How Many Hours Are "Required" To Work

Of course not. The important thing is you arrive on time.

No, that would be silly. You should manage your HOS to try to ensure you always have hours to run. Before the HOS were assigned to the craziest and most ignorant people on earth to determine I tried to log 8.75 hours every day. 70/8.75=8.

 

some days you will run 11 and then a day of 3-4
just how load and unloads go

 

My last terminal manager used to throw a fit if I drove less than 11 hours a day. There was nothing he could do though because I was always early for my appointments. Why arrive 18 hours early and sit on the street waiting for an appointment time to arrive? You won't always need to drive 11 hours each day. It all depends on the shipper/receiver appointment times. You're not being paid by the hour anyway; just deliver the loads you're given each week on time and anything in between is irrelevant.

 

It's not so much your hours they look at as your on time pick up and deliveries. It's hard to explain, but the hours are what they are for each load. If you manage to get it done in less than the DOT max, that's what they want. Then you are making your pick ups and deliveries legal. I see where you are coming from, but in trucking we don't have a minimum time. We have a load, a pick up date and time and a delivery date and time and as long as you make those times, they don't care if it's a short day here and a longer one there. All that matters is the load got picked up and delivered on time. How you plan it and run it is up to you as long as you don't go over the max DOT time in one day because you opted for a short day up front so you had to go over on day two to make delivery on time. That make any sense. I Know it's hard to get your arms around when you first get out of the hourly world and into ours. Not making fun at all, we really do have a totally different time clock. It's 24 hours a day in an eight day week. You'll get it as you do it. The short answer is think more about being on time than minimums. You'll learn when you can slack and when you need to hump.

 

Sometimes you gotta run ... other times you can walk. The gas haulin' business has a mad rush on during the summer months when Junior is not in school and he is out running all of Mom and Dad's gas outta the family car or doing it in his own car, that puts us in a bind and we have to run just as far and fast as we can to try and keep up with the demand ... which translates into just about maxing out every day and week on our HOS. Other times, it can be hit or miss with the number of hours required to "get 'er dun". If there is a snow or ice storm and inventory levels drop for the people we service because we couldn't run ... we have to work that much harder to catch up ... same with hurricanes that end up shutting down pipelines ... it turns into a game of catch-up again. In the end, you will have to do what is required to get the job done no matter what line of trucking you are in, which translates into a lot of long days and then the slack times mean shorter days.

 

"You'll work 100 hours, log 70 and get paid for 50."
- Prairie Boy

 

You'll look back on this thread when you deliver a load on a friday afternoon and they leave you hanging until monday morning for a reload. Obviously no pay, no qualcomm message, no phone calls, you are just... there.

 

It doesn’t sound like you understand the maximum at all.

It is a maximum of driving for 11 hours in the first 14 hours of work, not a maximum of 11 hours of work. There is no maximum numbers of hours you can work other than driving hours so as long as you do not drive after 14 hours of going on duty you could be at work for over 14 hours.

They cannot force you to drive if you do not feel able to due to being to tired but you need to drive as much as you need to meet the delivery time you have up to the maximum 11 hours. You might be able to get away with shutting down early and missing appointments a few times but if you do it regularly you can expect to be let go.

No, they are not trying to punish you; they are trying to deliver as much freight as they can with the fewest drivers on the payroll as they can. They know that if they have you run 11 hours every day that you will run out of hours and need a reset so they do not do that on purpose but it can happen.

Stop right there, this is not a normal job so those comparisons are pointless.

You will have short days and long days but not at your choosing. if you want to choose your own hours buy your own truck, you are not going be able to choose when you will work running someone else’s truck.

It's not about how much money you want to make a week when you are working for a company running their equipment, it is about how much money the company that paid $100,000 plus on the equipment you are sitting in wants to make.

They cannot run you 11 hours every day or you would run out of hours but they will run you as close to the maximum hours per week as they can. For them it is all about maximizing the profits they can make on the equipment they have invested in. They cannot force you to drive if you do not feel able to due to being to tired but if you indicate to them that you just do not want to work as hard as they want you too they will get another driver.

 

You can work as many as 70 hours in 8 days so 77 is wrong.

Some guys will do their best to average 8.75 hours a day, that way they never run out of hours.

There are many types of driving jobs but for many of us the load will dictate how hard we run. On the flip side, how hard we run will dictate what loads we get.

If you're forced dispatch then the load requirements will dictate how hard you run. If you can choose your loads you will have more control.