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:
