TransAm: It isn't THAT bad

It is basically a tax loophole...they pay less taxes by having one less employee, I pay less taxes because I can write off almost everything. It is a two-week walk-away lease, so it is really more like renting a truck from them than leasing one. At the end of the day, it is the same as renting a truck from some other company and leasing it on...except that it isn't from another company. Scam? Sorta...but the pay is still better than being a company driver since they are scamming Uncle Sam too (scamming in a legal way, but still). Also (to allow for the tax loophole) it is technically a lease from TransAm Financial, and it is leased on with TransAm Trucking...two different companies (who are in the same building). I'm not sure it qualifies as a conflict of interest...if they were leasing it to me and I was driving for their competition, then it might be.

 

Most of the company drivers I spoke with are making under $600 a week before taxes...that's a bad week for me. As a couple of side bonuses, I get to drive a 2013 T700 and I don't have to go to Philly, NYC, Pittsburgh, or any of the other places that were designed for nothing larger than a 24' box truck. Plus, it isn't just the dispatcher...in fact there is no such person at TransAm. There are driver managers that people call dispatchers, and there is the planning department that actually assigns loads. Since you cannot even talk to planning and since they work as a group, you are pretty much in the same boat no matter who you get...the only difference being that you have to "remind" a bad driver manager of what a good one does automatically. Also, I have TA Leasing on my side in a sense. They don't want to lose a lease driver, so a call to them saying you are thinking of ending the lease tends to whip everyone on the dispatch side into shape.

 

To answer your first question, if $400 a week means nothing to you, please start sending me checks. To answer your second question, it is because they are the best of a bad lot...few companies hire drivers with under 6 months, even fewer companies hire drivers with under a year who live in Florida. To answer your third question, it is because I have been to Philly...if you have to ask why I wouldn't want to go back you obviously haven't been. TransAm pays the same whereever I go...so why would I want to spend more per gallon, burn more gallons per mile, get fewer miles per hour, and then have to make a delivery in a city that isn't designed for trucks, to a place where I have to wait 5 hours for the only dock door that is practically impossible to back into???

Now, I am actually on my last load for TransAm...picking up in a few hours and going to the terminal to turn in the truck. From there I'm driving up to Iowa to get my new truck, and then to Green Bay to sign on with Schneider...after applying with over 200 companies, that is the best option I have available to me...with one other exception, all the other options I have actually pay less, and that one other option only pays marginally more than TransAm, hardly worth the downtime involved in switching companies. If I lived in Jefferson, GA it would be a different story...but I don't. I live in south Florida, and telling a trucking company that you have under a year experience and you live in south Florida is like telling a potential girlfriend that you have been convicted of rape and you have AIDS.