Can you make good $ driving a dump truck?

Well it's a stepping stone really. Would like to get on with state city or county. Would love to drive ODOT plow, but, have to crawl before I can run.

 

Well around here, city work needs contacts. Worse than the GD mafia. Once your in, your in for life....

 

If you wanna do state type work you mine as well start state and move up in the ranks. They usually hire from within or from who you know. But once your in the state your there and you plow from day one.

 

Around me they're grossing 700-900 weekly

That's hauling stone and sand, hourly

 

Around here in mn they start at $20hr to $25hr winter time you don't work and collect unemployment.

 

From spring of 2015 untill right before thanksgiving i drove a dump truck for a good size construction company, was paid hourly with davis bacon wages, and made an average of 1k a week after taxes and benefits was taken out. Not to bad i thought.

 

Well I will be starting in two weeks. I am going to give it my best and see where this goes. Sometimes you just have to take a chance. If nothing else, I will get some experience under my belt!

 

If you can hold on to that additude, you just might enjoy it.

 

I love it where I'm at. Pull a 38 foot aluminum enddump hauling pretty much everything except rip and take home anywhere from 650 on a bad week up to almost a grand on a good week here in Oklahoma. Every once in a great while I'll pull a bellydump but, ever since I got my new enddump, that's all I pull hauling to cement plants primarily. I'm outta town a lot but, atleast I get put up in motels, tho. Couldn't have made a better career change, I don't think. I don't think l will ever go otr again.

 

So I am one of those county government workers. It's a class 1 county and we have a lot of toys to play with. 10 wheel dumps, a couple of end dump trailers, low boys, tilt bed. Then there is the really fun stuff, we just bought 4 brand new John Deere motor graders 700 series with rippers and 6 wheel drive! We have back hoes, track loaders, a Komatsu W500 loader... You get the picture. Around here you can do whatever you can do.. We have a fleet of JD tractor mounted mowers too. Most of our dump trucks also double as plows and spreaders, we have them from one tons with duramax allison combinations up to International workstars. We take care of about 800 square miles with something like a hundred bridges. It all pays the same to one of us. We get hourly pay, starts at about $16 an hour and step raises up to $23, we always work the same hours so our paychecks are always the same. We get one personal day per month and that is allowed to accumulate up to 60, we get mad vacation time! We have 16 paid holidays a year plus your birthday... Yeah, working for the government is not bad, I am home every night by 4pm weekends off. So basically whether your here or not you get paid the same check. We haul lots of rock, base, shot, 2-1... We haul lots of black dirt and whatever is in the ditch. We also haul asphalt for our paver although we don't do complete overlays, we contract out all that stuff. Road district guys mostly do maintenance of roads, major repairs and construction is contracted out and one or two of us sits on those job sites and "inspects" and takes tickets. Having a CDL is of course required but that is where government regulation pretty much ends for us. We don't even have to maintain a DOT medical card.. Yeah, it's true, if you work for a political entity you don't have to take DOT physicals and you get a letter to take to the State DMV so that you can maintain your class A or B without it.. unrestricted. There are no HOS, no pre trip forms.. There aren't even tags on the trucks! Just a road district sticker.

Having said all that I can say it is true, you need to know somebody to get on. We do hire occasionally and most new hires come from somebodies recommendation. The State is different as they do take applications and have to comply with a bunch of diversity rules but a lot of the States around here are on hiring freeze. It's not easy getting on with MoDOT, those guys have it really good since some of them are union and that sets benefits for all of them. I also do some part time stuff on the side driving for some guy's I know who have their own trucks like many of you. During the season there is work, milling or stockpiling on Saturday, plenty of night work hauling asphalt for APAC. I totally get that while it looks sometimes like some of these guys are making bank they have to be good money managers because when it rains it pours and when the weather turns cold so do a lot of the better paying jobsites.. Don't be to proud to spend a few days in the quarry stockpiling for $70 an hour, kinda hard on the truck but it's keep the cash flowing. I know some who just won't fix their trucks unless the thing just won't move.. I had a guy ask me to night drive for him 3 nights a week. Old Freightliner with an old big cam Cummins and 13 spd.. the truck itself was junk though. I worked a night for him wondering why this truck was so hard to drive and then I discovered the frame cracks and broken spring mounts.. Did he fix it? No, just kept putting someone in it until one day I saw it sitting at his place with the cab smashed in where someone had rolled it.. He couldn't get experienced drivers so he put a kid in it, one of those fresh out of a driver mill road company who had never driven a dump truck and that was bad. So my advice is that if your going to have a successful business then keep your trucks in good repair.. That kids family now owns the guy with the junk trucks... Can't express enough how important that is. It is nice to have trucks, you aren't going to become wealthy until you figure out how to have several of them but as important as the trucks are the drivers you hire.. Don't be cheap and hire guys who know that taking care of what they are driving is what keeps them in a good paying job.. You guys be safe out there and take it easy on my roads