Snackbar is chillin'....at Shaffer

The answer to this, is you get screwed. I've never worked at Crete Carrier Corporation, so I can't comment on Crete or Shaffer's specific policies. But I'll tell you how this works for the majority of OTR companies paying CPM:

1. Breakdown: You get paid for breakdown if the breakdown is more than 24 hours and basically at the 24 hour mark. Meaning. You break down at 5pm Monday. You get repaired Wednesday at 11am. You get paid for 1 day of breakdown even if you sit in a mechanic shop waiting room for hours and hours, because OTR companies don't consider sitting in a mechanic shop waiting room as working. Because obviously you would sit in a mechanic shop waiting room for fun in your spare time, so why should the company pay you for that (this is sarcasm).

Or another example: Tire blows out, can't limp it to a nearby shop, you wait 5 hours in roadside service because they're busy. You don't get paid for that 5 hours.

2. Sitting on the dock/detention pay: Most OTR companies start to pay you after the 2nd hour past your appointment time. But here's the thing, you can't be late to your appointment time either. And being on time doesn't mean being at the guard shack 1 minute before your appointment time, at many places being on time means you're already in the dock with the check in process completed before your appointment time starts. Which is a long way of saying you need to be on site at your appointment time at least 30 minutes early, but usually 1 hour early to be on the safe side.

So if you arrive 1 hour before your appointment time, then you give the first 2 hours after your appointment time for free, this means you essentially give your company 3 hours for free before they start to pay you. And when they pay you detention, it'll normally be about $15 - $20 per hour after the 2nd hour past your appointment time.

So that means if you arrive 1 hour early to your appointment time, wait 3 hours past your appointment time for them to load you, you get paid for 1 hour of detention time, or $20 in this example.

20 / 4 = $5 per hour is what you get paid for detention when they take 3 hours past your appointment time to load or unload you, which is less than the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

3. Fueling: No pay for fueling, even for companies like Crete Carrier Corp where you have mandatory fuel solutions and are doing half fills, forcing you to stop and fuel more often. I'm sure Crete and Shaffer have a bonus system tied to following fuel solutions, if you averaged out the hourly wage of your fuel bonus (if you qualify for the bonus in the first place), the hourly wage is probably pathetic and below minimum wage for waiting 10 minutes to fuel, 10 minutes fueling and 10 more minutes waiting in the truck parked in front of you to pull off so you can get out. The real on duty time for fueling is usually 30 minutes of labor and whatever fuel bonus these companies give out it's well below minimum wage. Shaffer is now implementing fuel solutions on their reefer tanks as well so that's even more stops for fueling.

4. Drop and hooks: Zero pay. At the best of places you can be in and out in 30 minutes the fastest including trailer inspections.

5. Routine shop maintenance like PM's: Zero pay for sitting in a shop waiting room for 1-4 hours (if the shop is behind your PM will have to wait).

Yep. If the weather delays you for 1-23 hours, you get paid $0.

How kind of OTR companies, to actually pay you for working. That's very nice of them. Don't worry, I'm sure corporate will eventually decide to pay flat rates for when you're in a rental car, which will of course come out to less than what you would get paid doing CPM.

The bottom line is no, OTR truckload drivers are not compensated for all of their time and get screwed over, badly. The Super Truckers will be in shortly to tell me how I'm lazy and entitled for not working for free, but my advice to you is if you want to be paid for everything you do, do not do OTR truckload running CPM (exceptions exist but trust me Crete Carrier Corp isn't one of them).

 

Yeah well Crete is the one of few companies debt free..... they're smart in how they run things....not to mention insurance being affordable and growing freight lanes ... making more cpm/hr doesn't mean you'll make more somewhere else...do those companies have the capacity to keep every driver moving??

 

Folks like to run down a system they don't understand. Those of us who do will defend it.

 

Nothing. That is why we keep talking about it.

 

I did not bring this up out of nowhere. The person I replied to stated they had never been paid by CPM before and were asking how the compensation worked, so I told them. Out of respect for you I won't talk about CPM pay in your new thread that you created, even if another poster asks about it like what happened here.

 

I seriously doubt you’re even a driver in this business…