In the late 80’s and for the next few decades I worked for a household good mover, when I started it was about a 7 million dollar company and when I left it was over 200 million. So needless to say I witnessed a lot of changes.
I was in operations/dispatch , I planned the jobs on our drivers that ran the entire United States. At our high we had approximately 150 drivers in what we called our permanent fleet, in the perm fleet our operations department planned all the loads and had daily contact with all the drivers , remember this was long before cellphones and computers.
The perm fleet consisted of drivers that were owner operators , they ran as their own business and had their own LLC , actually pretty much like any other business responsible for claims, taxes, insurance etc the only difference is thier business is on wheels.
In the perm fleet was also drivers that drove for a particular agent in the country that was affiliated with my Van Lines, the difference there was the agent owned the truck and trailer and equipment and was responsible to pay the driver, we paid the agent, they paid the driver.
Because the Van Lines and I were located in Rhode Island there were times that I dispatched drivers and would rarely meet them, example a driver May live in CA and I may dispatch him work from CA going to TX and then when he delivered everything I would dispatch jobs going back to CA.
The make up of our drivers in the perm fleet ran the gambit , big, heavy, short, skinny, black, white, owner op and agent drivers and everything else in between, even gay before people talked out loud about it.
I rose in the ranks and eventually ran the entire domestic operations and I took my responsibilities seriously, we moved military members, FBI, civilians, National Account’s like Hasbro and relocation Realtor’s , everyone wanted to move in the summer when kids were out of school so every year there was a mad dash from May to September and we moved thousands of people every week and even every day.
Drivers could make a very good living for themselves , making on there 1099 from $200,000 to $400,000 and more a year so there was a lot of competition for loads, some had more weight and miles which paid more, each move was weighed once loaded on the trailer and at the end of a trip the Van lines settled with the driver or the agent.
How we chose who received what loads was easy to us, we preferred to load the guy that we knew would be where he said he would be and we knew he was professional with how he handled the customers belongings and was polite and helpful to the customer and knew how to handle his finances and logs.
That was essentially it, that is what we cared about and how we chose certain drivers for loads.
Now during that time I was accused by everyone of being biased. There was a hotel near our office that most drivers stayed at called the lucky 8 and from time to time Iwould stop in to share a beer with a driver and share a laugh and story and during some visits the driver would outright accuse me of favoritism. The white driver would say I favored the black drivers,the black driver would say I favored the white, the agent driver said I favored the owner op and so on, crazy right.
All I cared about was taking care of the job and making dates and satisfying the customer ...period.
Sometimes because I never met some drivers I had no idea if they were white black big or short, and I did not care.
The Van lines would help some drivers out with loans so then the word was those were the drivers we preferred because we wanted our money paid back, again - wrong- no one in dispatch was even privy to that and once again we had a job to do - make dates and satisfy our customer.
So YES we did have a culture of favoritism in my operations, we favored those that did their job !!
Simple- if you work hard and people can trust you to consistently do your best you will rise.
Looking back everyone was paranoid about everybody else because they were scared someone was going to take something from them and all along all they had to do was apply all that energy to improving themselves and their work and the rest would have taken care of itself.
The moral of the story is just worry about YOU and what you can do be better at your job and how to just be an overall better person - and stop worrying about the other guy.
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