If Gordon pays detention after 1 hour... will your company follow?

I see a lot of customers balking and taking their business elsewhere. We charge detention after 2 hrs, unless it's a driver assist, then there is no free time. All it takes is one screwup at the customer and that 1hr is gone. Also, how are they counting that 1 hr? Is it from when the trailer bumps the dock? From when the driver actually arrives at the customer? If it's from the former, ok, that's possible, maybe 40% of the time. If it's the latter, watched a Gordon driver this morning that took 20 minutes to get backed into a dock. Took the customer 45 minutes to unload him. Seems to me, if that's the case, they better train their drivers to be 2 minute backers.

 

Remember Gordon is paying after an hour, not necessarily the customer.

I view this as a retention/recruiting ploy. I am confident most of Gordon's live load/unload customers would laugh them out of the room if they tried to put it in the contract.

I am pretty sure one of the other larger carriers has already been advertising "paid detention after one hour" on XM.

 

Went to Gordon's payroll calculator. Gettin' $8500 more per year with K&B. Salary is the way to go; now, long waits are fine with me and low miles are even better. Goes to show these companies really can afford to pay us more. It's good to see things improving.

 

Shouldn't we all be hourly anyway?

 

No! I am an owner op. I haul freight for a contracted amount. If the amount does not cover all my costs including driver I turn the load down. I turn down loads because the customer at either (or both) end delays the truck too much which makes the $/day too low to pay for the truck and driver.

Hourly may work for local stuff but not so much for OTR long haul. If anything monthly or weekly salary with performance bonuses would be most appropriate.

Looking deeper @ detention time: it usually pays less per hour than drive time. Even @ 0.35/mile and 60 mph average you are making $21 per hour while driving. A couple of years back GTI was paying $14 for detention. I doubt that number has changed much.

The low pay rates that also need to be addressed includes per stop and layover pay. Last I heard extra stops were paying $25. Ok with the 1 hour detention pay that makes sense except for the first and last stop. Layover was $150? = less than a day's drive pay. If you are not grossing $200 or more per day as a company driver something is wrong.

 

Only thing with salary is they won't want to work ... Do the drivers on salary still accomplish approximately the same amount of work as compared to drivers on cpm + accessorials?

 

If you don't perform due to your own actions then I would think the company would go through a PIP, and if you still didn't improve you'd be searching for new opportunities.

 

I could be wrong, but I'm betting that if the company is paying it, the customer is paying them. And likely at a higher rate than they are passing on to the driver. I'm also betting that they won't mind losing the customers who "laugh them out of the office" over this, as those are the customers that usually end up costing the company more money than they are worth.

 

I've been hourly local for seven weeks now with my carrier, and neither my rate of work nor my quality of work has diminished. But I do see other drivers doing the same job as myself who have slowed down to 'work the clock'. So I would guess it depends upon the individual. There are still a few of us who are grateful to have a good carrier to work for, and repay them by trying a bit harder.[emoji2]

 

Next time you're at the dmv, imagine how different your experience would be if workers there were paid by the customer served...