the truck or the designated waiting area." All of that wasted time inevitably leads to discussion about detention pay. That's a whole other discussion. I got paid for 10-25% of the waiting I was forced to do. Even if I would have gotten paid for 100% of my waiting, that pay would be about one-half of the money I would make driving for the same time. Detention pay policies vary tremendously by company and there are several common "details" that greatly reduce the actual detention pay you can earn. Typically if you are one minute late for an appointment, you cannot get detention pay for that customer, no matter the cause for being late. If customer #1 made you wait 4 hours, and that causes you to be 8 minutes late for customer #2, no detention pay. Typically there is some "free time" you must giveaway before you are eligible for detention pay. 2 hours of waiting after the appointment time may be common. Some customers may write into their contracts detention pay will not be paid or will be limited to some nominal amount. Some trucking companies may not pass the detention money they collect onto the driver and provide some excuse. In a depressed freight market some companies may not push as hard to collect detention pay as they do during a booming freight market. Some trucking companies charge large hourly rates for detention starting very soon after the appointment time and then pass all of the money to the driver. You don't work for the average trucking company, you will work for one trucking company at a time and you will get the pay and conditions that one company provides and you will not change their behavior.

The most reliable info about a trucking company pay and conditions comes from current working drivers at that company. Make any company you want to research put you in contact with their drivers doing the work you want to be hired to do. There can be big difference within a trucking company based on which customer account or division you work for. Talking to a driver that did LTL, terminal to terminal driving tells you very little about OTR trucking. Company web sites, recruiter fairy tales are highly unreliable and not enough to make an important decision about where to work. It would be nice if all of the info was available online, but an online-only job search usually leads to bad results, IMO. Each driver needs a company that matches their needs and situations, but only the driver is able to get the info to make that decision. You don't ask the barber if you need a haircut, because his income depends on giving the same answer to everyone. We can imagine why the barber SHOULD be honest, but real money is easier to spend than mythical future money. Buyer beware. The outcome is most important to you so you have to take responsibility for getting the answers that you need, not just stop looking once you hear the answer you want. Trucking companies have a lot more experience getting drivers in the seat than new drivers have in picking trucking companies. Trucking is not a transparent and easily understood industry.

 

WHOAH!!! 10 hours of waiting just for a load!!! Man... That was one of the reasons I wanted to do Flatbed, I thought there was less waiting time in Flatbed and fewer 3-4 AM deliveries. I can stay up late but I'd rather have 11 AM and afternoon deliveries instead lol. And yeah, I've been doing A LOT of research since before I even started CDL school, and based the reviews of most companies I've been suggested too, most of them are trash. This industry needs a complete revamp.

 

The horror stories I told are from the reefer loads where appointment times are all around the clock and the customers generally schedule more trucks than they have doors so that they can have a continuous supply of trucks to load/unload during the 24 hours. There are drop & hook reefer loads and dedicated reefer loads where what I hted and described doesn't much exist, but there is still the noise and the fueling of the reefer to deal with. Many reefer customer won't allow trailers to be dropped with less than 3/4 full tanks. I've never heard of flat-bedders having to wait like that. There is a flatbed forum on this web site. Generally the flatbed customers are working outside and during 6 am to 6 pm, unless the freight is going to a factory setting. My impression is there isn't much waiting in flat-bed. Super Trucker Dan has a good YouTube channel showing what his days are like, although he has a very far from average truck and he is an owner-operator for Mercer.

 

I pulled reefers for 18 years and never had to wait that long. Any waiting time I did, was paid hourly pay while waiting, so not big deal to me.
Receivers/customers have cracked down on wait times anyway because they're billed for that.

 

Alright, that makes sense.