Werner trying to force us out the door?

Me and my wife have been team driving with Werner since Dec 2010 and I think they are trying to get rid of us. I have heard so many bad things about Werner such as they only want inexperienced people to haul freight at a lower pay (they are currently paying us .38 a mile which is their top pay scale). But I chose to keep an open mind and give them a chance and not just listen to how bad Werner is and all the truck stop rumors.

As of recently here are a couple events that are occuring. We've been getting non stop solo loads as team drivers. The loads are accompanied by hours and hours of down time. We're in southern texas. We get a call from dispatch telling us that we are far over idle (in a non APU truck). Now, being the middle of summer and currently 104 degrees in laredo we aren't left with much of a choice. We asked dispatch what would happen if we can't get our idle down and they said we'd be terminated.

Even at night it's 85 degrees here. We just had a 34 hour reset due to load delivery times so we idled the truck while parked at the flying J as I didn't see any other choice. Then when we delivered our load at 7:30 am, the customer didn't have us empty until 3:30 pm. So of course we idled while waiting for them to unload us.

Normally I'd be fine with having a certain idle percentage that they require as team drivers, since team drivers aren't supposed to stop right? But when you have loads with hours and hours of down time, and they are all short solo loads, in the middle of july, I find their goal pretty hard to reach. Me or my wife and dog will not have a heat stroke on the money they're paying us.

Now they're wanting to drug test us (which we can pass no problem) but my wife just got randomly tested a month ago and now we BOTH have to get tested? And I thought the drug tests were random. What are the chances that both our names got drawn at the same time?

I am almost positive they are trying to find anything to get us on so they have a reason to fire us, or push us into leaving the company to make room for a newer lower salary worker. I didn't want to believe it at first, but it's seeming more and more obvious. We really didn't want to leave Werner right now, we wanted to stay for a year so my wife could get a year's experience, and then move. But we might not have that long until our idle goes too high with all these high downtime loads. We are probably going to get 3500 miles this week at most due to how bad the loads are. We used to get 6k mile weeks.

I guess our time is up at Werner, they're telling us to leave without actually telling us. Top pay teams apparantly aren't welcome. Or maybe I'm just being paranoid. If anyone has any comments I'd love to hear them, but please try and base them on actual facts and not truck stop myths. We're really in a bad situation here and don't want to leave yet.

 

I know there's options out there. We just don't like bouncing around job to job. Plus having a pet, and living in FL of all places, and my wife having less than a year exp our options are limited. Thanks though. We will probably just go home and do something locally, this kind of crap is ruining my wife's opinion on trucking. She just said "I have to piss in a jug, i get to shower every 2-3 days, we go home once every two months, I can't stop putting on weight, and I am only making $450 a week"

 

Yea we looked into them and saw they require a years experience, it was an option for us in the future but now I guess it won't be.

 

Sounds worse than Werner lol. Hiring drivers when they don't have the freight to back it up.