Since Overdrive’s last look at detention problems and detention-pay practices two years ago, a lot has happened in truckers’ favor, thanks to improved communication and tight capacity industrywide.
“Drivers and truck lines used to get just horribly abused” at the docks, says Todd Amen, president of owner-operator financial services provider ATBS. Today, the “lack of truck capacity has given truck lines enough courage to go for it” in detention-rate negotiations, especially fleets using electronic logs or smartphone tracking apps. “When capacity’s tight,” negotiating leverage “changes pretty fast,” Amen says.
J.B. Hunt this year released its “660 minutes” white paper in the apparent hope that customers would take the value of a driver’s time to heart.
The paper cites small-business banking firm BB&T’s study that says out of the 11 daily driving hours (660 minutes) allowed by the hours of service rule, an average of only 6.5 hours are spent hauling freight. Most of the rest is spent on empty driving time, waiting on inflexible appointments and time spent at the shipper or receiver to load and unload. Respondents to the Overdrive poll shown in this story indicated less severe results; only 10 percent reported averaging fewer than eight hours driving.
The paper outlines these strategies to shippers and receivers for dealing with wasted driving hours:
- Allow flexible appointment times.
- Provide onsite driver accommodations/parking, and work with carriers on drop-and-hook operations.
- Expedite loading and unloading times.
The problem of detention can be masked by mixed company driver-owner-operator fleets without guaranteed detention pay, where leased owner-operators who quickly learn the problem customers and refuse to haul their freight, Amen says. In a mixed owner-operator/company-driver fleet, “the carrier may wind up putting it on a company truck, and costs are really hidden.”
The goal of any detention pay agreement ought not to be just to collect more detention pay but to “make shippers more efficient,” Amen says. It’s a goal a majority of readers seemed to endorse in responses to another Overdrive poll: 63 percent favored detention pay clauses in carrier contracts continuing to become the industry standard, combined with guaranteed detention pay for drivers, over a government mandate for detention pay from carriers to drivers. Significantly, the latter has been attempted (and failed) twice in the last two years with the Obama administration’s “Grow America Act” highway bill proposal.
If industry conditions continue in truckers’ favor, such public-sector attempts to address the problem may be unnecessary.
“There’s more money in productivity” than in collecting detention, says Jay Thompson, president of Transportation Business Associates and past truck owner. “Information flow will help productivity,” he adds, as relationships get less adversarial and more parts of the industry get comfortable with sharing information.
Easier to say than to achieve, of course. If undue detention can’t be avoided, a detention pay clause in contracts with customers, combined with a clear policy for drivers, helps offset the time wasted. Recent Overdrive polling shows that half of leased owner-operator and company driver readers report receiving guaranteed detention pay, and the other half say they receive the pay only if their carrier collects it.In the profiles below, three small fleets discuss how they’ve worked through detention issues. Click through each image to read more of their stories.
Cadle Trucking, Augusta, Ga.
Nine-truck, mostly flatbed fleet owner-operator Ben Cadle, an agent for Bennett Motor Express, guarantees detention pay for his drivers after two hours, a fact his shippers know well, helping mitigate detention problems. It can still be a problem, however, he notes, with detention pay coming into play on about half of all his loads. If the entire trucking industry demanded a change, he says, “things would get better.” Read more about how he establishes base hourly rates for wait time at this link.
Chance 2 Transport, Millersburg, Ohio
The 22-truck Chance 2 Transport, hauling a mix of dry and refrigerated freight, says company owner Rod Miller, sees detention where it’s worst — the grocery warehouse. While Miller passes on detention pay to drivers at hourly rates only if it’s collected, he’s been aggressive in recent times in dealing with problems facilities. “When I go out to customers, I can usually straighten things out pretty quick,” he says. Read more about his loaded customer visits in the company flagship Peterbilt glider at this link.
Old Time Express, Hartsville, Tenn.
Do shippers and receivers “get a warm and fuzzy feeling seeing trucks stacked up in the driveway? If consumers had to go through a similar experience going to the store and waiting in lines like these, those stores would quickly go out of business.” –20-truck Old Time Express operations manager Mark White on the problem of excess detention in trucking. Read more about his fleet’s use of electronic tracking data to negotiate on detention at this link.
from Overdrive http://ift.tt/1F9ON7E
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