My husband is driving for Covenant currently. He has been with the company for approximately five months, but he has been driving for about six years on/off. We have two autistic sons, and he has tried to be home whenever possible. It is only now that he has enough concurrent experience to get a good regional/local job, but he took the job at Covenant until that experience came together.
I have read these reports, and I realize how much people choose to attack the driver, so I'd like to give a description of my husband before the assumptions and accusations fly:
1) My husband works hard. He has no qualms regarding devoting himself entirely to a job, and holds his responsibilities above all else. He was managing a lumber yard, working 80 hours a week (on salary) to finish and set up for the next day long after everyone else had left.
2) He loves truck driving, and is constantly talking about how careful truckers must be because of the damage the trucks can cause.in many ways, whether I understand or not, it is his life, and he does his best at all times.
3) He has worked OTR before, even teamed with his dad for a few months, and he has had only one load that was 15 minutes late with Covenant, and he lists his availability immediately.
4) My husband stays out 6 weeks at a time, even though he has been told Covenant only allows 5 days off at a time. He doesn't complain.
He's not perfect, but he cares and is a good employee.
Now that that is out of the way...
At first, Covenant was exceptional. He was averaging 2500 miles per week. He gave a week's notice to come home, and the dispatcher got him home. She asked that he give more notice in the future, so he has always given two weeks since then. Second time he got home, he felt great because his dispatcher had complimented him and thanked him for always being so reliable.
Then he passed his three month mark... He got sent to the yard in Allentown for log book training. Once he got there, he was in training all day Friday (no pay) and told he had two problems with his logs, although his trainers didn't tell him what they were. He sat the weekend and was given a load Monday morning (no layover). Covenant doesn't pay layover until after 48 hours. The load was 800 miles and delivered Wednesday afternoon; no possibility for early delivery. He sat two more days, before getting a 500 mile load that delivered the following Monday.
Are you seeing the trend?
He has been averaging less than 1000 miles every week since he hit his three month mark. At one point, backing in to a load, he lost a mud flap. The guy unloading said, "Yeah, almost everybody loses mudflaps the way it is set up." It was considered an incident, $500 fee. Shortly after, they routed him through Chattanooga for safety training (unpaid, but breaking up 3.5 days of layover, so no layover either). He was called to an accident hearing, and he disputed the accident explaining the angles and layout of the loading area. He was advised it called for an onsite review and they would give him an answer the following week. If the review came back it was his fault, they would charge him a flat fee of $500 in weekly increments. He called back for the review decision and was told they didn't have to review the accident and they would get around to it when they felt like it. They've already started charging him.
Now, to the people who believe these complaining truckers are taking too much advances and they owe the company for advances... My husband takes less than a hundred dollars weekly. He lives on canned soup and water or soda. I just had to file for free lunches for my kids and they looked at his gross pay... $206/week for an average of three weeks.
He spent a week and a half sitting up north. He got charged for IdleAire, which he uses to keep down his idle charges and is a reasonable fee. However, he was stuck at a few truck stops that didn't have it, so he had to idle his truck... $80 last week, $185 this week. His dispatcher is on vacation, so his new dispatcher told him he should be sitting in the trucker lounge, not the truck. The place he was stopped didn't even have a lounge, so his dispatcher told him to sit in McDonalds for two days at a time. I don't know what his dispatcher thought he should do with his dog that he pays to keep in the truck.
So this week he finally got a decent paycheck, over $400 gross, but he only netted $135 of that.
The boys and I have been living on about $50 worth of groceries and household every week. We don't qualify for food stamps because his gross is disproportionate to his net. His gross, combined with child support and SSI for our son only comes to a yearly income of $22,000. The coalition for the homeless has kept us in our apartment.
Don't mock these drivers, they ARE stuck. We don't even have the money to get him back to FL, so he can leave this job. He is supposed to start with Heartland in January, but we have no idea how to get him and his stuff here without abandoning the truck. He's afraid that if he tells Covenant he wants to leave, they will not route him to a terminal or route him home for Christmas.
What this company is doing is criminal.
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