Beep Beep Roadrunner

Yeah I thought since I'm technically still under the old contract (until 123114) I would be able to conduct business as usual. I'm wondering if that would fall under breach of contract for them to change such an important benefit while drivers are still under the old contract.

 

I have been thinking about it all day long (won't know for sure til the new year) but I'm spitballing that we can still look up our own loads on the load boards and call the brokers then have them fax/email the load confirmations to the RR freight agents that way rather than the Backhaul department directly as before. I just don't think the RR agents will follow through because we would then know what the load truly pays and limit the agent to a fair 10% cut and RR get their little 8-12% cut off the top too.

I'm not happy with having to work with RR agents for outside freight and I know every other RR owner I talk to isn't happy about it either. I think the agents caused this whole problem to begin with by peeling too much money off the rates for themselves thereby causing RR owner ops to quit using them and book their own freight to their own trucks.


Well now that the RR agents will have a captive group and a second chance I hope they can be more fair in the future. I'm going to give the agents a second chance. I simply won't haul a cheap load for them anymore though. Most of my freight is T2T which I love but occasionaly get caught out at a customer about 600 miles from the nearest RR Terminal. At 12,000 miles a month I can justify moving 1200 miles deadhead to get back in lanes if they want to keep offering that sub $1.5 freight.

I'm going to drop the $76 per month cargo insurance that gets the 92% rate on outside freight. My rate will drop to 88% on those outside loads further reinforcing my tough stance on higher rates. You don't pay? I don't play.

So in other news, we were up in the Nashville terminal, I arrived and dropped the trailer and went to bed. Somebody else docks the trailer then they load it. That's all about what I love about this job. Typically show 1/2 an hour a day between pretrip and fuel on line 4 or maybe another 15 minutes dropping the trailer on the yards, and the rest of the 70 can be dedicated to line 3 production driving. If I could compare it to a welding job, it would be like if you had a helper move and reload your buzz box all day for you and precut and fit all your work so all you ever had to do was put your hood down and pull the trigger on the wire feed all day. That's the way it is on big jobs because the good welders are way too valuable to be wasting time doing anything other than hood down time.

So to recap we picked up in Nashville 1st stop Meridian ID then on to Portland OR.

 

Well it means when we get outside the T2T lanes like I was in New Orleans recently, I would not be able to book my own load out, but would have to call a RR freight agent to book a load for me. The problem I and others have had with that is that these agents are way too cheap so we all went to a 'book it yourself' route. Evidently RR or the agents figured they were losing potential % revenue when owners were booking their own freight. It's kind of a double slap in the face too because they did this before the new contract went into effect plus when we do sign the new contract we are locked into the old T2T rates for the first quarter. It would not surprise me if a bunch of lease ops turned their trucks in soon.

 

So I got my truck 45 months ago and just turned over the 400,000th mile since I have had it.

Yeah, don't judge.....lol