The truth about trucking....

Home every other day plus home 40 hours over the weekend is actually not bad. Werner would have been home less then 34 hours per week, for money that is no better if not worse then what I get driving a dump truck. I am home every night. Often times I actually don't do allot of driving. I have sat on the side of the road watching the construction crew take their sweet time before they even start loading me. Guess what, it's hourly.... I get paid, my boss is getting paid so as long as I am where I need to be, when I need to be there.... nobody cares

 

I have had days I drove 34 miles yet made a full days pay, sometimes $31 per hour on overtime rate. Allot of times I drive to the construction site and stay on or around the same site driving back and forth moving dirt. The other day I did 24 loads but only did 25 miles lol

 

I have to say, as a small business owner who works a lot harder than the average Joe to maintain...that the driving force behind my determination to succeed is simply the will to remain content. Content in the fact that I don't deal with mega carriers, company policies, dispatchers, etc.

I navigate my own waters and that's what creates my contentment. It's not for everyone. But I set out to do it this way, and I am content to remain until something forces us to change, like insurance premiums skyrocketing to the point of no return for example. It's not a business where you always have the luxury of raising your rates to meet expenses either unfortunately, like the plumber, electrician, and insurance companies, (those poor, poor people.) Try doing it, and most of the time the customer just uses the next one in line that didn't raise theirs, that will go under because of it...only to have more following the same path.

These occasional brokered loads I do to get to a location I need to for my direct customers for example. We dance around every time trying to get the best money for that load, sometimes playing games for a measly 100 bucks in my favor. They fail to understand how fuel costs in Pennsylvania, NJ and NY are all around $2.90/gallon (just estimating here,) and nobody seems to care about including a fuel surcharge over it on brokered loads. Let's not mention it can cost a couple hundred bucks in tolls to go to NJ and back to New England in a day's time...or over $100.00 to run out to Buffalo, NY on that thruway. Everything has a cost, but it's difficult to recoup it when negotiating these stagnant rates these days. That's why I enjoy my direct customers. I get the opportunity to include all those costs into my rate and they 9 times out of 10 understand and accept it. Not so with brokered freight. Those stinking rate confirmations that you sign away all your rights on are 100% to their advantage, nothing to the ones with all the burden. But we continue to press on, all in the name of being "content"...LOL. Sort of contradictory to the business model for success, but hey...it's what we do. 10 more years and I'll be drooling, so who cares.

 

I'm from California and there is no way I could get paid this well (for the work I'm doing) if I went back there. Trucking opened my eyes about America and I soon learned that I did not have to pay 10% state income tax and 10% sales tax and $300k for a "starter" home.
Personal economics has made me hate the socialists - they drove me from my home.

I would suggest to anyone not getting paid well or not keeping enough of what they earn to consider the color of your domicile state and maybe think about moving.

 

There is probably some "apples and oranges" confusion in this argument. When I said, "$28/hr" that was a simple division of paycheck by hours worked. For someone willing to work a lot of over-time on hourly pay, $24 nets a lot more than I ever get.

p.s. last two weeks have been slow so, almost $40/hr - doesn't put a single extra penny in my pocket but it cheers me up to do the math.

I met a heavy equipment operator who was getting 40/hr. He told me it took him about 12 years of union seniority to get up to that ceiling but that it was not uncommon for people who put the time in. Still, his work is spotty, he's not always busy and if the economy tanks, he will work very little.

Trucking generally pays less than heavy equipment but for most of the industry, the job security is very good and that aint nothing.

 

Your truckingtruth is truckinglies. All they do is to tell newbies to work for any mega with crapy pay and when the newbie disagree wit that,you all will be call him all bad names. With your so called Brett who a recruiter from swift. I think they sent you here to advertise for them. You be go back to your Truckinglies

 

keep telling newbies how great CRST, England, and the like are. Then after these people go there and find out what a load of crap you were spilling, you hide behind your computer board and screen name, so they can't strangle the life out of you for the BSadvise and phony dreams you sold.

 

I can drive a truck.
I drive.

 

Sure, take advice from some clown that putters around town driving a Swift daycab or that clown Brett that putters around the house planting flowers and vegetables in his yard.
Can find better advice from Mad Magazine.
You shouldn't come on here bashing this website or the members. You and your TruckingTruth mods probably come on TTR looking for advice to pass on to your members at that "other" website and plagarize the advice as your own. Why else would you be on here? You're trying to recruit new members for your favorite site and get information on trucking to pass on as your own advice.

 

Trucking is an employment of the last resort that leads nowhere (except maybe early death, it is not like you live much when you drive). Otherwise it is pretty much the same as any other dead end blue collar job, except maybe it is more demeaning than average. Sure, job security (of working the same kind of OTR for different companies) is good for as long as your record is good, but much unlike the rest of blue collar world you can become unemployable in as little as a fraction of second. Also, if you'll try to leave OTR for a local job or any job, you'll find really fast that your long OTR career and good record do not really count for much.