City Work

Although city work is something many of our drivers do not enjoy, it ends up saving the entire fleet a lot of time every week. We wanted to stress the importance of city work and how it is a benefit to other drivers, our customers, and thus the entire company.

The term “city work” refers to any work of transporting empty trailers to customer lots so they can load the trailer the night before dispatch. The operations team tries to avoid using drivers to do city work, but since our operations is based on meeting drivers commitments to be home, it creates city work, especially at the beginning (Mon) and end of the week (Fri/Sat).

City work allows our customers to pre-load our trailers for the following day or week. This allows drivers to start their days earlier instead of waiting until 7AM for a customer to open and start the live-loading process. Having a trailer pre-loaded from the night before lets drivers save a lot of time.

Sometimes a customer will only allow live-loading (requiring a driver to be present for the loading process so that they can move the trailer after loading is complete). In these cases, city work can also refer to the time it takes for a driver to be present for a live-load as well as the time it takes to drive that pre-loaded trailer back to one of our company drop-lots for later delivery.

We pay our drivers fairly if not above average for city work by providing a $25 stop off bonus and compensation for the mileage driven. For the cases where customers only allow live-loading, we offer a $20/hour detention pay rate after a two hour wait. This guarantees high pay for drivers who help out with city work.

We do have drivers dedicated to city work, but they are not always available. Adding city work to our driver’s route is efficient because a driver route may end up at a location where city work is needed. We always appreciate when drivers help out with city work. We compensate handsomely for city work so it is not time wasted.

It is important to remember that we are all on the same team. Performing city work helps other drivers by pre-loading their trailer for the following day, and it also helps you because other drivers pre-load your trailer too. We think of city work as the way that we adapt to our customer’s hours of operation for better customer service, and how we adapt to our driver’s home commitments as well.