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TRUCKER STORY * USA - Comments and Observations from a unsatisfied driver
"To me, it seems completely unreasonable for a driver to have to raid ATMs and shell out hundreds of dollars in a week. That's MY money, it's NOT Swift's money"...
USA -johnsantic.com/John Santic Writer/Photographer -1 Oct 2007: -- ...With my average day having 4.0 hours of waiting and only 6.4 hours of driving, it would be a BIG help if the waiting time could be reduced. That would get my average driving hours up and boost the amount of paid miles. It would also be nice to have fewer runs, but longer runs... The estimated yearly pay of $26K sounds pretty good for a rank beginner, but considering how many hours I worked and the difficulty of the job, it's a pretty poor hourly wage, only $6.40. And of all the hours I worked, only about half of them were actually driving a truck and generating paid mileage. The other half was slave labor—unpaid. As I suspected, I worked a huge number of hours per week (more than 90 while on the road), so truck drivers don't have time for an outside life. You're a truck driver and that's it—no family, no hobbies, nothing else... The amount of sleep is somewhat deceptive. At an average of 7.5 hours a day, it sounds like enough, but consider several other factors. Due to weird schedules, sleep time might be in the daytime, when it is not very refreshing. Also, the sleep time might be interrupted multiple times. Or there might be several days with much less sleep, followed by one day with a huge amount. In my opinion, the level of fatigue due to lack of quality sleep is much worse than the sleep figures seem to indicate... One sore point is the big difference between actual and paid mileage. Over the course of a year, it's like you drive six weeks for free. And the mileage difference is not accidental; the Swift routing computer deliberately plays tricks to shave miles off your pay. In this age of high technology, there's no reason why the routing computer couldn't come up with efficient routes and very accurate door-to-door mileage figures. After all, that's exactly what I wound up doing for myself: I used the DeLorme Street Atlas program on my laptop to do excellent door-to-door routing with precise mileage figures... Another sore point is having to finance the company's business by paying for business expenses with cash out of my pocket, and then having to wait for reimbursements (and hope I got them). Due to the time to process reimbursements, Swift got free use of several hundred dollars of my hard-earned money. Multiply that by thousands of other drivers, and Swift is getting a huge free loan. To me, it seems completely unreasonable for a driver to have to raid ATMs and shell out hundreds of dollars in a week. That's MY money, it's NOT Swift's money and they have no right whatsoever to use it! If they need a loan so bad, let them apply for a bank loan, just like everybody else!...Labels: truckers' jobs
posted by Unknown @ 5:30 AM
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