Pay Rates

Your 1st year as an OTR newbie driver will B your hardest. These OTR companies are exploiting U because they know no one is going to hire U except another OTR company. Concentrate on just doing the job safely and properly, & don't focus too much on how you're making lousy pay, while some other drivers (with 3 or more years driving experience) are doing so much better. The more U think about $$, the more U're just putting yourself into a state of emotional depression. Things will start looking better after U've put in at least 1 year driving experience, and U then begin to qualify for other better paying driving position.

Don't make the mistake of quitting from 1 OTR company to defect into another OTR company. You'll find that the next company is often just as bad, or worse than the last company. Pay & work conditions will not improve till U secure & land an hourly-paying local job. While most OTR drivers have to put in 100+ hours a week to earn $800 or better, an hourly-paid driver only has to put in 60 hours; and come home every night !! This is why the OTR portion of the trucking industry is having a serious driver turnover crisis; they can't compete with offering pay that's comparable to what local drivers make, without having to raise freight charges that they bill their clients. Improving pay and working conditions will likely double the rates customer already pay for trucking service.
:smt010
To address the driver shortage (turnover) issue, the federal government had instituted NAFTA to allow cheap, Mexican-domiciled trucking companies to do the job cheaper than American truckers. NAFTA had been temporarily halted, but I predict this is a temporary hold till after the election. If I was a shipper paying thousands of $$ a year in shipping cost, it only makes smart business sense to increase my profit margins by finding another way of getting the job done at a fraction of the cost. From a business accounting perspective, Mexican truckers means lower shipping cost.

So just concentrate on letting time go by day by day, till you've established your 1+ year of driving experience. Don't build up a job-hopping history of going from 1 trucking company to another; you're only prolonging your years of having to suffer and contend with OTR companies, because local hourly-paying employers have a policy of not hiring drivers with a job-hopping history. A lot of these OTR drivers want to quit and get a local job; but they've disqualified themselves after years of job-hopping. They didn't know local-driving employers don't hire job hoppers.

 

100 hours a week? So you're saying the majority of OTR drivers are driving illegal? And you make less money for OTR than a silly route? That's almost hard to believe.

I've spent a lot of time investigating becoming a truck driver, and what I see is most of the industry is a giant scam. Recruiters lie, companies (even schneider) don't uphold their promises and you don't make a decent living unless you're willing to run illegal, all the while unreasonable expectations are placed on you in a dangerous, unrespected job.

 

When people are content & happy in their job, they stay for 10+ years with the same company. The OTR portion of trucking has over 100% turnover rate; this is a strong clue something is not right. If U go to a grocery supermarket distribution warehouse & talk to their drivers, you find drivers who plan to stay until they retire in their 60s. Shippers/receivers can take up to 6 hrs to load/unload a trailer, so dock delays are a strong factor to drivers having to do 100+ hrs a week. On the logbook, dock delays are reported as line-2, sleeper berth time, when in fact, you're in the dock counting the freight, loading, or unloading.

 

No what hes saying is that theres a whole lot more to the job then just sitting there holding the steering wheel while the big truck goes bump bumpity bump bump down the road. Once you add up everything thats involved with the job its a lot more then what it looks like on the surface.

 

Actually, when he clarified, he said that you put dock delays where you're actually doing stuff as time in sleeper birth, which is infact driving illegal. You get 60 hours in a 7 day period of total on duty time. (This is supposed to include driving and other responsibilies.) I think that limit is incredibly low and unreasonable, but it's clear OTR have to drive illegal to make money.

 

Im gessin that you dont have a CDL do you? Has such dont try and quote HOS rules with only a halfa$$ed understanding of them.

 

My brother in law made $75,000 driving one of those little brown trucks on a "silly route". Nice benefit package too. And he sleeps in his own bed with his own wife every night.

Oh, by the way, he has never driven OTR.

 

http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/rules-regulations/truck/driver/hos/hos-faqs.asp#_Toc111021248

A driver may remain on duty for more than 14 hours; however, the driver of a property-carrying CMV cannot drive after the 14th hour after coming on duty. Also, the additional on-duty time will be counted toward the 60/70-hour on-duty limit.

So please explain Mr. Expert driver how I am mistaken.

 

So you managed to do a minor amount of reading and now you know more about HOS then the people who use them on a daily basis. Not to mention your high standards of work ethic's for whats legal or illegal in the industry. While having never worked a day of it your life. Theres a thing out there called the real world and what really happens you should try putting down World of Warcraft and check into it sometime. Heck that might even help that little work history issue that you have.

There is also a 7/80 rule it's not hard to get 80-100 hours into a truck with out driving over your limmit. You just have to know all of the rules. Not just four or five read about on a forum.

 

Nice little rant with no actual content disproving what I said. I wouldn't be caught dead playing WoW, kid. The bottom line is, you do have more experience than me, and you should know more about the HOS rules than me, but that doesn't mean you do. You would do this by PROVING it with a reference instead of appealing to my supposed ignorance. That's called a logical fallacy, kid.

You mean 7/8, right? I've even mentioned it on the forum. it's no new news to me. That's 70 hours in a 8 day period. You still can't get 100 hours on duty out of that. I read through the Ca CDL handbook, thankyou. I wouldn't be about to get all of my information from drivers on here because a lot of them are confused.

Edit: take a look at the definitions for on duty time. It appears you need to educate yourself.
http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/rules-regu...p?rule_toc=764&section=395.2&section_toc=1939