Hello all, OK so I have completed about 225 hours of my training. First off lets just say that I have not yet personally been wronged in any way by the company. However Through talking with many other Werner drivers, and there are a lot of them who are not happy, I have learned quite a bit about where the problems lie.
The major component related to the current issues is the government subsidies the company gets for creating a new job. From what I understand Werner gets $15,000 for each new job it creates as long as the employee works for 90 days and is not fired. The catch here is that Werner keeps a new student in the training process for about 8 weeks and they have a policy of an employee can take up to 30 days leave of absence without being terminated. At the end of the 30 days if no contact is made then it is assumed the employee has quit. So they pay the student 350 bucks a week for 8 weeks (2800 bucks) and then send them home to await truck assignment. if it goes past the 30 days they are free of the employee but have still made the 90 day criteria and thus make thier 15k which means they make roughly 12k per student just to waste our time.
There are some students getting lucky though and recieving truck asignments. The key to getting one is to be in the right place, right time and be looking for the "team driver OTR" positions.
They have several types of positions but I think what they are looking to achieve is to have solo drivers do regional positions and what they call "net-ops" which is basically a courier run from one regional terminal to another regions terminal. So a regional driver pickes up a load at the shipper and drops it in a terminal, net-ops takes it from there to another terminal close to consignee and then that regions driver delivers to the consignee. the key here is that net-ops makes about .03 cents per mile less than regular drivers because they are practically garunteed a good number of miles a week (usually around 2500-3000) and the regional guys are paid less for the short runs versus the long hauls. Therefore it is less cost for Werner. The remaining drivers are being coerced into team driving situations where they could get longer runs but they split the money with another driver. Even then it seems like you are basically just driving a 24 hour truck that picks up the slack the regional and net-ops can't handle. Student/Trainer sets are treated like a team and thus get a good amount of runs especially since the students are basically free workers and the trainers get about 65% of the pay for both his and the students miles...which is less than what they would have to pay a regular team.
All in all the whole thing makes perfect sense from an employers point of view, however the company slogan "Werner cares, we care" is a load of garbage. It is all about the dollar and they couldn't care less about the employees. In fact I do believe they are slowly removing thier solo long haul drivers by simply starving them of loads and waiting for them to quit. I don't know how this strategy could possibly be good for thier reputation but they have no shortage of drivers so again...the money is what they care about.
The funny thing is they claim to have zero debt which is astounding for a trucking company of this size and yet they still pass all of thier economic problems down to the employees rather than taking what would amount to minor hits to thier profit margin. 2 weeks ago they reduced thier "down-time" pay from whatever it was to 20 dollars per 24 hours (hell I used to make 21 bucks an HOUR at my last job) and this week they cut the 401k company match from 50% to 25% for all employees. So we the little guys barely making a living get to suffer more and more just so the shareholders can maintain thier profit percentages.
The other kicker is when they tell you they have no trucks available yet every terminal you go to has brand new untouched petes and internationals parked in nice orderly lines. In fact I was told that they have over 1000 brand new rides that have been sitting for over a year. One guy told me they buy them in bulk at ridiculously low prices and then sell them a year or two later individually for huge profits.
My choice so far is to drive OTR as a team (already have a guy to team with) and to see how the truck assignment thing goes. I will be highly upset if I go through all of this just to be sent home.
I will let you know more on how things go soon.
Sorry could not resist...Good Luck, hope you succeed in the new venture. Keep us informed, like I said in a different post somewhere around here. I have heard good and bad thing's about Werner..
