IWX Motor Freight

Whenever I write this in the "Why did you leave?" box in the IWX section on job apps it always makes me laugh: "No matter how much seniority, if you miss IWX's monthly mileage minimum just once, they demote you and take away your benefits."

 

I was only there for three weeks in February 2013. The longer I drove for them the more the policy bugged me. I really disliked having it hanging over my head. It didn't seem right that my benefits were placed in the hands of dispatch.

An unlikely set of events occurred one morning that prompted me to resign sooner than anticipated. After parking overnight at Galaxy Hamburgers in Ontario CA, unaware of their parking policy, I walked over to the Starbucks on Vineyard Avenue early in the morning. I used to drive for Marten back when they had a terminal on Francis Street, so was used to doing this walk...good exercise, good coffee, what's not to like?

Well, the exercise turned into a sprint when I received a phone call at Starbucks saying a tow company was hooking up to my truck at Galaxy. Luckily, another IWX driver happened to be parked a few spaces away and phoned the company. I thankfully got there in time to plead with the tow guy to let me just pay for the tow without them actually towing it. He got on the horn with his boss, who agreed to leave the truck there and only charge me something like $200. (I like to call it my $200 burrito.)

While I was running and talking on the phone at the same time, I managed to utter the words, "I don't think this is working out very well, so I'm resigning as soon as I get back to Kingman."

They slapped me with a "No" in the "Would you rehire?" field of my DAC, which is understandable based on the above sequence of events, but partly because of that, I like to occasionally post here why I quit. It wasn't because of that tow situation, it was because of that policy.

 

There were other things that were weird too. Only two of us went through orientation that week. The owner Steve Coulter was among the presenters. Nothing weird about that, except he never introduced himself...when we found out a few hours later who he was, then it seemed a little weird to us. I think his background is in engineering, which sort of gives him a pass (engineers tend not to be very extroverted), but still, that he deliberately withheld his identity from us just didn't sit right with me.

Another weird thing was at one point during the orientation the safety guy went on a major rant about accident lawyers, calling them some really bad names. The company had recently had some bad luck with accidents and came extremely close to going out of business during the recession, so I guess everyone there was really sensitive about court cases at the time, but still, ranting about lawyers like that in a company orientation was totally unprofessional and out of place.

Yet another weird thing was they didn't want drivers ever changing lanes. Our mission was to get into the right lane and stay there until we exited.

As the above post by Powder Joints indicates, the company somehow manages to be well-liked by a lot of drivers. I just don't happen to be one of them.

On the plus side, IWX takes especially good care of its equipment, and they give drivers the option to have all of their pay be in the form of earned income (0% per diem).