Troy sent a message to John N. Roberts, III – President, Chief Executive Officer and Director of J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. – Email Address that said:
Hello Mr. Roberts,
My name is Troy. I am a Lease Operator with your company.
My Fleet Manager is Holly.
Let me begin by saying that my fleet manager is a sweet, wonderful and caring human being. She cares a great deal about her drivers and tends to over-extend herself to the point of exhaustion to try and find the right answers and do the right thing.
She is often criticized for her depth of dedication from the more senior in her cohort because she actually cares and takea it personal that we, as drivers, are not treated as fairly as we should. She may not know every aspect of her job but she tries like hell to find out. She's an asset and I am proud to be on her team.
That being said, I began at JB Hunt in May.I had a slow start and then things started to pick up a bit. Since then it's been touch and go. My issue(s) stem from the lack of transparency for lease operators amongnother things. With your first program, you owned the trucks and had programs with forced dispatch. There was no autonomy. However with this program, the only thing you truly own is your DOT Authority. The driver literally pays for everything else. There is no reason why a driver should not have access to the load board, the planners and be able to pick and choose loads rather than wait and wait and wait until something "pops up" on our recommends and then wait and wait and wait until we can get in touch with a fleet manager to find out what the load is paying, how much weight it is, what the ACTUAL miles are and if there are any special conditions surrounding it.
I understand that those with their own authority can view and use those boards. Why is it that we cannot? The only information that we receive is where the freight is picked up and where it's going. Sometimes we get the weight and sometimes we don't. Why is that? Does one go to a restaurant and is given choice of different brown bags without any description of its contents and then told to choose one and if they do not, no other food will be served for another few hours in the same manner? No, because it's ludicrous.
Friday (8/19/2016), I received a rec for a load. It was at 5:15pm, I called and talked to a weekend fleet manager. I explained that I needed to speak to my FM. He stated that they were all gone. Okay, then I asked if he could find the "money on the load". Rather than saying, "I don't know how to do that" he proceeded to try and get in touch with my FM. By now it's 5:30pm. I told him to please send the info over the OBC because it was taking too long. By the time I got the info that I needed, the rec was gone.
At the moment, I am still waiting for a load. When I enquired yesterday about what was happening, I was told that a load will "automatically" pop up when it becomes available. So I look at other load boards. Mercer, LandStar and a few indys. There was more freight than ever on those boards and I have to wait till something....pops up?
There has to be a better way. I called at 3am this morning to enquire about positioning myself for the next load. I was told nothing will come available until 6 or 7am. Well, it's 7am and nothing is here.
My point to all of this is that in order to properly take care of your drivers and keep them moving, your employees must be thoroughly trained, be fitted with the proper tools and, for lack of a better term, Give A Damn about JB Hunt's mission and its life's blood...the drivers. Not just worry about what will affect their paycheck, not just panic when a middle manager crunches numbers and gives a subtle suggestion to highly paid expendable who in turn trickles their ,now, emergency down to the lower ranks.
This is JB Hunt. This name is synonymous with transportation. I have a true sense of pride when I tell people who I work for and that name should match the quality of its human infrastructure and the inner workings there of.
