Werner or cr England

While what you have posted is eye opening, can you be more specific about what makes CR England such a lousy choice for newbies? Frankly, I think that Prime sucks for just turning people away like that, but it's their job I guess. I would think that if you were able to go L/P with CR, at least you would get the miles??

 

For a little while, yes. If you run the numbers (and I did - I set up spreadsheets for this purpose), you'll find that, as a solo lease operator, assuming that you get the miles to stay in business, you can only just barely do so. Worse, even at the $0.23/mile that they paid company drivers, you still made more money as an employee, than as a lease. The only way that the numbers worked, was if you ran team - and got the miles to justify doing so. They don't want you to run team; they want you to train - which pays even better, since you pay very little to the student for their miles. In my experience, you also got more miles dispatched, as a trainer, than in any other configuration.

Until you don't. They state it clearly, in the lease contract; they do not guarantee that you'll get the freight that you need, to pay your lease. But they gloss over that, when they talk to you, as though it were only a legal disclaimer that applies to people who don't want to work.

In a class of about 130, about a dozen of us made it to becoming solo drivers. Two lasted long enough to become trainers. The other guy leased a truck with 8000 miles on it, that turned out to have electrical system problems which eventually bankrupted him. Full-on bankruptcy court. I told him that if it only had 8000 miles on it, you had to wonder what was wrong with it, but he rightly pointed our that we were totally unqualified to evaluate the running condition of the trucks, and it was equally possible that any of them could be lemons. You get warrantee repairs, for a while, when you first sign the lease, but you are still expected to make your lease payments, your bills at home don't stop, and you still need to eat, now and then. You can't do any of that if your truck is constantly in the shop, and tow truck companies also want to be paid. That's not covered by your warrantee, and the towing service contract that they sell you, never covers the full cost of a tow, in the real world.

They pulled my freight, two months before my short-term lease was up. Thankfully, I owned my home outright, and so I just drove the truck home, parked, and waited for a load. They sent a guy to come and take the truck in the middle of the night. Had I stayed where they left me, when they stopped sending freight, I would have had eight duffle bags of accumulated crap, 500 miles from home, with nowhere to stay and no way home.

When I was a trainee, they were (as they ever are) short on trainers. They assigned me and another guy from my class, to the same trainer, on the same truck. That's right; two students - three bodies - on one truck. We both got off that truck when he parked it in an out-of-business truck stop parking lot in 100+ degree heat, and took the keys so we couldn't idle, or move to a better location. We spent three days sweating and starving in that truck, with no showers, food, or liquids, before I made bus reservations on my credit card, to get us both back to a terminal. This was not before the trainer became so ill that he could not drive. I took over running the truck, and we ran over 9000 miles for him, that week. He repaid the favor by giving us both his sickness.

CR England never reimbursed me for the bus tickets, and since the trainer never turned in our evaluations, we did not get credit for the training time, nor paid for our miles. They split me and the other trainee up, when we suggested that we would like to just team, since we were managing so well despite our trainer, together.

The next trainer I went out with, had 8 months of driving experience. I had a year, with Werner, and then a stint working for the Federal DoT in a non-driving role. The first thing he did, was roll out of Hershey with a load that was 6000 pounds overweight, and skip the scale at the TA, ten miles from the shipper. I questioned this, and he told me that he knew his truck, and the load was fine. He drove right up to the first DoT scale along our route, that was open, and then made me drive. I got the ticket, at the scale, not the trainer, because as a licensed CDL driver, I'm supposed to know better - but of course, in practice, you can't tell a man how to run his own truck. That's a good way to wind up on the side of the road with your crap, and fired. All he has to do, is tell the training manager that you skipped out of the truck without telling him, and all your stuff was gone. Then it's "he said, she said". The fine was over $500, and had to be paid on the spot, or I was headed to jail. The load also had to be adjusted, or we were going to be put out of service. He couldn't find a way to adjust the tandems, without being overweight on the steers, so he asked me what we should do. I told him that he was going to have to adjust the fifth wheel, thinking that this was some kind of test - that he could not possibly not know this. Then he asked me how to adjust the fifth wheel. I lost it. The fifth wheel slide lock is a switch in the middle of the dash console, at about chest level, next to the switches for the drive tandem air bags, and the interaxle differential. How long does a guy drive a tractor, looking at these switches, before he starts to wonder what they do?

That's just some of training. It doesn't get into the pay problems, their sleep apnea scam, the two days of hometown I was able to get in eight months... I could go on and on, but there just isn't room or time in the day.

Do yourself a favor, and take my advice. Failing that, ask around. The folks at CR England will tell you that the only drivers with time to talk bad about them are the drivers that aren't rolling. But there are also the ones that no longer work there, and those who do, but aren't getting the miles. Read this and other forums. Check out CR England in the news. They are in the midst of at least dozens of class-action lawsuits (I'm in one of the classes), and some have been going on for decades, while they delay and refile and delay some more, in court, to avoid paying the judgements against them.

They're a terrible company to work for. If you don't have a CDL, yet, and you can't afford a good school, they're worth a desperate, last ditch try, but get out as fast as you possibly can, even if it means that you have to pay them back for the terrible training that they gave you. The longer you stay, the worse it gets, and the deeper they dig their hooks into you.

 

I don't have an opinion on which is better or worse, but as far as accuracy goes.. England basically has no leasers anymore. They're almost exclusively company drivers now.

 

Its about time.I don't know of any drivers that succeeded in the lease program.

 

I'm pretty sure that if there was any chance at all of a driver doing so, they would find a way to disqualify that driver. One favorite way was to nitpick his logs. With me, they kept telling me that I had to log on-duty time for training a trainee that they had left on my truck, after they removed me from the training program. Had I logged the on-duty time for training, they would have disqualified me for training, when I was no longer qualified to do so.

For most people, they just pulled on the freight string, until the driver financially unravelled. For others, they would find an excuse to medically disqualify them - or make them buy a $12,000 sleep machine. Others would bring their truck in for periodic maintenance, and be put out of service and bankrupted in the shop.

People were not permitted to succeed at a lease.

 

Goes to show England really doesn't need extra drivers .

 

Do you have any knowledge if Werner currently is in need of drivers? Recruiters lie..

 

Werner is always hiring drivers.They have orientation I think twice a week.

 

They are always in-processing new students. Like CR England, they don't really need them, but they get Federal grant money for "training", so they keep bringing people in.

Keep your head down and your mouth shut, during orientation, if you want to do well, there. It's best if they never learn your name. Try not to stay there much more than a year; they need the space for new students, so the pressure to leave hinges at around that point. Pick your account carefully - don't just blindly accept the first thing that they offer to you - or stay on 48-state. Avoid the Sears account...

 

Appreciate the advice. They came to my CDL school and the recruiter was really pushing the dedicated Dollar Store/Dollar General/Family Dollar account. Along the lines of "here is what you will get over the road, but HERE is what you will get if you go dedicated AND we JUST MIGHT be able to get you home twice a week too!". Definitely a sales pitch but I understand that is there job and all. Not to hijack the OP's thread here or nothing but I think that if I was to choose Werner, it would be OTR vs. Dedicated. Just to get the experience down. Dry van, reefer is fine versus flatbed my taste.