Drivers Representation - We are no longer VOICELESS

I don't need to look anything up.

Thankfully, no one is basing their life decisions off of your beliefs.

So if gold is an unreasonable metal to use to back at dollar when it is priced worldwide at over $900 an ounce, your solution is to unilaterally change the price to $20 an ounce. Who exactly would agree to that scheme?

As far as the purchasing power of gold being constant over time, you are wrong again.

 

Matthews,
The site will not allow me to send you a PM. Maybe you can send me one.

 

Two responses: A) I'm not asking them to do so. B) Likewise, I'm sure.

 

I agree there 100%...this would be a big help for the trucking industry if the customers rate would be on BOLs it would eliminate all pencil pushers and nobody would complain about price of freight. Not only it would eliminate bad brokers but it would also eliminate bad trucking companies that dont pass their fuel surcharge to leased o/o...it would make a big difference. Why cant we push for something like this to be done?? This seems simple enough..

 

I'm not saying this is why, but it could be one reason...

Shippers and receivers have an interesting relationship. Often the shipper isn't the manufacturer, it's a distributor. If all the receivers could get ahold of that kind of information, they'd bypass the distributors and buy direct. This would put a lot more people out of work.

This could still be hidden if the distributor took delivery before the receiver. The problem is that many distributors don't actually handle freight anymore. So because it is ordered, and shipped through a distributor by paper, but direct physically, transparency would leave distributors pricing open to be viewed by anyone who saw the BOL.

I know the system isn't perfect, and by no means is it right, but some of the opacity has a purpose.

That all being said... I rather like the transparency idea, it would stop triple-brokerages, increase the gross income for drivers, and not cause an additional expense to pass to the consumer!

Raising rates will only accomplish the same thing fuel surcharges has done to the consumer.. Increase the purchase price. Striking exclusively for higher rates, and lower fuel costs will only benefit drivers. Drivers will make more, but the cost of the products will remain the same, or go even higher. Everything balances out some-how. We need to do something that the general public can stand behind, so it has to benefit them as well.

We need to take an approach that attacks many problems at once. Focusing on one or two major issues will only cause the balances to shift in another way, and nothing will change.

The small "shutdowns" and "protests" did a lot of good. National attention is something that can be very good, or very bad. We got it to be 99% positive coverage. That's a complete one-eighty from the news we have received up to that point.

Keep them small, keep them positive, keep their attention. We have to do all of this in a way that doesn't get people fired, aggitated and violent, in so deep they lose everything, etc...

Small steps, but many of them... That's how this can work.

 

Ummm no it is not. If there is one person on the earth that uses no oil that would support my claim. Getting tired of one hundred and one different people telling me what we must have and I am afraid if any of them actually get listened to we are all in deep doo-doo. But alas I am a company driver with only nine years so what do I know.

 

Life can be sustained without oil, but we would live like cavemen.

MO Family Man, no American could go a week without using oil. You'd be walking everywhere and freezing in the winter.

But oil isn't just gas and heat, it's in all plastic and rubber products. Buy a hot dog at the ballgame and the plastic wrapper is oil based. Meet a hot chick at the bar and get lucky enough to bring her to a hotel room, you better give a quick thanks to ExxonMobile as you slide that condom on.

I didn't intend to get everyone so worked up about gold prices and currency values, my only point earlier was that we need less government regulation, not more.

While I agree about the transparency of the FSC, it should not be accomplished through regulation. Instead, O/O should stop asking brokers what a load pays and start telling them what it's going to cost to get the load hauled. If they don't want to pay, let the load sit at the dock. Don't haul cheap freight.

And calculate your FSC. It's amazing to me how many O/O don't know their fuel cost per mile. If fuel is $4/gal and you get 6 mpg, your fuel cost is .67 cpm. So how can you accept a load paying $1.30 a mile? And no it's not the brokers fault. If he has a load paying $2.50 a mile and he finds a truck to haul it for $1.30 plus .30 FSC, then the broker is a good businessman and the driver who hauled it is a bad businessman. It's not the role of government to help the O/O calculate his costs and run his business for him.

Government is the problem, not the solution.

 

Since you are obviously socking it away...care to share your secrets with the rest of us???