What you should know about Detention Pay!

I would never accept that. The few times I have not been given a consignees phone number I have googled the company and called the shipping department to confirm the hours they receive and if I need an appointment.
If I had been contracted on that Swift load with a delivery time on the Rate Confirmation that said 5 PM. When I arrived and they told me to come back tomorrow I would have had Swift agree in writing via a new rate con to pay detention or find me a cross dock to unload tonight. They are the ones who broke the contract. What I would not have done is wait until I am empty to try to deal with it.

 

Enter the address in a search engine and you will get the phone number.

 

Yep ... this is a really, really asinine comparison. At $78k level, especially in government, you are in a salaried position.

As such you have assignments and deadlines ... you have to meet the deadlines whether it takes you 40 hours or a 120 hours in a week. The work has to get done, it has to be on time and your pay is the same regardless of the time you put in.

 

Sometimes no number is provided or a number to a voicemail.

 

Use Google, call the front office and ask for shipping. Not very hard.

 

Well if more companies (trucks) and owner operators would start holding the docks accountable for the long detentions and make them pay the hourly fee after 2 hours they will start getting us loaded and unloaded on a timely manner. Cause if the docks can charge the trucking company for being late then the company's need to be more diligent on getting that cost. Also the drivers need to be on time to the appointments for this to be effective. And drivers need to be diligent in calling into the company and documenting the detention.
I also feel like the driver is the one sitting not the company so they should not get a penny of the detention pay. Company pays the driver and the company gets reimbursed from the drop/loading company.

 

That's ridiculous. Do you think my sole purpose in life is to buy a truck and trailer just to provide a driver with a job? The truck needs to make money too sheesh. Best way is X amount for truck + X amount for trailer + X amount for driver.

 

Different industries pay detention differently. It's always based on their business conditions.

In produce they pay more up front than comprable loads because they don't pay detention. They don't pay detention because they pick up at produce shippers and drop at grocery store DC's... And with that double whammy they would very likely be paying detention to every truck.

In big corporate logistics they tend to have very generous detention policies and be VERY stingy about the line haul. This is because their MBA's think that their supply chain is very quick and efficient and they won't be paying much in detention which to them = cheap trucks. When this ends up not being true they can pay a lot of money indeed.

In the customs brokerage world they love detention... Because they aren't paying it and they are absolutely taking a cut. One customs brokerage told me to make sure I put the detention on the invoice (!!!?) because they needed to make sure the customer was charged for it.

In the first situation (produce) I think pocketing any of the detention money is pretty vile. This is because 1) the shipper is your client and they are paying you to keep their costs down... and you've already been paid for the load. And 2) because these customers are insanely stingy and absolutely aren't going to be paying anything remotely close to the damage that was done you're taking a bad situation for the trucking company and making it worse.

In the second two situations detention pay is a meaningful part of the total compensation on the load and it's pre-negotiated so you can bet your ### I'm going to take a piece. Also a lot of these companies are vulnerable to my offering the line haul at cost and the detention at 75-100/hr or something. I'm going to pay the truck 25 an hour if I'm running the line haul at cost. Sorry not sorry. Sometimes these loads are awful and sometimes they are outstanding. This is a result of brokerages going at each other. It's like trucking companies consolidating loads in Chicago. The loophole is what makes the business model function to begin with.

EDIT: At the end of the day detention is just money to the truck. It's the variable part of the equation. It's like a FSC. No money is sacred and how it gets whacked up when the freight is delivered is, as always, negotiable.

 

Differences in how we do business here - I never touch detention. It is what it is- If my customer is paying detention on a load, my driver is getting what the customer is paying. I try not to gank either party.

 

I have news for you. Your aren't paying me $25/hr for truck, trailer and driver. I really don't care how cheap your customer is. I am dealing with you. The only way you continue to service this customer is by screwing the trucking company because you know the load is a loser and you're taking advantage of the truck. If you paid a real detention from your own pocket you would drop the cheap customer