Abilene Motor Express....A New Place To Call Home

Well... the job title doesn't include the term "mechanic" now does it? XD

 

Certainly doesn't, also can't have "Mechanics" driving trucks to get them into the shop bay or to do a road test after repairs because, well, they are not "drivers".

 

I get it, my point is guys on here are saying the driver should be fired, You just said and I agree it's your load it's your job. If you took a load and met somebody half way you would want to be paid there's no difference.

 

All of that is part of a pretrip

 

Perfectly reasonable, the key thing is that you are executing part of your job function by ensuring that load is legal and not shirking that responsibility by leaving an overloaded trailer for someone else. If that takes longer than 2 hours then part of our pay/compensation is detention pay so collect it by all means if you can get it.

Now, can you expect detention pay for a load you didn't pick up from a shipper?. I am not seeing it, not saying you can't put in for and receive it, just that it falls outside the detention parameters set forth by *this* company.

 

And a pretrip is part of a driver's job...as is ensuring their load is legal weight.

That isn't a dig at you. It's directed at those drivers who say that reworking a load is "unpaid work".

 

A pretrip is required by law just like legal weights are, my point is that drivers leave the problem for the next guy because they don't get paid for it, I can't tell you the number of times I've seen pictures or somebody #####ing that the previous driver left a trailer with a flat or lights that don't work, a person is not very motivated to spend time fixing a problem when they don't get paid and they can leave it for the next guy.

 

This whole subthread exists because you and I and other people agree that a driver who scaled a trailer, saw that it was overweight, and left it to be someone else's problem anyways, didn't do their job. You would like to see that driver held accountable for not doing their job.

I'm just extending that philosophy to the shipper as well. Why does the shipper get a free pass for all of this? Why are you willing to hold the other driver's feet to the fire for not doing their job but won't hold the shipper to the same standard? They also didn't do their job. But in their case, if I put in for detention, Abilene will try to hold them accountable by passing along the detention charges. So I actually have some leverage over them that I don't have over the other driver.

Maybe Abilene won't get it. As I understand it, shippers can refuse to pay those charges. Maybe I won't get it. Abilene might not agree with me (though they have paid me for it in the past). But that's no reason not to at least try to hold the shipper accountable for wasting hours of my time because they couldn't be bothered to properly load a trailer.

Just seems weird to me that the ONLY person at fault in our scenario is the driver who scaled the load but didn't get it re-worked. Like that overweight load just magically appeared out of thin air.

 

I don't hold only the driver responsible. I mentioned in a previous post that if this is common occurrence the company bears some of the blame for not ensuring their employees do what they were hired to do.

A burglar is to blame for a string of house break ins. If the police knew the burglar was committing these crimes but did nothing about it, then they also bear some of the responsibility.

Sure the shipper is ultimately at fault, they are the cause of this whole overweight mess. However until we are in a position where there are more loads than trucks they aren't going to care as there are no comebacks. Same thing with the driver who knows the company won't penalize him for dropping overweight trailers.

 

The driver that dropped it,is the same example of driver's that drop trailer's on the yard with burnt out marker lights,and bad tires.

Than won't write it up,the hey not my problem attitude.