do all ltl companies make you work the dock before you become a driver?

You wont necessarily have to be a dockworker before becoming a driver if thats what you mean. BUT every LTL company I know of requires drivers to work the dock at times. Sometimes just for an hour in the morning to get your route ready, sometimes everyday for 6 months when it is slow.

Either way, it is a better life than OTR.

(LTL driver)

 

I worked for Roadway(YRC now). And I work for ABF now. At both places you apply for either dock or road. I've never worked the dock at either place. I applied for road only.


Conservative to the Bone.

 

When I worked for Central Transport years ago, I rarely if ever worked the dock.

 

I know 3 CT drivers in Indy, they all tell me that you have to unload your own trailers when you get back to the yard.

I guess all terminals do things different.

 

Must be because as far as I can tell, the dock workers do the loading/unloading at the CT terminal in El Paso. I've picked up there before.

 

In my outdated experience, larger union terminals would not allow drivers on the dock. Small town union terminals require everyone to work the dock including terminal manager and dispatcher.

If you load your own trailer for LTL delivery, at least you know the order of the stops and each shipment will be together. I mean, a dock worker will not throw a small box to the nose of the trailer when the rest of the order is on the tailgate.

I was intrigued with operations at Holland years ago. Road drivers would leave home with a partial load and hit every terminal along the way, picking up freight for their destination terminal. The freight was shrink-wrapped, but there were no dock workers. Other union companies would not allow road drivers to make that many stops. I did not take the job offer at Holland, but the fact I had done dock work at Chippewa looked good on the resume.

 

Different companies have different ways of doing things. You really need to talk to the companies you are interested in working for to find out what they require.

Nothing wrong with working the dock. Particularly if you are just doing it as an aside to your driving job. The advantages of loading your own have already been covered in this thread.

But the nature of LTL is such that at some point, you WILL be handling freight. And a lot of it. Sure, it is hard work. But it keeps you in decent shape.

You are going to find a lot of uh, "interesting" situations with your deliveries as well.