Still Getting Screwed

I thought I would relate yet another way that trucking companies screw truck drivers. My final load last week delivered in Piedmont, South Carolina on Saturday. They sent me home for the rest of the weekend from there. Fine. Well, the load I'm on now pays me for empty miles from “home” to the pick-up, not from my last delivery in Piedmont (although the routing shows me coming from Piedmont, not from home).

So. What does this mean?

Simply put, this means that if the company's trip computer routed me from South Carolina to my pick-up in Statesville, North Carolina, I should automatically be paid for that. However, my paid miles are about 75 miles short of the reality. That means that I'm only being paid from “home”, and that means that someone changed the miles. So with a few keystrokes, someone took about $30 out of my pocket. This will be added to the discrepancy between the routed and actual loaded miles (which will be about another 50 miles). So the company is going to get me for around 125 miles on a short trip, which is about 1/3 of the actual trip miles. I'm only going to be paid for 2/3 of the miles I drive on this trip. That's around $50 that I'm not going to be paid on one short trip.

As I've said before, this sort of thing is normal in the trucking industry. But it's especially brazen to get someone for over 1/3 of the total trip miles on the load. And I'm still smarting over the 500 miles they screwed me out of when they sent me to Canada (almost $200 there).

So why don't I switch companies? Bleh. They all do it. Except for this one issue, I have no real problem with this company. Although I have to say that they screw me more per trip, on average, than any trucking company I've worked for.

One of these days I'm going to compile the data I've collected through the years into a spreadsheet and find out exactly how much I've been screwed by my various employers in the trucking industry. See, since Day One I've kept track of the routed (paid) and actual miles, as well as my settlement sheets that show my pay rate for each trip. I estimate that in the seven years I've been driving, unpaid miles have cost me about $32,000. And that is a very conservative estimate.

Maybe I'll round up my settlement sheets and load pads, and compile that spreadsheet. It'd certainly be interesting to be able to compare how various companies did. But honestly, I don't expect to be compiling eight years' worth of data any time soon.