As upnorth said, yes, 8/40 and technically they are supposed to pay OT after 60 even on a L/H run, but I know guys that go over, and don't say anything and the company looks the other way. When someone gets the urge to complain, and labor canada does an audit, and they will, then the company will be on the hook for all payroll infractions for the past three years, plus a hefty hefty fine. As for linehaul and weather. They try and take a stand, but to be honest, they usually refer locally for the weather because the service centers are so far apart that it can be great weather all around, but one service center has bad weather. Not like say the chicago area, where if one has bad weather, you can rest assured that 5 or 6 also have bad weather, and linehaul will make the call.
Dodge Ram, you are close, but kinda mixing 2 things together. With equipment, the issue is the tax. Since our equipment is usually purchased in the US and the tax is paid there, they are legal to use in the US. But once they are sent to Canada, they are allowed one loaded move inbound, and one loaded move outbound, as well as an empty move internally for US trailers (300's). But, the 417's (or most of them)have had tax paid on both sides of the line, so they are good to go. But of course, with equipment allocation, if you guys are using our trailers, and we are using yours, then we are running illegally because the 300 trailers do not have the tax paid on them here. The company usually gets slapped with a big fine every year, and it fixes them for a little bit, then they just go off the rails again and get slapped again, and so the cycle goes. You don't even want to know the plethora of nightmares they are eventually going to get nailed with up here once they do get caught, like Cdn plated trailers with US safeties, US plated tractors with no Cdn safeties, and so on, and so on. And they have been warned many times, but the licensing dept in Portland just always thinks they are right, until they get nailed, then say they didn't understand. I don't really care, as long as I get a paycheck, lol.
The problems with moves inside the US is with the driver himself. We usually refer to it here as inter-stating. Basically because we are not legally allowed to work in the US without citizenship, or a green card, we can only make a loaded move inbound, and a loaded move outbound in the US, plus an empty move. But, the same thing applies to US drivers up here as well.
The biggest gripe I have operationally is the sales side of things. We used to have our own dedicated BDC (sales department) in our office in Toronto, but they did away with that when they made the big single company shift, and now our sales efforts here are almost nothing. Which makes other companies just laugh their @$$es off at us because we do so much sub-service coming north, because we have more freight inbound than we do outbound. If none of you knew it before, let me tell you now, Canada is an EXPORTING nation, meaning we export more products than we import and it's been like that since jaws was a minnow. But for some reason our operations/sales seems to not understand common international economics. There is no company, other than YRC that even compares to the kind of service we can and should provide up here and we still cover more area's directly than YRC does but the company has no interest in capitalizing on the opportunities that are staring them square in the face.
Lol, that's my little rant for today. Keep asking questions if you have them, I like answering. Most Americans know very little about Canada, and could care less, so I always take the opportunity to shine a light for anyone that wants to see. You don't have to limit it to the company side of things either but you can just bugger right off if you want to know where my fishin holes are!!!
