I’m looking for some answers to my questions and hoping to confirm a few things I suspect. So I hope it’s okay though post this here as it felt like the best subreddit to ask.
I apologize as I’m not a trucker myself, but my husband is and I usually ride along with him if it’s allowed.
My husband has had a CDL for around 5 years now and he’s done a little bit of everything, but he started working with this company around 9 or 10 months ago. This company works with oil fields and do a variety of jobs. My husband works a gap vac or hydrovac truck, as he calls it. I apologize if that’s not that correct term, but I have no idea what it’s called. Basically, he drives to an oil site, cleans out the different tanks, and then drives back to the company site.
There’s been no issues until they hired a new dispatcher three months ago. This dispatcher is a nightmare. She will send incorrect directions to the job site and then get mad and yell at him when he’s late. She threatens to take money from his paycheck if he drives back without certain equipment, like hoses, even if other drivers take the equipment without him knowing.
But what I’m worried about is situations that she has been putting him in. Monday she sent him for a job in Texas, about 2 1/2 hours away. After 24 hours, the job was finished and he was getting ready to come home when she called and demanded that he goes straight to another job, which was over 1 1/2 hours from where he was, and complete some work over there. So he does.
I’m not by any means upset that he’s not home every night, I’m afraid for his safety and the safety of everybody else on the road. He was exhausted but he can’t quit and he doesn’t want to get fired. She’s only a dispatcher, but she has threatened through texts multiple times that she would get him written up or fired if he wouldn’t go to a job site or if he was late to a job site.
I know what the federal laws state but I know there are exceptions to oil field workers and I’m unsure how they work in his situation. Mostly because although he is on the job site and is technically working, he’s not always driving the truck. He does have to keep the truck running the entire time from what I understand. Which is something else that he complains about because the trucks they run are garbage. The truck he was sent in this time has never had AC, brake lights, or proper hoses.
Speaking of garbage trucks, this company has sent my husband to job sites in trucks that didn’t have proper working lights, wasn’t registered, and didn’t even have a license plate, among other things. My husband actually got stopped by a state trooper once who shut the truck down and when my husband called his boss, his boss told him to drive to the location anyway or he would be fired. My point being that this company doesn’t care about their drivers.
So I’m hoping someone can clarify how drive times work with what my husband does and if there are other federal laws that we should be aware of. I’m also hoping someone can tell me what, if anything, I can do to help. Or that he could do to get this dispatcher to back off her crazy. Actually, any advice or information is helpful.
I’m just afraid that his fear of being fired is going to cause him to wreck that truck. And that is never a situation anyone wants to happen.
