01/21/10 Update on good and bad at Marten

ya my dispatcher tells me she is going to swap me out to get me, home,,, then a few hrs later says, no one to do it, no trucks in the area.
I'll help to get them home as well, but of late, been getting way to many reqs to repower loads due to driver out of hrs.

I do this for two reasons, planners not on board yet with E logs, and there fore still dispatching on paper. And the for the driver accepting the load, when they are short on hours.
After hrs tried to get me to repower a load that was late by 5 hrs already, cause the driver ran out of hrs. I would of lost 300 miles, then most likely would of had to sit till the del appoinemnt could of been rescheduled on Monday.
alreadt a few days in Lardeo, this week, after sitting a day and a half in Irving for service.

 

Wow, this thread started out so positive for Marten that I was reconsidering my decision to join Swift but I think that after reading this and many many other reports on so many companies I have concluded one thing....they all seem to be about the same!!

I live in the Houston area and am a newbie to trucking (retired military) I decided to go with Swift as they have a terminal here in Houston and home time should be ok, wish it was 1 day home for every 5 out like Marten but I think its 1 home for every 6. Mileage should be ok. Looking to run the purple "comfort zone" in the west.....anyone have any thoughts or input? bad idea, good idea? go with Marten instead of Swift? any thoughts always appreciated. Thanks

 

Bradley, I hate to be Mr. Ambiguous here, but I'll say what's true.

Every potential job has to be balanced for how it fits with YOU the individual driver. We all can rant and rage till we're blue in the face, and you might spend ten years here and always wonder what we were on about.

The facts are these: I'm not dying at Marten. Neither am I getting rich. The shenanigans that are pulled (especially by night/weekend shift) are irksome and relatively regular. The miles are a little scarce, especially for OTR. The trucks (for the most part) are pretty good machines. I'm very pleased with the Pete 387 I'm in right now. I'm working my job because it's a job and I have to feed my family. I've got some tolerance left, but it's not going to be too long till I start looking around in real earnest (if things don't turn around rather soon).
I haven't had enough in the division I've just recently moved into, and that might make all the difference.

Likewise, the same, I would imagine, is true for Swift. It's got a rep for being huge and steamroller-ish to its drivers, but if some drivers there can find a niche job that meets their needs, it could be their best possible job.

To each driver, each job.

I have to think of it this way: while there are trends to each company, in reality, based on the combinations of FMs, drivers, team leads and load planners, there are as many iterations of Marten Transport Ltd. as there are drivers.

 

The ads runs on the Road Dog TRcuking ch. 147 sirius, and 171 xm. Even had heard it on Cnn.
But Dave Nemo has Tim Norlan the Director of Recruiting on, at least once a month. Last month when he was on, a bunch of people were calling in , and calling Tim onto the 'carpet' for various things that has happened in the past couple of years, ie: drivers treated like crap by managemnt, losing miles etc.

 

Are there any good dedicated accounts with good miles living in L.A.California that I can get one or is OTR better that the Western Regional. Thanks

 

Even though I seriously doubt you read any of this thread, I'll answer your question.

In LA there is the Intermodal fleet, which I believe is a salaried position, there's Western Regional, and there's OTR.

OTR and WR don't share a freight pool, and only occasionally ask each other for "help". What this means is that, if you live in S. Cal (as I did until recently) you'll only see the West Coast when you go home, and perhaps once or twice every quarter otherwise. This means you'll have a decent week outbound and a decent week inbound to the house, and probably bounce around scratching your head the rest of the time.

Beyond that, call a recruiter or take the time to read the thread.

 

