Heartland Express (formerly Interstate Distributer Co.)

The big problems are crazy micromanagement and detention at their customers. The avg detention was 3hrs at pu and 4hrs at del. with the 3 worst customers taking 8hrs to ld or unld after appt time. All my loads had appts and on time pu& del. Safety shut me down 10hrs because a mall customer had me drop trl in dock and drive 50yds to park during my 10hr break and it tripped e-logs for 2min..
When your avg miles per load is 12hrs of drive time and 7hrs det. You can imagine I had a lot of cases when I would run out of hrs on cust docks or had to find street parking outside the fence line.
I had a great FM who always got me mult loads. But the customers or wknd ld planner would screw things up.
They are constantly bugging you about idling, speed and safety msgs daily. Or telling you who they fired and why. Since 91 I have one fender bender, no tickets since 08 and 0 CSA points.
I agreed to 14/3 schedule and got 14/2. The payroll is very hard to figure out because they are based in Wa State and pay log hrs hourly and everything else in bonuses to equal your cpm. I made 45cpm (the avg is .42) but was paid $11 per hr and the rest in bonuses. The hourly pay was on a different scdl then the bonus pay and the DH miles on your dispatch is added to the previous load, not the load your on. In 6 months I had 3 trucks and 2 weeks shop time due to major truck issues. They would have you do local work before and after going home almost every time I went home. I would put a return pta of 6am and they would give me a local Costco or Supervalue ld that del at 5 or 6 am. Because of local work and cust delays almost every load had to be run to 14hr limit to deliver on schedule.
Ran on the temp controled board for 6 mos and could take no more. I was putting in 70hrs week not counting dock time because most pu are on backroads out in the sticks at packing houses and del during commute times in The big city.
Office crew great -shop crew terrible- hometime not as agreed too but avg. And Heartland is stripping down the new trucks and craming all the equipment into yds that are to small to handle it.
They closed 4 terminals on west coast alone to combine assets. So you have GTI/ IDC and Heartland all mixed together.
.Pay is not my issue anymore. It is all about working conditions. If your a runner with no reason to go home and don't mind a computer full of micromanagement, IDC is not the worst but you will work 12hr days 25 days a mo and get $17hr if you get the .42cpm avg for a refer hauler.. I did the math, Good Luck!

 

I know. The yards are a real cluster with 3 company 's crammed into a 1 company yard. I signed up for IDC to eventually sign my truck onto the Contractor board in 6mos and then they got sold to Heartless who pays Owners cpm, not % like IDC.

 

Left in September.

 

I left before Heartland fully took over. All my work was performed under IDC. I wanted to IC after 6 mos at IDC. Heartland pays CPM not % and is not self dispatched like IDC. IDC would not let me self dispatch till I had 6 mos in. They got sold 3 mos after I started but nothing was clear till last month. So my opinion is strictly on the co driver side. You can imagine what the IDC contractor fleet is going through . I'm glad this happened before I got in. The cpm is to low for regional work.