How’s the LTL sector doing where you’re at?

Well guys. The hatchet has officially fallen on us. We laid off 9 people today (including yours truly) and that's about 20% of our driver pool.

Two things I have going for me. For one, my health insurance company has decided to provide us 8 weeks of benefits at no cost to us. Generous gesture. The other good news is that those of us laid off are allowed to work the dock and grab runs as needed.

The downside is that they already got the next five drivers lined up in case things go from bad to worse. If that happens working the dock won't be an option anymore for us younger guys and we will have to take a hard layoff. There is no way my TM can justify having 14 people on the dock at full rate to do a job that usually takes 10 part time people making less than us. Not when our outbound bills dropped from 400 to about 100.

It's been a turbulent few weeks and this will get worse. I want to wish all of you guys the very best.

 

You'd be surprised. Our voluntary furloughs didn't even make it to the bottom half of the board. Senior guys with low expenses are more than happy to sit at home for a month and a half for a little over a grand per week. Our city furloughs never even made it 20% of the way down the board.

 

Man the question is, will economy get going enough for them to need all the drivers they had to come back.

 

What happens to the senior guys who take the
Voluntary furloughs, if not enough work comes
Back, for them to be called back.
Can they just come back on their own and tell
Them to layoff one of the lower ranking guys
Who worked thru the whole thing.

 

Would be all the lower guys luck.

but if not that’s a hell of a way to move up the ladder!!!

 

Is that worse than canning all the junior guys right now?

 

They will re-evaluate the situation at the end of the furlough periods and possibly do another round of offering them to drivers according to seniority. It's all up to the company as to how long they want to do those, but they're not going to force out a senior driver. That was stated explicitly. If it ever comes to layoffs, those will happen from the bottom.

They are looking at the furloughs as a way to buy time and keep everybody employed in the hopes that business will come back fairly quickly after restrictions are lifted. It's certainly a better way to go than immediately laying off 20% of the workforce like some companies are doing.

 

That's the answer I was looking for.

 

Well on the line board there is only 10 of us total, so I don't know if that will help or not as far as keeping us all rolling, we just did our first four day work week starting this week.

 

We did 4 days this week as well, but only due to Good Friday. Is that going to be the norm for you guys?