Who Pays for catastrophic failures when driving for company

I have seen companys go after Drivers for a bad case count that ended up being short of product. Co. took money out of drivers pay and driver took them to court. Guess what the judge had to say? "That's the cost of doing business. Pay the driver back". You can not be held financially responsible for a Tranny. They can fire you for it and put it on your DAC record. But that is really all they can do. They will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you did it on purpose. And when the info is in front of a judge, He will see that it is a wearing item. (It wears out and breaks)

 

Some things there is no excuse for but really at the end of the day, its a mechanical beast. Its going to break down eventually. To right away blame a driver because say a fatigued pinion gear shears off and the diff explodes all over the highway just isn't fair. There are ways to tell if something was abused or fatigued/defective. An experienced wrench needs to perform a thorough failure analysis to determine the root cause of failure.

First fleet shop I wrenched for a truck spat the lower countershaft out through the bottom of the case. Driver's fault? Absolutely not. I tagged out the truck because I found snap rings and twisted metal while re-sealing a PTO. Dispatch pulled my tag off and sent the driver out in it anyways. I don't think the driver knew he was driving a time bomb at that time.

Another truck ended up spitting a drive shaft out into the weeds, destroying 2 air bags and an output yoke on the diff. Driver's fault? Not at all. Truck was at the main shop in Edmonton for a major overhaul. Driver was bringing it 600 kilometers back to our branch. Cause of failure we determined was a defective u-joint that was installed. Cheap import parts rather than genuine Spicer u-joints.

See what I'm saying? A good company will investigate and determine the root cause of the failure before pointing fingers and naming names.

 

@tlalokay said it right above. Absolutely no way a company can charge you for damaging equipment unless it was malicious like youre on video slashing your own tires. They could put something on DAC about being tough on equipment.

 

BINGO.

 

We had a driver twist the drive shaft right out of a truck trying to slide the tandems. He pulled the handle and tried to slide them but it wouldn't budge, instead of getting out and looking for a problem, he just gave it more fuel, and snap.

Tow and repair bill. Upon investigating, one of the springs that retract the pin was broke so the pin stayed locked.

Definitely the drivers fault, the company didn't charge him for the damages, but they did put it on his record.

 

I could see a new driver doing that on a real heavy load.

 

44,800 pounds of soda.

 

Yeah, I've seen some crazy truck abuse in my time. A guy I worked with once used to work at a truck repair shop, a guy comes in, IH I think, says he has a BAD vibration somewhere. The guy I knew said, when he brought it in the shop, the driveshaft was "cork screwed", like a drill bit. He had never seen anything like that, and how it stayed in there at all!

 

I hooked up to a trailer with a pin lock attached way back when i was a rookie. Lol. True story. Remember, back when I started there were no fancy schools and "training" consisted of a day or 2 until you could actually get the truck to move. Then you were "road ready".

Now, I'm not gonna lie, it took me a couple attempts to get hooked up, but I managed to do it (pin lock and all). Moved trailer to where it had to be dropped, then couldn't get unhooked. Imagine that. What a mess!!

Point is, that was pretty much the definition of "driver error". While I caught a lot of grief, and got razzed about it unmercifully for years, not a penny was taken out of this company drivers paycheck. Nor should it have been.

But what do I know? I'm just a DumDriver