Any Drivers Pressured to Violate DOT Regulations

I miss Super Dave Osborne...

Some younger people may know him as Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasim.

 

I'm not sure what role my time at Knight or my anger with them plays in this court case. If this were a case against Knight, then maybe I would have an axe to grind(and if the attorney ever needs some damning testimony against them, I would he absolutely thrilled to assist him with that!!!)
All I am trying to say is as truckers we get used and abused with alarming frequency, isn't about time that some changes take place?
Is this the best case for to force these changes? Maybe not! But a win for Ms.Ferguson may be win for all drivers. We don't have the luxury of being picky. There might be better cases out there but this case has traction, the trucking company screwed up! They fired a driver for refusing to operate a CMV when the driver felt it was unsafe to continue.
I believe that Ms. Ferguson may have had a poor service record and the company probably had sufficient cause to terminate her lease PRIOR to the poor weather incident, but the final straw, the incident that ultimately caused her FM to initiate the paperwork to terminate her is the issue here.
I personally wish Ms. Ferguson and her Attorney the best of luck in court and I hope that when Prime gets their gonads trapped in a vice because of this suit, they and every other unscrupulous company out thinks twice before pressuring or punishing a driver who wants to do what is right!

 

It's gonna a whole lot more than this one attorney to change things. There's a thousand ways to fire a driver or starve them out. It's just one dispatcher with an attitude screwed up.

She got what she deserved. Now he's trying to fatten his own wallet.

 

SUPER DAVE!!!!!!! What an awesome stuntman. This is the same guy. No?

 

So the next time you get caught over on your logs when your only 30 over and heading home the DOT should slap you for the entire $11,000 dolllars allowed by law right?

I mean we all know drivers go over and falsify log books. Lets make an example of it regardless of the actual harm you have caused. No little warning on a paper no Sir, full enforcement right so we can show other drivers what wil happen?


But Sir that is what you are advocating. Kind of like the guys over on the Class action CRST thread. Punishing companies for your percieved transgressions. Or should we appply just a bit of reason when considering amounts of culpability. Hell even in the transcript the judgement admits the plaintiff shares in some responsibility for her termination yet people want to see a company crucified rightly or wrongly just so they are punished because of some insipid belief drivers are incapable of protecting themselves from abuse!


You absolutely right this ghread is a shining example of why this industry and society in general is in the crapper. Leeches and looters, leeches and looters!

 

And after your rants about HOS and rules of the road I bet you would be first in line to sue someone if they backed into you in a parking lot and there log book was found to be off by an hour or so.

 

I'll offer them the opportunity to have their insurance pay my damages. If they are out of compliance I would make request the officer write a ticket to the fullest extent of the law.

Yes that would include the maximum $11,000 fine. In fact I might insist that my vehicle needed towing to insure that the failure appeared on his or her record. However your veiled insult of my character continues to highlight your failure of comprehension. In fact if you would but pay attention my thoughts on HOS and you conduct on the publics roads are precisely because of leeches and looters.

 

This thread makes me giggle.

That is all.

 

It is ultimately the drivers decision to violate a given rule, not the companies. Dispatchers will push that load on you until you're black and blue. It's your responsibility as a driver to tell them "no" when you know you can't legally run a load. If you accept the load, you deserve the violation.

 

I have been pressured by Prime to run illegal. Dispatchers from Pittston PA, and the Terminal Manager were in on it.

They wanted me to log sleeper berth when they were completely aware that I was inside warehouses, loading/unloading trucks with pallet jacks, or inside the warehouse (AWAKE) counting freight by the customer's policy.

My dispatchers and trainers (and even the people running orientation) told me how to cheat my logbook.

I was running the "uncheatable" electronic logs while at Prime, but let me assure you, they are cheatable.

I did what i shouldn't have done, though i didn't want to. I left Prime because of the pressure to run illegal (and caving in to it for so long).

Than they screwed up my DAC report and put a truck abandonment on it.

On the elog cheating... what they would have me do is drive the truck 1.5 miles at a time (like when the 14/hr clock was out) and pull over, set the brakes, turn the truck off.

Than i'd turn the truck on and you could literally drive across the country and not one minute would show as having driven. obviously your starting location would be suspect to the dot but since usually the dot doesn't really go to into the elogs as they assume they are "uncheatable" when that's not the case; it enables companies like Prime to get away with pressuring drivers into doing this stuff.

Theresa (a Prime Dispatcher) runs people illegal.

Adam, terminal manager at Prime's Pittston terminal pressures dispatchers into pressuring drivers to do so.

In regards to bad weather and wanting to shutdown I also had that happen. I shut down do to bad weather but my dispatcher was very mad about it and though I finished my training right before winter so I had to figure out snow on my own (without a trainer) for my first winter of driving I did it. I only shut down once the entire winter.

It wasn't the weather that bothered me but the fact that I would have to drive a very traffic filled multiple lane highway in that weather. Bad weather combined with bad drivers is too risky. The weather was obviously the big problem, but it was boosted by where I was and what I would have to go through with the crazy car drivers out there on that particular day.

Shutting down once due to snow in my first WINTER on my own driving an 18 wheeler (and I was 23 years old at the time, barely out of high school for crying out loud (ok a few years but not many had gone by)).

Seriously though, my dispatcher kept calling me when i was catching up on sleep since I knew i wouldn't be able to depart for a few hours. I waited a few hours and than left, but every 15 minutes my dispatcher would call me and interrupt my off duty time to figure out if i was "ready yet".