Dry bulk proposal to help the industry.

The government in their ever changing wisdom keeps changing the rules to suit the big companies. We have done and still do fine because our company charges for our service! The latest piece of crap shoved down our throats that was supposed to level the playing field was the brokerage bond. We are not now, or have ever been a broker, but with the wisdom of the government opened the doors to any jack wagon out there with a phone and nothing but time on their hands to become a broker. Don't get me wrong, there are a LOT of great brokers out there that were in business before the government stuck their nose in the game! We have, in the past 8 years that I have been at the helm here have only posted a few loads we needed help with to service our customers! This is not enough loads to warrant a brokerage. With that said, we will NEVER get anything sone right until the brokers as well as other carriers start holding the shipper's feet to the fire for rates! If you want to be successful, you can not haul cheap freight!

I guess my answer to your question is that it would be AWESOME if we could all stand together to work for higher rates BUT as we stand together the snakes will slither in and cut the rates to take our customers! Jerry if you have been around for several years you will know what I mean when I say there are 2 types of truckers. The keep the left door closed, get it done trucker and the trucks stop, sit at the counter and talk about getting it done trucker. We here have the best of the first type! I am proud of my group of guys and gals and would put them against any fleet in the country!

On to "Back Hauls" or "Off Season Rates", there is no such thing!!! These trucks NEED to make a set amount of money for EVERY mile that the truck travels!

I like your Ideas and it would be great if they could be implemented but truckers for the most part talk a good game but have a hard time sticking to it. That's just what my experience has taught me.

Keith
ET Trucking INC

Where in manteno are you located?

As director of transportation for a shipper that uses 75 or so (mostly small mom and pop) tanker and hopper carriers plus operates a private fleet of over 500 power units I can see both sides of the issue.At the end of the day it is all about supply and demand. Rates have been down for several years because the lean times have not driven capacity down enough to affect rates. Frankly, too many marginal carriers try to compensate for low rates by running illegal. It's a suckers game and I feel sorry for those who have to go that route. The ELD mandate and the HOS rules will do something that the industry can't do for itself and that is drive down capacity by limiting the hours of operation, thereby decreasing supply and increasing demand. Think about it this way if 100,000 trucks worked 10 hours less per week (running legal) that would amount to one million hours. Potentially you have reduced capacity by 15 to 20%. Those miles still need to be run and now the demand has gone up and the cost to move it will go up with it. With tonnage increasing and these regulations coming in to play the coming year is going to be good for truckers.

I agree with Richard Evans

I believe the 90 day exemption is only that. it will take time for the supply and demand side of things to work it self out and then rates will go up

Now let's talk dump rates. In the local market, I can haul sand and gravel products and make $1000.00 to 1500.00 a day, and be home every night, participating in my family's life. In the long distance OTR dump market, that I have worked for the past several years, I can only make a $1000.00 a day, living in the truck Monday through Friday. Detention time has rarely been a issue, with dumps, so the fact that there may be paid detention time in the future, is of little comfort to me. Given the fact that I could drive a cement mixer all summer, and collect unemployment all winter, and make $70,000 a year, I really have to ask myself why I would want to continue doing this anymore.

Dave. you make a good point. I personally can run grain or frac sand where I live here in Illinois and make better money per mile then I can running over the road. it is still not enough money locally but it does pay my bills. so there is no way I would go over the road to make less money per mile and be gone from my family 5 and 6 days a week. it is crazy how things have gotten. but it is what it is I guess anymore. I guess we can put the blame on whoever we want and use that as our excuse. or should we put the blame on ourselves for allowing it to happen in the 1st place? Just to be straight I'm not trying to be an ??s or start anything negative because I think this is a pretty good post on this forum. but at this point who is really to blame?

I think at the end of the day, we all want the same thing, to be treated with respect, and fair compensation. Solving problems begins with the discussion of them. I will stand off to the side for a while, and turn it over to the rest of you... Merry Christmas to all, and god bless you.

