I drove OTR for Schnieder National and one thing I hated was that you were contantly forced to return to your terminal to do unpaid work. Each individual piece of work seemed necessary, or at least useful, on it's own; but, the sheer amount of times you had to do it in a year was sickening. You had to go to a terminal twice a year to take refresher classes (so they can remind you how to drive in winter/summer whenever the season changed), you had to return to be road tested on a regular basis, etc. I can't even remember all the different reasons. Once you add in returning when selected for random drug testing, everytime you picked up a trailer that was due to be inspected, etc it really added up.
My question is, how much of this does Swift have? Obviously I assume they have drug testing and regular trailer maintainance, but do you have to spend a day at your terminal doing unpaid classroom work or road tests a couple times per year? Or is this just a Schneider thing?
How much unpaid terminal work at Swift?
Discussion in 'Swift' started by JasonK314, Mar 8, 2010.
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Coming in experienced, you won't have much after orientation. Most of their classes are for drivers who screw up. Mess up your logs, get a log class. Have an backing accident, get a backing class. Etc, etc. In three years, I have never been called in for a drug or alcohol screening. And if you get a trailer with an out of date inspection, they don't care. Unless you go through a terminal, you can drive that trailer as long as you want to. It's actually quite annoying how many trailers are behind on inspections.
When you are required to do something, it can be done at any terminal. Since Swift has 30 some (I'm not sure of the exact number) it's not too hard to pop in somewhere and complete the task while under a load. Some of the classes are on the terminal kiosk system which means you can complete the class on your own time.
On a completely different note, when I first read the title of this thread I thought you were asking about spotting trailers. I've had to do that once
. I was picking up a trailer that some numbskull had dropped a trailer in front of. I had to move that trailer out of the way to get to the one I needed. So that kind of terminal work happens occasionally, too.
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That it does, especially in the Decatur Ga terminal. Tried once to get some yard pay after moving two trailers to get to the one I needed, they declined it and would not pay it. After that I call and get it ok'd before touching any of the trailers. They usually try and say "well thats part of getting the load". Just have to hang tough and tell them, well you can pay me to move these trailers that some idiot don't know how to park and have the load get on its way OR you can take the load off me and find somone else to take it..... you will get the yard pay quickly.
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