Handling freight

No matter who you drive for or what you haul... you're going to "touch" freight occasionally.

You'll eventually get stuck at a receiver with a few pallets on the truck that they won't "jump" on... so you'll find it easier just to grab a pallet jack and unload them yourself.

Or... a receiver will assign one "lone" slow dock hand to unload your 40k lb delivery. Might as well give them a friendly helping hand to get moving again rather than sit all day.

Moving heavy freight really isn't a big deal if you're used to it and have the proper equipment in good shape. I move skids weighing 2k to 3k around all day with a pallet jack and I'm certainly no Hulk Hogan. I've never once hurt my back doing it (knock on wood).

 

It all depends on who you hire on with. For the most part OTR freight is loaded by the shipper and unloaded by the receiver or a lumper service. I haven't touch freight in five years. Before that I had a LTL job (less than truckload like UPS) and you load and unload everything. There are jobs you have to tailgate freight like I've done with office furniture and La-Z-boy. Truck ads usually specify freight handling like 96% no touch freight.

Unless you haul floral.

 

my company says ," DO NOT TOUCH FREIGHT". insurance reasons. haven't touch freight in years, my health isn't that good anymore, so it's in my list of questions at job interviews.
if co. asks you to sign a paper asking if you are willing and able to lift 100lbs and carry it 75 ft. they will be asking you to "finger print" freight. I refuse to sign, (don't get hired either,lol) my choice. 44K of bags of rice , 440 bags, hot Miss day, H##L NO !!!

 

well i did say "usually" personally after just 4 months i havn't done any touching

 

You heard wrong, we don't load our trucks. However we do help unload on some furniture loads.

 

I rember this , i often get loaded , then he walks out with charts, you want the chimney stack or this one, i'm thinking i'm getting a load of chimney's , but i felt dumb when told me, i like too load and load my own freight , i like the exercise too so then the real question here is then , why do all them work load assignments at the otr terminal if we don't touch the freight hum.

 

i think the worst load they gave me was 123 towns too deliver too, this load came from a printing plant down south, i was in my first year , in trucking, green as they come, they floor load jc penny catalogs,, no pallets, no tie bundles, nothen but the floor and catalog's, with each town on top of the stacks, well eacjh stop was too back in there back door, put each catalog on the belt and let each one roll down too em after i got that big pile of mess inside the trl, there was cataloges everywere, all town messed up, i was so mad , took me a week and several drops latter i got it all off, no money for that week, never again, i told boss , next time on pallets and metal strap em or i refuse the load. he just said ok and i walk back out too my truck, course that was crst truckline ,when i started out.

 

Thank you. That makes me feel better. I hope they hire me. I'm up for it.

 

Don't know about loading, but I took a job where I unload at each stop. It's rotten manual labor! Most weeks I spend more time on line 4 unloading than I do on line 3. It's all at food warehouses. For me it's not a good job. Without a doubt it is the hardest physical work I have ever done.

Food warehouses have this thing called ti x hi. The ti is how many boxes go on the horizontal plane of the pallet. The hi is how many boxes you stack vertically. The freight you take off the truck might be stacked 12 hi on each pallet and the warehouse requires it at 1 hi. Now each pallet you unload becomes 12 pallets! Undoubtedly, you will be shrink wrapping each of those pallets. Now do the math. Trailer has say 20 pallets, each one breaks down to 12 pallets, you are breaking the stuff down to an additional 220 pallets. IT IS BACK BREAKING. This is an extreme example, but the food warehouses have some ridiculous requirements.

I was at a Giant Eagle warehouse delivering 11 pallets. The 11 became 81 pallets after breakdown. Giant Eagle required me to use their blue CHEP pallets, they weigh like 90-lbs each. The UNION labor force wasn't much interested in fetching the pallets for me! I got to find the pallets, load them on my pallet jack, and cart them back to my dock. Then handle them again because you don't have floor space for 81 pallets at the dock. So you put a pallet on floor, stack freight on it, heave second pallet on top of that pallet, place freight on that pallet, heave another pallet, etc for as high as you can go.

The companies NEVER pay you what a lumper would get. We get $170 to unload an entire trailer. Lumpers are around $300.00, plus a lumper uses a device called a forklift, some forklifts have attachments called clamps! We get to use a pallet jack and our back.

Bottom line, if you want to unload trucks, go to a warehouse and get job. Tomorrow is my LAST run. Back to tankers where unloading is turning a valve!