Need help deciding between Marten and Knight Refrigirated

i am goin through martens orentation next week all the drivers i have talked to have said really good thangs about them thats why i went with them.....thats both marten drivers and drivers that drive for other companys...sorry i couldnt be of more assistance

 

I drive for Marten and talked to a couple of Knight drivers and we are doing better than they are. Marten isn't the greatest thought but it is better than Knight.

 

Marten is hands down better than Knight. AS a matter of fact, Marten is one of the better companies out there.

 

I worked for Knight dry, and Marten wet, and as far as truthfulness in recruiting goes, Marten was good ( a few discrepencies) and Knight was god-awful. Knight did ages-old typical bait and switch recruiting, i.e. claiming they would start me at a certain rate per mile (based upon my experience), and then when pay day came I found I was paid a couple cents per mile less than promised. I was given a very lengthy run-around in trying to find out why. It finally shakes out that a couple cents was held back to be paid later as a bonus, which is a common ages old tactic for trucking company recruiting. But the catch, of course, was the trucking industry ages-old tactic of making the bonus impossible to attain for anyone except Jesus. It was quite a lengthy list of requirements, and 2 of the "impossilbe" that I can recall were that the truck had to get 7.25 mpg (it only got 6.25 governed at 56 mph) and you had to recruit at least one driver every 6 months and that driver had to stay with Knight for at least a year. You had to never be late on picks and drops, never be seen wearing sweat pants or sweatshirts, keep your hair and facial hair neatly trimmed, and on and on. You had to go in and meet at the desk periodically with one of the Knight executives for a review about your performance and how you might mprove it. All this before you could get the bonus. Truck mpg has improved since then, but probably the Knight requirement has raised to a new impossible standard. I say impossible, but there were drivers who would buy fuel out of their own pocket enough to qualify, but I did the math and, if you figure in the income tax on both ends, it was a break even proposition. But the new hires almost always quit when they see the paycheck theft from the bait and switch, so the chances that I would ever recruit somebody to stay a year were I think slim. But it's been about 9 years since I left Knight, and about 1 year since I left Marten, and things change with time (and get much worse for drivers in such an economic downturn) so it's hard to judge absolutely. I would probably never work for Marten again. I definitely would never consider Knight. I think it is wise to compare the ratings at SafeStat when considering a company. If a companies' drivers are rated at 75, for example, that means 75% of them are failing driver inspections (usually its the log book that fails them, and a company that has to hire lower caliber drivers, or a company that pushes the drivers to run illegal will have the worst scores). And I also compare the SafeStat rating for the equipment; this is significant to me in that I can know how well the company keeps their equipment maintained, and I believe that there is generally a correlation between this and overall company quality. Remember, at SafeStat, the higher the score the worse. And the higher the score, the more you will be sidelined for inspections. Link here or copy/paste for SafeStat http://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/safestat/disclaimer.asp?RedirectedURL=/safestat/SafeStatMain.asp