Stevens Transport - Dallas, Tx.

Celadon .19cpm

 

Stevens!

 

has anyone gone to stevens thru carolina truck driving school?

 

Well, we've moved up in the world to .36 to .37 cpm fresh out of school (well, solo from trainer) so baby steps. Almost went to CR England for my training, bullet dodged. Stevens seems to be a middle of the road starter company as far as pay goes but the training/safety is supposedly top notch and it seems that way thus far.

 

If you don't finish out your one year of employment and pay your loan off with them, they'll try to keep you from using your "Training, skills or talant" that they provided for you, with the No-Compete clause in the contract they have you sign, to keep you from ever working with a competitor, for a total of 1 year, or until the loan is paid in full. Not all states allow this.. but most do. My state doesn't allow it for the purpose of what a company trained me to do or any education they provided.

What Stevens Transport's attorneys fail to see (probably they're hoping you don't see), is that Stevens never taught us any Stevens specific "secret recipes"..and Stevens didn't invent the trucking industry. Nothing they teach us was anything we wouldn't have learned working for any other trucking company or even on our own..YouTube videos. lol They can't control non-company specific knowledge that we have or gained.. whether we learned it before going to Dallas or after. There is a difference between a companies "top secret" trade secrets, and the general knowledge of scaling a load or sliding the tandems on a trailer!
Any company CAN put a suit against a former employee for disclosing trade secrets that are company specific, or for setting up shop (a 2000 truck business) across the street and using the knowledge they gained (actual customer or client name base) to steal customers away from them.. or create the same product from the same ingredients that are PATENTED or COPYRIGHTED. But what you learn in the training with Stevens is just general knowledge of the everyday trucking industry.
Why Stevens does this is only so they can send a letter of "Cease and Desist" to any of your future employers, basically telling them you're still under contract with them and didn't fulfil your contract (even if that was due to them letting you go on the 5th day of orientation, for no reason or for fabricated reasons). They do this in order to bully and torment you into paying them and to punish you, if you had left (escaped) of your own FREE WILL!

Yes.. I agree fully with everything the above poster said, that is exactly how it plays out if you go to school on the Dallas campus. I went to school at an independent school in Colorado that contracts with Stevens.. so it was a little different. The school in Colorado will have you sign a contract with them as well.. for roughly $5,000.. in the event you skip out on going down to Stevens. If you can not even sign the contract for Stevens, which they also present to you.. you will probably be far better off! Im not sure thats even an option.. almost like youre being trapped and controlled into doing it "their way". Thats what I'd wished I had the guts (and the bus money home) to do at the time! The school in Colorado is FAR better training than you'll ever get at Stevens in Dallas.. and it is pretty much standard opinion from the majority of drivers (at least the ones who have expressed to me) that most of the trainers down there were not interested in training someine, they were only interested in the pay they receive! Soo many drivers expressed to me that their trainers were horrible, that they weren't shown or trained on so many things.. they had pretty much no backing practice and werent shown some very important skills, like how to slide the 5th wheel and how to chain up. This is not REAL training! You are being sent out with just another driver, who is NOT an instructor and has a minimum of one year with Stevens with no accidents. .. just go to the Colorado or Missouri schools (avoid the Dallas yard like the plague) when you finish and get your CDL, just buy yourself a bus ticket home when they drop you off at the greyhound station (make sure before going out to the school that you have money to get home!).. and save yourself a lot of misery!

 

Yes they do... I just "escaped" from this company. What I found and experienced.. was that their Stevens Transport Android App enables your phone's microphone in the settings. You give it permission to when you install the app.. most likely believing that the microphone is in some way used to take memos or voice messages within the app..which it does not. Nowhere inside the app did I find a need for it to even have microphone permissions. This enables them to listen in to you, through your phones microphone and hear your conversations with other people in the cab of the truck, outside the truck in public.. or listen in on your side of a phone conversation you are having with someone..anyone, a friend or family member or fellow co-worker or a phone conversation with your DM, etc.
What happened to me..was that I was in a phone conversation with my cousin when suddenly my phone call went dead, and after a minute of trying to hear my cousin and realizing we lost connection or something.. I hung up. About three minutes later my cousin calls me back and says she actually heard another person, a man, on the phone and he was talking to someone else ..and telling them all of what he had heard me say about the company and he had repeated private my financial information in which I had said to my cousin! His voice was scrambled using a voice scrambler..as he was informing whoever else was on the line (who she didn't hear). She said "Who the #### is this!?" and the call was immediately disconnected.

It is NOT legal to listen in on someone's phone conversations as a third party, without either having permission by one of the persons in the call or being part of the phone conversation yourself. Just because you give permission for Stevens' app to use you phones microphone, does NOT give them permission to use it to listen in on what you are doing or your conversations, or break the law and infringe on your rights! Stevens just seems to think they can do wtf they want to do.. and in my opinion, the federal government needs to step in and start an investigation. We need to get a class action lawsuit going against these bullies.

 

This is similar to Gestapo.. or Mafia behavior. O-o

 

Yes! This is absolutely true! ..and Stevens spent 5 MONTHS running me in circles (not making diddle sqwat) and not getting me home. Your safety and your CDL is the least of their concerns.

 

I believe their main focus is their "school".. the money they make off getting you to sign a contract with them asap.. before you've even gotten down to the main Dallas headquarters and actually met them or experienced what they're like and deciding whether you actually want to work for this outfit!

This is so they can immediatelly start applying for federal and state funding for their new "student"? (But wait.. you're an employee, right?) and getting all the tax write offs of running their school/trucking company.
I read that they charge you for schooling that they're getting paid state or federal funding for.. This is considered "double dipping". Also, if they are charging the drivers for anything that they're writing off as a company expense would be double dipping.