FedEx Express an inside look

First of all let me start of bye saying hi to all , i've been browsing the forums for awhile and figured i'd share a few words myself, I have seen many threads regarding FedEx Freight, Ground, National, Custom Critical, etc but few of the main FedEx Express Division

I never intended to work at FedEx just kind of stumbled upon it after I graduated from high school, never figured i'd fall in luv with it...anyways started off as a package handler hit 21 and then proceeded to become a courier, at that point I decided I really enjoyed the job and eventually wanted to drive tractor trailers. I moved up to class B and drove straight trucks and when the opportunity arose for class A I jumped on it.

However to my surprise my vision of trucking really differs to what i've read on this forum and that's the part i'd like to share.

 

At FedEx at least on the express side you either work Am or Pm shift. In my case Am, my typical day consists of starting anywhere from 2am and ending around 11am. Start off with a 5 minute "stretch and flex" a time allotted for us to, you guessed it stretch... so to prevent injury, it is up to the individual to really do it. We have our trucks and trailers usually assigned per route, we perform our pretrip and backup to our dock. We are stationed out of airports in my case Burbank Airport and are basically what you consider "feeder" drivers, that is we each have an assigned station to which we transport their packages for delivery(on the Pm pickup their containers) most are within an hr drive at most which means we average around 100 miles per day if that. Were paid hourly so that doesn't matter and hardly any of our shift is spent driving, mostly waiting for the handlers to unload cargo containers and bringing them back to the airport. Truth be told we do very little actual work if any which is why the turnover rate is so low with most being 25 yrs plus.

Of course this is overly simplified but basically this forum has taught me what really hard work you guys are putting out there plus the hell you guys went through just to acquire your CDL (training, orientation, etc.) much respect!!! and how blessed I am to be in this position. All our training is paid, it is a 3 wk course, 40hrs per wk, hotel paid plus a $2,000 spending account plus an extra 2 weeks with a developer(extra trainer after the initial trainer) before they send you off to the DMV.

Sorry for the long post and i'll happily answer any questions and will try to post some pictures of our stations/hubs to provide better insight

 

I believe only Custom Critical and Ground are owner operators. Express is 100% company employees. Yeah we never have to unload our freight which is all in airplane cargo containers and all our trailers have rollers so they just slide out. The only exception would be the pu&d drivers of course, which deal with palletized freight but we deal very little with that. As you can imagine our overnight heavyweight service is very expensive and unless customers need something that urgent they usually go with Freight/National. Starting pay for what we call a "Ramp Transport Driver" is $20 in case you're interested but that also depends on what district you are located.

 

Oh no sorry, yeah you would have to be an employee. I'm not sure about the other divisions but at least in Express, similar to Ups you have to be an employee first before you can upgrade to drive tractor trailers.