Jerry you seem to have done your home work and are very knowledgeable in this. I talked to you a little before, you and I are in tge same situation and because we do have a live for the industry it's hard for me to cut it off. Most if the dissonance makers are trying to completely run or ruin the way trucking should be run to turning owners,into beggers waiting and hoping someone with compassion will see our side. This is christmas, owner operators are like the scrooge story it's just that we are tiny Tim looking for that miracle. I know reading tge bible that it's written in the last days we will see less and less of love and compassion for our fellow man, so being a Christian I put my hope and faith in god. I love my brother and sister those who still believe in doing unto others. So I hope everyone is blessed this Christmas and more in the future. Sorry this is so long. Thanks again jerry for your knowledge and opinion in whom I agree with.

And isn’t paying by weight coercion? It tempts people to haul heavy in hopes they don’t get caught? Just legally speaking people are trying to get you to load heavy to make a decent wage

Jerry as you have pointed out, the purpose of deregulation was to break the unions, and take the profit out of the industry. I am curious where you see stuff going in the future? What stands out the most to me, is not the E-log mandate it self, but what it represents, collusion between the government and the megga carriers, to break the back of the small carriers, now that the unions are gone. If the megga fleets were able to get this mandate passed, it demonstrates that they can get anything they want. How long will it be before they are able to ge the rest of what they want passed, like the 4.5 million dollar general liability policies, or surveillance cameras in your cab, or anything else that is harmful to us their competitors? Are we now witnessing a consolidation of power in the market, similar to what we have seen with the railroads? It would appear as though we are not independent contractors, but glorified employees of the megga's, since many carriers broker freight from the same people who run the ATA...(makes me think they should be paying our social security, and work comp).... We own the equipment, and the liability, but they control how we operate it, and what our income will be, by setting the market through collusion.

Although I do share your sentiments, and the milage rates are reasonable except for deadhead - shippers will never pay for that, if they had to pay for all miles they'd just buy their own trucks and run a private fleet. However the $2.50/mile seems too low to me, unless you're talking about a lot of miles, but we are a local/regional carrier and our trucks return home every day but our base rate is between 2.70/2.80 a mile so we'll call it 2.75 and all loads have fuel surcharges (which still start as low as under $2, cant remember the exact number - moving the surcharge to $2.50 or $3.00 sounds resonable. The reason surcharges are getting harder and harder to get is due to easier cost discovery discovery and tracking of logistics spend - and laziness, some people sitting in chairs calling for trucks working for big companies are the laziest and most triffelling people you'll ever come across (I can imagine how taking a rate and the weekly fuel cost and looking at a spreadsheet to get the percentage and then taking a calculator and taking the rate and multiplying that rate by 1.(enter percentage here) is so tediously hard (sarcasm), but I do understand how it affects our customers and makes it a little more difficult for our customers that market their products constantly and can't get the fuel until tuesday when the DOE reprt comes out. However surcharges are great and makes it fairer for to figure driver pay (which I'm not so sure I'm not just for flat percentge all in and lumping accessorials, fuel, stop charges, all together, but that's just me wondering if that's fairer or makes any difference) but it certainly seems fairer for own operators since when they take loads - they are the ones bearing the sole burden of the fuel cost so I would say that would make it easier for them to make sure their settlements are fairer by keeping fuel revenue and having percentages actually figured on the load revenue. One thing that might should be adopted so that everyone wins is quarterly surcharges - yes they can me slow going up, but they're also slow coming down - based on the averages from the previous quarters, on maybe monthly would be a good inbetween. But cost discovery and budgeting is what has shippers wanting flat rates, so quarterly adjustments may be a fair way to go where everyone wins. As for demurrage, I'm all for that and 2 hours on either side has always been the standard and demurrage starts after that, but some companies like Maverick made the jump a year or maybe two ago and dropped customers that wouldn't accept the demurrage after one hour, but charging on site, thats not realistic, afterall then you would have a few bad apples ruin it for everyone and start dragging even when they could get loaded faster and so it would be short lived and have shippers start demanding spotted trailers. Those hourly rates would be outrageous in this area too, My company is at $75.00/hour - a few old customers are still lower - and I know Thompson is at $80.00, so anyone that can get that amount for their truck per hour please let me know so I can send some tractors out.

