First, the backstory: A while ago, I was a dispatcher for a trucking company. Finding loads on Transcore 360 and ITS for 52″ dry vans, sending load details to company drivers and offering loads to OO drivers.
From day one, owner was bitchiing about not having enough drivers. My father drove and through his circle of friends, I knew experienced, reliable drivers. Owner knew some of them but whenever I would suggest them, he would dismiss them as not a good option.
Until I figured out his pattern. He was seeking out “fresh off the boat” immigrants (owner is a 1st gen immigrant himself) to hire as owner operators. The company drivers had to be at least proficient in English but for owner operators, the opposite was the requirement.
He kept pushing for higher demands and eventually I was able to figure out the good and relatively easy loads, kept finding good loads but there was a lot switching around after I would take a load. For example, I find freight for an OO, but after I take a load and exchange load confirmation, loads would be shifted back and forth between different drivers and I had to contact the broker again and update the details. What really stung is I was blamed for that and it made me furious after I figured out the whole game.
I noticed that, as I book a load, the owner would change the saved confirmation file, it would be renamed and asterisks added with digits attached.
The company owner had the following agreement with the owner operators: The company would seek out loads for them in exchange for a 10% fee of the paid value. For example, a load pays $1500, the OO driver gets $1350.
Then, on one occasion, I found a good paying load and the owner bent over backwards to make the load work for a company driver but couldn’t because of his late afternoon delivery appointment for the previous load. So he eventually passed it to a OO driver but for $200 less.
The owner was seeking out drivers that barely spoke English and he insisted that the brokers contact the company for updates and not the drivers directly.
Basically, he sought inexperienced drivers and tried to prevent direct communication between brokers seeking updates on the load status and the owner operators because he didn’t want the brokers to let slip the actual load price.
That’s when it dawned on me. Because he was stealing from the owner operator drivers all the time, he had a bookkeeping problem, it was hard to track what he told the drivers they were getting paid vs. what the loads actually paid.
That’s why they were asterisks attached to the OO driver loads, it was his way of tracking how much he stole from them so that when he issued the paychecks, the amounts would match with what he told the drivers.
I pulled the load confirmations as far back as I could, 2 years back, I transferred all the * load confirmations to a USB stick and gave it to the drivers.
Just yesterday, I spoke to a dispatcher I met and found that the practice is even more widespread than I thought.
The only thing that changes is the immigrant wave that gets taken advantage of. Sp I just wanted to urge you guys to spread the word to other drivers to alert them to this.
