Swift Transportation Company, Inc. - Phoenix, Az.

You might want to check that link again as it does not appear to be working anymore. It looks like the site may be down from what I am able to tell.

 

Swift tried to contact me again. I of coarse told them where to stick it. They lied to me once and it will never happen again.

On the bright side , I quit my end dump driving job . The guy I was working for just was not interested in finding work. Too much sitting around. I quit him once before to go to Swift. What a mistake. But , I found me another end dump driving job that pays quite well. 150 to 200 a day. Works for me. And I am home every night and weekends. Now I do not know how that fairs in other states but here in Kansas it is good money. I like blowing by them Swift slow trucks on the interstate.

All is well that ends well. I am happy.

As for the guy who is trying to make a go at Swift... Good luck and I hope you make it work. Some people have.

 

As to how many drivers Swift has- at last count I had , in October, it was about 18,000 trucks. So figure from there the amount that may have 2 drivers. Swift also told me that they have about 1 driver killed every week. 8 people, drivers and others were killed in Swift accidents the week before I went to orientation. Very bad training. One would be well advised to get training at an accredited school first and then drive for Swift. They do not have near enough training , driving , before they put you to team driving in the big cities and mountains and snow etc... That trainer sleeping in the back is not teaching you jack. That is one reason I would not drive for them after orientation.

 

There are two reasons to avoid SwiftQuit:

1. This outfit uses those with very little experience to train green drivers. At the Quit, one can be a "trainer" with as little as 6 months' experience. I believe they call these guys "mentors", probably to avoid negative press and dodge lawsuits.

2. Swift has more or less accepted its role as "training company", which means they look at any newbie coming in as somebody who won't be staying very long. Those who aren't going to be staying on long are people who can be abused. It's a whirlpool/viscious circle. This is the foremost reason for turnover (which is outrageous) at SwiftCo. And any company that can't keep its drivers for longer than about 6-9 months on average is an outfit you want no part of. Am I wrong? Nope.

 

Alright, I need to clear up the confusion. You know, there may have been quite a few of you "drivers" who had a bad experience with your trainer sitting in or sleeping in the sleeper berth, not teaching a darn thing. Maybe you had that owner/operator trainer who made you do all the driving to make those big paychecks. You know there are a lot of bad trainers and Swift is starting to do what they can to weed them all out. I had an owner/operator for a trainer and let me tell you something. He was never sleeping when I was driving and he preferred to do all the driving....shoot, it was his truck to begin with. I know if I were an owner and training, I would be doing all the driving as well. Why would I want a newbie ruining my truck. If anyone is going to ruin my truck it better be me since I am the one paying the maintenance. There are good trainers and bad. It just takes time to weed out the bad and you all know that. I still find it funny that the only thing former Swift drivers have to say are all the negative experiences they had...what about all the positive?

 

I came into the company with previous experience and all this did was treat me like horse manure. When I started with the company I was hoping that I would be allowed to be a trainer for the company, but that did not happen.

The company sent me out with one of their owner/Op trainers for about a week and this guy had less experience than I did. I tried to tell him that we were both supposed to log on each of our home terminals time, but he did not listen to me and told me that if I did not do it his way then he would dump me off in the middle of BF Egypt.

I complained to the terminal manager and to my Driver manager about it, but neither one of them seemed to really care and as a result of this trainer and both of the managers I ended up getting logbook violations and had to take a stupid logbook class and that was just the begining of things after that things just seemed to go down hill from there.

Much of the time I was sitting waiting for them to give me a load going somewhere and whenever I tried to ask them questions about policy or procedure they just clammed right up and would not talk to me.

I even had several times in which I turned in my logs and my bills of lading and they came back and said that they never received them and that was after I had turned them in at the designated drop box that they have at each terminal for your trip packs and as a result I ended up having to redo my logs and some of the bills of lading several times and that is not counting the times in which I ran loads for Walmart out of the Los Lunas Terminal.

The loads were late in being ready and my dispatch in Albuquerque never told me that my running late messages would not go to the Los Lunas Swift Terminal in which I was doing the Walmart loads for and as a result they gave me service failures for that even after I submitted my running late macros.

They also gave me a service failure for telling them that I could not do a pre-planned load on time because I was out of my 11 and that is against the FMCSR.

I don't know about you but Swift really seems to take the cake when it comes to being stupid. I have even had customers complain to me because of loads that they assigned to me that were already late to begin with. One load that they had me pick up and deliver was not available to me until later that day and the load was supposed to have been delivered early that morning.

As you can tell that is obviously a company problem and not something that I could have done anything about.

 

SWIFT Smoking While I Fuel Truck

 

Not teaching a darn thing is what you'd be doin', Mario Martinez. I had that problem at my expensive mill. Four guys. One truck. One steering wheel. 75% of my in-truck, on-the-road hours were spent watching somebody else drive.

I'd spend one shift with a trainer who wants to drive all the time. I could then be found at some truck stop fuel island looking for a ride back home.

 

As of just a few days ago Swift has alittle over 15,000 trucks..They are down sizing due to lack there of whatever..And to the ones who think that previous drivers from swift only state the negative things that's not totally true. The compnay has alot of positive things about them also the only thing is that sometimes the negative outweighs the positive. It doesn't mean it's a bad company all together.

 

There must be downsizing going on as they are not accepting any rehires at this time, according to recruiting.