‘Their Loads Are Garbage’: Drivers Say Uber’s Trucking Business Is Making a Tough Job Worse
By: Amy Martyn
Tags: Technology, Gig Economy, Uber, Trucking, Business

Lewie Pugh saw potential for Uber Freight, hoping it would correct some of the mistakes of its predecessors and help truckers who might have difficulty booking good loads at the other firms. A former driver, and the current executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Pugh says that Uber’s sales team reached out to his organization in 2017 for feedback ahead of Freight’s launch.

An estimated 70% of the nation’s freight reaches its destination thanks to truck drivers, yet drivers say they feel like they are the most dispensable part of the operation. Ask a truck driver what would improve their working conditions, and their requests are modest. Truckers want to be guaranteed pay for detention, or the hours they are detained at a shipping site when a customer is running more than two hours late. They need more sites to safely park overnight so they can get sleep after a 14-hour workday. And they want higher pay. To survive, independent truckers live and die by whatever the going rate is for freight. Freight rates can vary widely depending on a number of factors, including distance of the delivery, the amount of labor required to load and unload, and how soon the load needs to be moved. From a trucker’s perspective, it’s often not possible to pinpoint the reason for decreasing rates — are they due to a change in demand? Or middlemen increasing their take?

“They take a lot of advantage of the truckers. TQL sucks,” says a woman filling her truck up at a stop in Long Beach, California, referring to Total Quality Logistics, the second-largest freight broker in the nation with $687 million in profits last year. The woman, who declined to give her name, says she decided to quit her office job to become a truck driver after her children grew up. The best part of the job is the freedom. The hardest part is dealing with freight brokers and shipping clients who don’t want to pay detention fees.

Under federal law, truckers have the right to find out how much freight brokers are making on each job. But in practice, truckers say they give up that right when they sign contracts with the major firms. According to a TQL trucking agreement obtained by OneZero, TQL “is not required to disclose its charges to customers, commissions, or brokerage revenue,” and truckers must waive their right under federal law to ask for that information. TQL declined to comment.

Mike Matousek, the director of government affairs at the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, says drivers would never get away with trying to exempt themselves from any of the federal regulations they must abide by. Regulators at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and law enforcement “would get a good laugh out of that,” he says, yet “brokers have been getting away with this for decades.”

Uber advertises that truck drivers on its platform will get “guaranteed rate transparency,” and that freight rates are determined by an algorithm. But Uber declined to say what percentage it makes on jobs, and like TQL and others, requires drivers to waive their right to broker transparency. “As with most other brokers, carriers waive their rights under that federal regulation as part of their carrier agreements,” Uber Freight says.

When Uber asked Pugh to weigh in on its contract for truckers, he suggested reworking the sample contract by guaranteeing detention pay and providing truckers with more legal protections in the event of damaged goods, among other suggestions. Uber eventually got back to him to say that their attorneys rejected all of his suggestions, he says. An Uber Freight spokesman told OneZero that “we did incorporate modifications into our carrier agreement based on OOIDA feedback,” but declined to provide specific examples.

According to truckers interviewed by OneZero, Uber Freight pays detention on a case-by-case basis, but getting the money is not easy. Truckers say they feel like they are arguing with an app rather than an actual salesperson. Joseph Aljebuori, a trucker who tried Uber Freight because the app was easy to use, says that Uber has never paid him for detention time. In one instance last year, he says he arrived at the Dollar General distribution center in Missouri two hours ahead of his scheduled appointment, which is the norm. But Dollar General was running late — more than 11 hours late, to be exact. In the end, he says he spent 13 hours detained at the Dollar General lot without getting detention pay. In a statement, Uber Freight says that under its current detention policy, drivers are paid $40 an hour for detention, but only for a maximum of five hours. The spokesman says that the driver in this case was paid a flat $200 layover fee for the wait at Dollar General.

“They pay fast, they pay pretty good, and they pay fast.”

