O/O get Personal Preferance over Comp/Drivers?

I am not completely sure if I understand your question, but it sounds to me, like your questioning the brokerage? The company is making money either way..... They are getting paid a larger sum than the o/o or the company driver is going to see.
The thing is, a company driver get's paid less because he doesn't own the truck. He is using someone elses truck/the companies. So the company is entitled to more money.... as it is their equipment that they(the company) must mantain.
As for the O/O, they take the head ache of repairs/fuel etc. away from the company. It would be literally impossible to keep the truck rolling if they got paid the same as the company driver. So they get a larger cut of the per milage pay than the company driver.
As for the company driver, the money he would be getting above what he already is, if he where an O/O, is feeding back into the comany for the fuel, maintance, etc of the company truck. It's all fair, and all business. Remember, either way, the company has many other hard working men and women, who are not drivers that need paid.... that help to coordinate the loads/keep us truckers with a job.
I hope I answered your question head on. If I didn't or was to murky with my answer, then let me know, and I will gladly either try to rephrase it, or I will answer the question you were asking, that I misunderstood.

 

As long as there heve been company drivers and Owner operators, the question comes up about whether or not management is favoring one group over the other. Company drivers will often swear that the good loads get cherry picked by the O/O's, and the O/O's will swear on a stack of bibles that the company saves the good loads for the company trucks and tries to starve out the Owner Operators. It's been going on for years, and there is probably no end in sight.

And, it's very hard to say whether or not it is actually happening or not. Since this is the time of year when much of the freight slows down across the board, there may well be an appearance that freight is being offered to one group or the other, but it could be slow simply because all freight is slow.

The only way to tell if this is truly going on or not is to have looked very carefully at the way that the loads have been distributed in the past, and ensure that there has been no discrepancies there. If you haven;t done this, and if you don;t have full access to this information, then it's hard to prove that anything is happening. For several years at my terminal, there was a daily load sheet that came out and was posted that showed what we all were doing, and it included our leased on owners. So you could match their loads with what everyone else was doing and see if there were any discrepancies in the distribution of loads.

And, you have to do this long term, not just over a short period of time like a few days. Because I was and am considering owning my own truck, I looked carefully at the load sheets to see if the dispatchers were making any differences in how they assigned work, and in my case, I was rarely able to find any differences. If anything, 2 of out 3 Owner Operators took some less lucrative loads, and when I asked them about it, it turned out that ws their preference due to the shorter mileage they preferred to run. The third guy ran the exact same schedule as anyone else, since he liked to run further than the other two.

Now, depending on how the payments are structured, whether by the mile or percentage, and whether or not there is a fuel surcharge, and how that is calculated, the company could be moving freight to one group or the other in an effort to make some control over fuel prices. if you have a crappy fuel surcharge program in place, then it might behoove you to move freight to O/O trucks when fuel is high, and to company truck when prices are lower. But, it would be hard to prove that this is being done intentionally.

As I say, it's a very hard issue to prove unless you have spent previous time investigating the way the dispatching has been done. Without that, it's merely a "he said, she said" type of thing. The option left after that is to go to a company that is all company drivers or all owner operators, then there is no conflict in that area.