Here's why. Let's say a terminal has 200 drivers and 100 of them are on the extra board. If 30 of the extra board men ran an extra trip each week due to the 34 hour reset, at let's say, 500 miles per trip......that's a 15,000 mile gain in efficiency and a loss of five 3000 mile per week or six jobs of 2,500 miles at the bottom of the board. Naturally the more guys who ran the extra trip the more job losses at the bottom. It would also mean less new men would be hired in the future.
I had a fairly new guy in the spring of 04 (when Tyson J. and the Companies were fighting over this) cursing Tyson J. and asking me how he could do this....I told him that in May, when freight is good and everybody's working he might not see the negative of the 34 hour reset.....but wait until November,December, January, February.....the slow season....then he would sit at home while the guys above him ran the extra trip.....he didn't like the sound of that too much...when I added the part about the lack of new hires in the future he said they didn't matter because they weren't even hired yet.....I replied that these new hires were very important to his future and he couldn't see how.....I told him that the money paid into the retirement funds on behalf of these new hires would be what he retired on. I told him that sometimes a guy really needs to look past this week's paycheck and think about the bigger picture. He finally saw what I was talking about and said he'd never even considered the things I told him but now it made a lot of sense.