One out of seven, that's the number of weeks Marten has gotten me the miles they advertised. I'm not a rookie driver. I have found, up to this point, this company is, in my case, a sham. The upper midwest regional account is garbage. I have been sitting, waiting and starving. I've had to tap my savings account to pay bills. My bills are ridiculously low. However, I do need to take home more than $350/wk, in order to survive. I've talked to Dan, Jason, Lyle and my dm about the low miles. Their answer is, yes, they're low, we'll look into it. Marten is about to become history for me. I've spent the last 24 hrs sitting, again. I have no faith in their leadership, management or integrity. I've read at least 25 articles about Randy Marten, the past growth of Marten Transport, talked with numerous veteran drivers for the company and have come to one conclusion. The new management at Marten is destroying the reputation the Marten family worked so hard to create. The current managers are obtuse, ignorant, arrogant and under qualified for the tasks at hand. They feel important because of the use of "buzz" words like feed back, synergy and team environment. They lack practical experience and have no ability to accept responsibility. They're breading a business environment of zero accountability on the stream lining of their organization, nor do they hold their subordinates accountable for their failings. The csr's are lazy and naive, the dm's obtuse, the supervisors deflective, the load planners underqualified and the drivers are the ones who pay for it financially. They have adopted a 'warm body' policy; meaning run the trucks enough to pay for the lease on them, plus a little more, then focus in other areas. A 36 hour window on a 300 mile run, with no dispatches between is lazy on the part of the load planners and negligent on the part of the dm's. It's been common place during my tenure.
I applaud you drivers that are making your miles and am genuinely happy for you. However, your complacency in the knowledge that far too many aren't and your lack of action over it, is selfish and demeans your sacrifice as a truck driver. I'm not saying you should give up your miles. I'm saying you should be fighting for those who aren't getting their fair share. We are the only people in the company paid on a production basis and the only representatives we have are ourselves and each other. If management can keep us from standing up, together, then they have secured their pay checks and diminished ours.
Marten, in this drivers opinion, has no concern for it's drivers. They play a political business game in which they make liable statements they have no genuine intention or the character, to support or enforce. Management only cares about management and their own careers. Drivers are a dime a dozen and easily replaced. Welcome to the lie!

 

Wow I just thought Marten was just going through same as the other company's goes through. I had always heard good things about Marten in the past, is there reputation as a good company gone down the tubes

 

This is an interesting take on the issue.
My response:
While ideal, this strategy is not viable. I happen to be one of the very drivers you speak of. I'm making more miles than most (but less than I'd like). The problem when it comes to standing up to the company for my coworkers is threefold.

1) I can't actually prove that the complaints my coworkers register with me are true or objective. While I empathize with them, and the vast number of drivers dissatisfied with miles and management indicates that it's practically impossible for all of them to be self-sabotaging or lazy, I cannot, on paper (or any other way) verify their situation.

2) The very issue you have with "obtuse" management pretty well torpedoes the idea of mutual driver support in the face of management. If I call up Chris or Dan and say, "Hey River's not getting enough miles to feed his kids." I guarantee that their response is either, "That's really not your problem" or "We can't control the freight, his FM, or his relationship with his FM" and the phone conversation is ended.

3) The very structure of the company (and most OTR trucking companies, for that matter) intrinsically hampers the communality of the driver corps. It's not necessarily a mustache twirling evil, but the way freight works, each drivers operates essentially alone in the corporate solar system, occasionally crossing paths with other objects orbiting the same massive center.

Really, there are two valid options for the drivers that are getting miles and frustrated with their employer for mistreating most of their workforce.

1) Leave the company, and thereby deprive the company of one more solid, bankable asset. Enough assets depart, and the corporate margins will suffer. This will definitely get everybody in the office to pay attention.

2) Organize. The entire point of labor unions is to, by consolidating negotiating power, leverage the workers against the financial strength of management and prevent them from misusing the inherent power imbalance of the employer/employee relationship. Unions have a bad rap, especially the Teamsters, what with names like Hoffa and sordid tales of corruption and sloth to be bandied about. All that taken into account, though, it remains a fact that labor unions are designed to curb exactly the kind of disregard for workers' welfare that you so stridently complain of.

However, part of the trouble with actually organizing a bunch of truck drivers can be found above in reason "3)" regarding the impracticality of well-cared-for drivers fighting for the peons.
Am I going to do nothing? No. I will ultimately do something. But this is real life and I have to consider my ethics in toto, and they include the ethics of providing for a family that is dear to me as well as the ethics of lending my labor to a company whose practices I might find unconscionable.

 

My husband has been with Marten for about 3 month now and is on electronic logging. The first three weeks he ran good miles, then he had a 1200 mile week. After that about every other week he got very little miles. Then after 2 months out he came home for 4 days and since he has gone back his average has been about 1500 miles per week. His highest paycheck has been $380.00 in the last 4 weeks. He has followed the regulations in letting the company know that he is not getting enough miles. They responded by giving him one good week on the 5th week out. This week they have gone back to the 200-300 mile garbage they were giving him before the good week. Furthermore, since he has not been there for 6 months they will charge his orientation pay and motel stay if he quits. He will have no choice but to quit if this continues for another 2 weeks because we are using up our savings rapidly to supplement the poor income. On top of this issue is the amount of per diem they have been taking out. They are so lopsided that I'am willing to hazard a guess that many of their drivers are going to owe Uncle Sam for 2010 taxes. Don't come and work for this company if ever they were a good company they surely are not now. My husband has been driving for about 20 years now and has never had an accident, has been a trainer, and never been late on a load because of driver fault.