Marten Driver (currently)

I heard kabar on the road dog channel this morning talking to trucker Tim.

 

Thats good, im glad to hear he found a good place to work. He and i disagreed several times but its all good glad he's happy.

 

Because I said I would: I just got $60 in detention on Friday's check from that trip.

 

Wow!!! I worked for Marten from 1994 till 2003 and loved every minute of it. I am looking to go back on the road and was going to call them up again but after reading all of this i guess i will look elsewhere. What a shame, Marten used to be an awesome company to work for and had a lot of fun there. My FM was Randy Hansen, who would get me all the miles i could handle. I had to cry uncle many times after running 4000 miles a week many times. When in Mondovi we would go across the street on a saturday night and it was nothing for a FM or Randy Marten himself to walk in and have a drink or two with a bunch of us drivers. Cant believe all this. What a shame

 

you are so correct. It used to be a good company, but when Randy stepped down as Preseidant, then things started to get bad.
Now days every one in the office is sitting on pins and needles, afraid of when the AX is coming for them for any reason

 

He should be, they are reporting a 22% increase last business quarter.
To bad alot of that comes from the company drivers forced onto perdiem, then having to pay and addtional .3 cents for 'admin fees'.

 

but marten just gave you drivers a .04cents pay raise

 

based on the lenght of load. The more miles, the less you get, the less miles, the more pay. In short it's the 300 milers is where you will earn the 4 cents.

 

Yeah, it averages to about 2 cents. And 2 cents doesn't make up for all the poor planning.

24 hours to run a 300 mile load. 5 days to run a 1500 mile load. Unload at 5am, and then get a preplan that loads 25 miles away at 1900 that night. There's soooo much wasted and under-utilized time, and it seems like this is a result of the planning crew doing all of their "planning" with calculators instead of with a working knowledge of the HOS rules.
Many times, I flat out tell my FM, "My 14 ends at 2000," when trying to prod for a load. I'm sure he tells the planners, and across the Qcomm comes a load that picks up at 2200. So I'm parking onsite over night, or using line 5 or whatever, just to take what I can get.

Even the silver linings have clouds attached. I had a defective part on the new truck they just put me in, and so I lost the load I was on. When I was repaired the next day (Saturday) weekend dispatch gave me a load that was dropped in Memphis and that went to Ontario, CA. Almost 1800 miles. Hooray, but I'm Upper Midwest Regional, and I'm supposed to be home Friday (two days ago as I type). Long story short, the regular dispatcher came in on Monday and did right by me and found be two loads to get me back to the house (in Minnesota) by Saturday morning. So I got monster miles out of the deal...but only because the weekend crew was completely ignorant to where my operating area was and when I was supposed to be home...and now my usual 2.5-3 day weekend is little more than a 34 hour restart.

I know this might seem like another crappy day in paradise even to some of my fellow bluebirds (who haven't seen 2 1500+ mile loads so close to back-to-back in many moons) but what bugs me about the company is that the left hand NEVER knows what the right hand is doing, and you NEVER know when that institutional ignorance is going to totally bite you in the ###.

Summary: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts...and Marten has some parts, but they make not a good whole.