Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/566087
September 2015 | Overdrive | 23 Todd Amen, president of owner-oper- ator 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 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 bank- ing 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 inflex- ible 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 accommoda- tions/parking, and work with carriers on drop-and-hook operations. • Expedite loading and unloading times. The problem of detention can be masked by company drivers at fleets without guaranteed detention pay, as opposed to leased owner-operators who quickly learn the problem customers and refuse to haul their freight, Amen says. In a mixed owner-operator/company-driv- er fleet, "the carrier may wind up putting it on a company truck, and costs are really hidden." The goal of any detention pay agree- ment 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: 59 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 deten- tion pay from carriers to drivers. Signifi- cantly, 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 Transporta- tion Business Associates and past truck owner. "Information flow will help productivity," he adds, as relationships get less adversarial and more parts of the Average owner-operator use of daily maximum 11 hours of driving Source: OverdriveOnline.com poll 8-10 hours 40% Varies too much to specify an average 8% Operation doesn't require logs/I don't know 5% Fewer than 8 hours 10% Almost all 11 hours 37% Todd Dills