Calling all ABF drivers

The driver that said 400 teams in Kansas City is prone to exaggeration, it could only be 40 so you cannot count on how many will be hired there. UPS will likely be around in 20 years. I don't know what will happen to ABF. I am hearing that they have 2 billion dollars of pension liability so it is not likely that someone would acquire them. I don't know if their financial situation will allow them to be around in 20 years. They are changing to a system where freight is loaded on to a sled which when filled is then pushed into a 53 foot trailer. Loading and unloading is supposed to be much more rapid then loading two 28 foot pups. Their current and rising star is UPack where you can have a cubes brought to your home to be loaded or have a 28 foot trailer spotted in front of your home where you load it then they move it across country to your new location to be unloaded. You pay by the foot so if there is space left over it is filled with freight for other customers.

 

Yeah, it definitely depends on your priorities. My priority became being home every day, so I had to leave. I would have had to start over from the bottom of the seniority list if I went local at ABF, so UPS was the natural choice.

 

The number of people we are supposed to be bringing into the Chicago area is so staggering, I question whether we will even be able to reach that number.

So 400 teams isn't out of the realm of conversation.

It's also a much smaller number than we are doing here in Chicago.

Where all these trucks will go is a mystery.

 

At most terminals when you go to the halfway point on the seniority list the start date is either 2014 or in a few cases 2015. Most of these new drivers chose to expose who they are on FACEBOOK. I don't have an account there so all of my information on twisted trucker is second hand. Virtually no one posting on truckingboards.com anymore. Not for ABF anyway.

 

The negativity on that site is a real turn off. There are some real psychos over there, and I almost have to wonder if it's not one person with a terrible personality disorder running all those accounts.

 

so you get 90% of what

 

I’m seeing ABF pull flatbed out of the Chesapeake, Va terminal. I guess it’s for the U-PACK account.

 

This site is much better because the moderators do a good job of shutting nonsense down.

I mean imagine non-union drivers going into a union thread on this site and posting long political diatribes about how they're not going to pay somebody to go to work. You can't imagine it, because it wouldn't happen. One inflammatory post like truckingboards regularly has, and they would be told to move it along.

I like this site because it's neutral. Plenty of people are pro-union, plenty of people are anti-union, and they all just hang out in their own groups. And for the most part, when they clash, it's kept respectful.