But my reaction to those rates shows how difficult it is to do anything nationally since us moving away from the gold standard and real money and all of these non tangible financial industry creation like credit default swaps and the like have created vast market differences in reasonable rates. And history has shown general strikes and national unions aren't effective, my father hadn't been long started this company when one of the old general strikes of old got underway, well they had put up everything to buy those trucks and was working another job to make enough support the family so the company could run and payroll was met, needless to say he wasn't going to participate in the foolishness of the general strike and lose everything, I wouldn't either this day. Now I wont run for nothing, I'll park trucks before I operate at a loss. But the general strike didn't make any difference, but it cost some people everything. One of our driver's father was also running during the strike and he lost his life because someone threw something off an overpass at him (a striking trucker), luckily more people weren't killed in the wreck. Regardless, the real problem is people taking loads below cost our too cheap, and most get away with it by violating the hours of service. One company that we had lost some drivers to up the road had their drivers complaing and very dissatisfied because they immediately cut $75-100.00/day off of their checks. Well the ELD wasn't the problem (okay maybe for carriers operating illegally), but for us who run legal and are willing to work hard and long hours and meerly want fair compensation the ELDs ARE THE SOLUTION. There are far too many carriers out there pulling loads for nothing because they're working their guys beyond what the law will allow, well that has been depressing prices for the rest of us. Now I'm not saying that I don't think we need hours of service reform, far from it, but in the past the FMCSA has thrown whatever ridiculousness they wanted to into trucking regulations and except for the big boys with the ELDs, the rest of us just learned how to make our logs "look" right. We made a mistake in not calling our congressmen and senators and raising hell - FMCSA may make the rules, but Congress can force them to do whatever they deem fit and/or simply cut enforcement of (insert whatever rule here) in their funding. Now with the ELDs it will force the driver's in masse to be very aware and make their voices heard when some lifelong political hack who's never been in a truck decides they have the newest and greates rule to stop us from killing people (when Ray Lahood was in charge of the FMCSA when we got the 2013 reset disaster repealed he was tearing up in one hearing and yelled "We have to stop heavy-duty trucks from killing people", yeah I know that's what my drivers think every morning when they start out: Gee, hope cause a wreck with some soccer mom's car and kill someone today! Well now that we're all effected and can't just learn how to 'fudge' our logs to look right, maybe we can stop the ridiculous regulation and maybe even get some of the old ones back. And finally regarding per ton rates, they are fairest to both parties. It's not fair to the shippers nor carriers who run light. Some of our older trailers way as much as 15,000lbs more than our newer ones, that gives us an extra 7 tons if the product is dense enough and allows us an incentive to update equipment, plus it keeps shippers from being taken advantage of by someone not maximizing payload or using old cheap equipment and making as much off of a load as someone with lighter equipment. At any rate this is not realistic if nothing else due to accounting reasons. Much of what we haul is of low value when compared to general freigh and I've worked on may projects (we also merchandise material) where freight was the deciding factor or worth more than the cargo, so even if accounting reasons wouldn't prevent companies from going away from per ton pricing, the lost revenue from the decline of loads sold would (who here would order a bulk product and take a per load rate (sure maybe if it was someone you know and not too much freight - like a minimum 20 mile load or such and the entire load was cheap - but lets say a load of feed from two states away? I didn't think so. However, a lobbying group in Washington fighting for small companies, own operators, and maybe even just the average non-hourly truck drivers and also putting out news and prs to the general public as well. Most people are afraid of trucks - my state requires no curricular about how tractor trailers function differently than cars, not even how just because a truck may not be all the way over in a tight turn lane doesn't mean his blinkers were left on and he's not turning but does mean he couldn't make the turn otherwise and pulling and darting around is not safe. Well we sure could use someone lobbying for that, most of our, infact all of our crashes or fender benders in the past two years involving two parties were caused by the other motorist doing something stupid. Also, refers aren't a good comparison, the refer rates have been depressed in the spot market in recent years due to oversupply and there are plenty of van loads that are plenty heavy, in fact I have some customers that load low value commodities in vans or flats and they banned refers the other year because they would have to cut some of the pallets due to the weigh restrictions so when trucks were abundant, they said no refers. But overall I like the idea of trying to get together and stop the starvation rates out there, but I urge everyone to look at how ELDs can help us and not just how they're a pain in the a**.

AG exemption is only good for 150 miles problem is you have to many people wanting to run local to many trucks in one area fighting for the same freight drives down rates if you have 300 trucks and 200 loads its supply and demand issue