Can my boss tell me to come back to work before my 10 hrs off? Looking for clarification.

Company suspension means nothing for hos. To be 100 percent legal you should go on duty for your meeting yesterday (if you had one) but otherwise just off duty.

 

I am not reading through all of this, but if you are local, you are to log on duty until you return to the place where you started work. If you are local, you can use the 16 hour rule once every 7 days but it does not extend your 11 of driving. It only extends the window in which you can drive. You can work unlimited hours, you can not drive until you have had a 10 hour break.

"If you usually come back to your work-reporting location and go home at the end of your workday, you might be able to use the 16-hour short-haul exception. This exception allows you to extend the 14-consecutive-hour driving window to 16 hours once every 7 consecutive days. In order to use this exception, you must do the following: • You must return to your work reporting location that day, as well as for your last 5 duty tours. A duty tour is the period of time from when you come to work to when you leave work. It is your “workday,” the time between your off-duty periods of at least 10 consecutive hours. • You must be released from duty within 16 hours after coming on duty. • You must only use this exception once every 7 consecutive days (unless you took 34 consecutive hours off to restart a 7/8-day period)."

Page 9. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/sites/fmcsa.dot.gov/files/docs/Drivers Guide to HOS 2015_508.pdf

 

It's from when you go off duty not stop driving. They can require you to be on duty 24/7 for the next month but you can't drive until you have a 34 in that case since will be way over your 70. If you punch a clock you are off duty once you clock out. Retaliation for HOS compliance can cost them tens of thousands. They likely well understand that. If you allow them to bully you they don't worry about. Stand your ground and they start worrying. Yeah, they can fire you but get a good lawyer and you'll be richer for the experience. Some drivers actually bait companies into giving them cause for a lawsuit. So companies either know the rules extremely well or pay big settlements then learn. They will document nothing nor do anything requiring documentation such as desciplinary actions if they are trying to bully you into falsifying logs. Asking them to put it in writing is a good way to learn what they can and can't actually demand of you. If they won't put it in writing you can bet it's illegal, if they will it's likely legal and refusing will get you fired.

 

Quite frankly, Im surprised that your dock time is not counted as part of your 14? Im sure it would be as far as D.O.T. would be concerned, even if your dock time was with another company. Their rules are specific: You cannot drive after being "on duty" 14 hours. If you are working, you are "on duty". I was also told by a D.O.T. Officer in Ohio that if you are sitting at the controls of a tractor trailer, you are considered "On Duty" by D.O.T., whether you are driving or not. They used to bust a lot of drivers in that rest area below Toledo for that very thing. (Drivers sleeping in their seats)

 

You cannot take a moment to read this thread with it's errors, flaws and issues. But you hit the OP with 23 pages that he might not be bothered to read either?

I am teasing. Gently.

The 16 hour exemption I used maybe twice in my entire life. The last time I had a dispatcher puff up and sprout some BS about having the authority to grant me a 16 exemption I quit that company pretty much on the spot. Any company that uses it as a crutch will simply burn the 70 hour work week at least half a day faster leading to a longer period of time until the recap allows a new 70 hour work week to start.

The DOT cannot be bothered to examine every truck hooked into every dock every minute of the day across the USA. However it is not difficult to do once they chip and transponder every dock in use coast to coast for enforcement purposes. If this tractor trailer spent this much time in say a Nestle Dock waiting to load and loading it will be all there in a big data base somewhere 20 years from now available to check against ELD logging for enforcement if necessary for falsifying onduty time.

Currently shippers and receivers do not value a professional driver's time at all. It's meaningless to them. And opens the driver to being abused in so many ways.

The best solution is to dispose of such abusive accounts and run for those who will drop and hook you in 15 minutes or less with a loaded trailer ready to go when you get there. Or in my case of valuable medicines, unload asap on arrival. No effing about wasting anyone's time. The people who are waiting in the hospital might not have any tomorrows at all if they don't get some of that medicine today.

 

I read through this whole thing and shrugged. If they mistreat you get a new boss. Remember what my ol daddy used to say though: changing jobs is just changing bads. Its just a matter of what matters to you.

 

The regs were changed in 2012 to allow OFF DUTY logging while sitting in a PARKED commercial vehicle. If the vehicle is parked, there is no control for the driver to be in charge of even sitting at the controls; the vehicle is parked.

They did this to close an endless loop wherein daycab drivers wouldn't have been able to complete a 30 minute break inside the truck since they have no sleeper and would have to stand outside in the rain/snow/heat/weather to get their rest break.

 

My apologies sir. (I tease I tease)

Never expected anyone to read every page. I simply backed up where I got my information. I even gave a single page number so as not to have the reader go through every page if they didn't want to.