One of Uber’s key selling points is that its up-front pricing will save drivers from the hassle of negotiating. “With Uber Freight, the price you book is the price you’re paid,” Uber says. But truckers say that this feature works to their disadvantage when they are demanding detention or fees for other unexpected issues that are common in trucking.

“That’s their way out, if they don’t agree to it on the rate con [the contract], they’re going to tell you they don’t have to pay it,” says Mark Kuhn, a truck driver in North Carolina, who says that he was stranded with a trailer full of Hanes socks for three days when Uber Freight gave the wrong information about a delivery to Dollar General.

With established brokerage firms, truckers typically deal with the actual broker or another single point-of-contact who they can easily reach by phone. But with app-based services like Uber, truckers say that the only live humans they talk to are anonymous customer service representatives who seem to be based overseas and are reading from scripts.

On jobs that span across several states, dispatchers with Uber Freight have called as often as every 45 minutes to check the status of the delivery, says driver Tony King. “More often than not, anyone who works for them has what I like to call the foreign understanding of the scale and size of the United States,” he says.

At the same time, when unexpected problems arise, truckers say that the Uber customer support team never has immediate answers. Instead, the call center workers put drivers on lengthy holds and eventually write “support tickets” that don’t go anywhere unless the trucker follows up with emails or more phone calls.

“Their account management is very, very poor on the trucking side,” says Courtney Perkins, a dispatcher for a trucking company in South Carolina whose firm has taken Uber Freight jobs including moving damaged merchandise to a thrift store and delivering air conditioners to a construction site that had no loading dock. In one instance, she says that Uber Freight provided the wrong appointment time, costing her company $1,000 because her driver was unable to make his next job as a result. “We use it as kind of a stand-in,” Perkins says, “like a last resort kind of place.”

A perhaps more generous name for being the last resort is to be in the “spot market,” or the term the logistics industry uses for booking freight jobs at the last minute. An Uber blog post highlights the spot market as a key area for growth.

About a year ago, Uber Freight offered competitive freight rates compared to others in the spot market, according to Ruzhdi Aliev, the owner of a truck company in Wyoming that specializes in spot orders. But the rates have since plummeted and are now among the bottom, he says. His impression is that Uber lowered freight rates after it recruited more truck drivers. “As soon as they had enough [truckers], they flipped the switch.”

If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because longtime drivers on the traditional Uber app have also complained about decreasing pay and poor account management. According to one 2018 study by the JP Morgan Chase Institute, a growth in ride-share drivers was accompanied by a 53% decline in driver earnings. And after Uber replaced some customer support representatives with contractors in the Philippines and India, ride-share customers and drivers said that their serious complaints went nowhere. Uber nevertheless in February laid off 80 customer support representatives in Los Angeles and indicated some of their roles would be filled by workers in Manila.

Uber Freight disputes that it has poor customer service, writing that Freight offers “24/7 carrier support, has a dedicated carrier sales team and continues to invest heavily in improving service for carriers and shippers alike.”

The spokesperson says that Uber Freight approves an average of nine out of 10 detention requests and closes out each request on an average of 33 minutes. “We have an automated, unbiased internal process that reviews each request fairly and quickly by leveraging GPS data and the carrier’s submitted in/out times to handle requests,” the spokesman writes.

Uber Freight also says that its freight rates in 2020 are better on average than they were in October 2019. “Freight’s rates are on par with market rates and reflect market conditions,” the statement says.

“Run all your competition out of business, you’d be the sole provider making a crap ton of money.”

Two truckers who were interviewed by OneZero say that they like using Uber Freight, though one acknowledged that he was still waiting for Uber to pay him after a lengthy detention. The other driver, Robert Murphy, says he regularly finds good rates on Uber Freight when he is in California and looking for a job that will take him to Arizona or Nevada. Murphy points out that Uber Freight does not charge “quick pay” fees, the industry term for fees that freight brokers deduct if drivers want to get paid faster than a month.

Since he joined Uber Freight, Murphy says that its rates on detention have dropped from $75 an hour to $40. But the freight rates leaving California have remained solid. “They pay fast, they pay pretty good, and they pay fast,” he laughs.