FedEx Freight Diary (ala Russian Rabbit)

In my area, those are city drivers going to or from the rail yard.

 

Great read...thanks for sharing your experience and the dough you pulling in. The benefits seem to be pretty good. They even have tuition reimbursement. Am currently in school too and that would be awesome to have.

 

That's the thing though, what Fed Ex is doing as far as the way they run their different divisions actually works for them, take it from someone who contracted to FDX ground for 12 years, they have no intentions of changing anything , Ground makes them money, the fact that FDX doesn't have to invest in tractors and package vans because of the Ground contractor model puts them at a great advantage over UPS, in my opinion it's the FDX Express employees that have taken the biggest ####ing out of all the divisions because overall their pay has come no where near to that of a UPS employee, I assure you that hourly FDX Express tractor/trailer driver makes no where near what you make, which gets to my final point, FDX freight employees by far have the best deal going as far as pay and bennies compared to the other divisions, and you don't have to own a truck to do it, I didn't include FDX custom critical because I don't know that much about them, other than they are contractor model also.

 

I wouldn't doubt that one bit, in the small town we live near, we have UPS, FDX Express, and FDX Ground, all of them small facilities, UPS only hires for Christmas help, there is no way in hell I would ever go back to Ground, but prior to hiring on at Saia the Express facility had posted a fulltime position for a tractor trailer shuttle driver to do the airport run, would have been perfect, 10 mile commute, home every day, easy work, bennies, but then reality set in, 8 hr days and it started like at $16.50/$17.50 an hour, that right there was the deal breaker, I didn't bother applying.

 

Dude I completely forgot about that! You are like the 3rd or 4th person that has mentioned that now, I remember reading a couple post about that issue on Brown Cafe from FDX Express drivers, and this was years ago, all of them said the same thing, they get raises, but they never get caught up to top scale because of the way the pay system is set up at Express, it's messed over what they do to those guys.

 

I wasn’t suggesting we should all be straight hourly like Express, just that it would be nice for those shorter trips of under 50 miles and I wouldn’t feel the need to rush so much in order to make money.

But separately, I just think it’s interesting that they operate these companies with such vastly different strategies. Corporate logic would usually dictate that they take the most successful strategy and duplicate it. Although I guess if all of the OpCos are healthy and profitable, they don’t have a reason to change anything.