Schilli Specialized , Inc. - Indianapolis, In.

Well, it's been almost 5 months and I still haven't received my last paycheck or the "letter of explanation" that I was supposedly going to get. At least my unemployment got approved because they couldn't provide documentation that they didn't just fire me for no reason...which they more or less did.

I have a complaint in with the Department of Labor and will probably end up having to sue for the wages they owe and violating the whistle-blower laws.

 

Updating again...I received a letter from the Department of Labor saying they're going to begin mediating my claim...basically that they're sending Schilli a letter.

Sounds like the friggin' U.N. to me...

 

Well, here's the final chain of events.

The Department of Labor found in my favor...that State Law says they can't withhold wages for the reasons they stated and that they had 10 days to send a check. The date came and went and I got another letter from the DOL saying that they did all they could and that I should sue. Enclosed were all the response docs from Schilli that were basically explaining that they kept my last paycheck to pay for "damages" to the truck...basically every repair I had since started working for them two years ago, some of which I agreed to pay and had already paid the year before...silly stuff like $40 for a CB antenna that they replaced and $24 for a gladhand...and stuff that had already been determined was not my fault like the fuel gelling up twice when the weather was 70 below zero with the windchill.

So I wrote a nice letter to the owner of the company saying that I was prepared to go to court and that it would be a shame for them to have to spend a lot of money on attorney's fees defending themselves during these bad economic times.

On the day of the deadline I set, I got a phonecall from his secretary saying that he had just received the letter that day because it had been passed around the chain of command. He was unaware of what had been going on the past few months...apparently Nathan Lindsay didn't feel it necessary to tell him about it...and wanted to settle. We came up with a fair number and they paid me.

So, I have no further beefs with this company except that it took 7 months to get the money they owed me.

I honestly believe that if it weren't for crooked people like Nathan Lindsay, I would still be working for Schilli Specialized because before he became the terminal manager, everything was fine.

 

I'm not driving anywhere at the moment, either. I do part time team driving with my best friend when he does long jobs but that's once a week at most. I've been looking and all the good jobs are filled the moment they're announced. I saw a tv ad wanting trainees and it irked me because that's who's taking all the jobs right now: people who lost their jobs in other industries and thought that trucking would be safe. The way I see it, all the new drivers are pushing wages down because they don't know any better. Schilli's starting wage was .37, but now I'm lucky to find anything starting at .33 and even those jobs have all the drivers they can handle right now.

 

Attica, Indiana area...the -70 was the windchill, NOT actual temp, though I know actual temp was well below zero. We had some killer winds that winter. My fuel gelled up while driving down a country road with no trees to block the wind. The time my gladhand broke because of the extreme cold, I was in northern Indiana flying across State Highway 6 west of Nappanee and the lines froze and when I tapped it to take it off, it broke in two, hahaha. THAT's cold...no way to tell how cold it was when the actual temp was below zero with 60mph winds adding to the windchill plus the wind generated by driving 60mph.