Regional with Werner (Phoenix, AZ)

At least 3 months of training take home pay $298 per week.Once you test out and get your truck watch your #####.They made their $ off of you and will cut you loose for the tiniest infraction, because there are hundreds more students coming into their mill weekly.I'm not trying to scare you,I'm just telling you the truth.

 

That 4-6 weeks is the time you have to spend driving.When you add in the time waiting at shippers and recievers,factor in breakdown,repairs,foul weather,and your trainers home time(could be a week there);then your break if you want it,= 3 months or more. Recruiters lie whenever their lips are moving.

 

Werner has some really good trainers;the first one my son had was training for 6 years;he's not currently training because even though trainers make more money,when training you are running hard,team driving,so the truck can be rolling up to 22 hours a day.He told my son that if he was younger he would team with my son as he was one of the better students he had.
My son's second trainer was collecting a pension from another company and recieving SS payments so he was a veteran driver.
My son tested out in Ga. no trucks were available so he and a few others were given a rental to Allentown Pa.He was assigned a Peterbuilt with a broken APU so he had to bring it to Carrier and have that fixed,then he had to bring it to the Peterbuilt dealer to fix a check engine problem. He recieved $176 then $141 take home pay for those 2 weeks($100 of that was repayment on his student loan)
So finally his truck is ready to roll and for 5 days he's delivering loads till he rolls into the main terminal in Ne.Once there he's told to report to safety,they tell him a security guard reported him for not coming to a full stop at a stop sign near the terminal entrance, 3AM in the morning,so they want to test him again(We think that's a false report because but it's their word against yours)
He gets tested in a truck that he's unfamiliar with (freightliner)pulling an empty trailer.The tester says congrats you passed,2 hours later he gets a call come into saftey talk to Mark the head of safety. Mark tells him the onboard computer registered hard braking.My son protests saying he's not familiar with that truck,test him in his own peterbuilt with a fully loaded trailer .They say sorry you failed, but you can try again in six months,we will give you another chance.
So if your wondering why I'm so critical of Werner,that's the reason.They set him up.They cut him loose once they made $ off of training him(they get government funds for training drivers) and they got him to team drive for 3 months at $298 per week. That is their business model, they maximise their profit by bringing 700-1000 trainees per week through their drivers mill.They don't have jobs for all of those students,they just want to milk them for what they can and move freight as cheaply as possible. They really aren't interested in hiring new drivers when they can make more money training students.

My son isn't moping and feeling sorry for himself,he put in 10 applications since he's been home.He ran 48 states saw a lot of nice scenery met a lot of nice folk and got a lot of good experience(but only 5 days OTR count) as verifiable,because training doesn't count.I'm more upset with Werner than he is,I still get mad when I think about what they did.

 

I'm really surprised that nobody else is responding to this thread;anybody have any suggestions to point Smaggs to a good training company?The first time I posted it on here about my son's experience as it was happening and most guys already knew about Werners games,but some guys try to poke holes in my son's story.
Well ,if they are in your area, I've been told that Watkins Sheperd is a good company to start with.

 

Well three weeks of actual training, the rest was repairs, waiting for loads, all the things mentioned earlier. It's going pretty well so far, I have a good trainer with a lot of experience. One reason I chose Werner was because I heard good things about their training program (relative to others). I also came on board with the knowledge about how Werner uses and loses their newly hired trainees after taking the subsidy and slave wages. Still not sure how accurate this is, but this thread seems to confirm it, and if anyone else here has stories they want to share please post them, I had to start somewhere to get experience, so I hope to last long enough to get that.