My understanding is if an employee gets fired, they don't have to pay the sign on bonus back. It would be ABF that broke the contract.
Thats one of the great losses of trucking.
They fire people like myself when I popped a tire or something stupid. It would cost 300 bucks for another tire or perhaps a thousand dollars to rebuild a curbing or something else. Even as much as 20,000 or more dollars in losses. Ive paid for all that damage. Usually by firing the the small ones. and enduring civil suits for some of the big stuff. Which ends up getting settled by insurance in the end because I have been fired and are unemployed with no wages to pay any Judgment. If there was one given.
When I started trucking I was with smaller companies that usually took the money out of my pay for the damages and mistakes I made. I once did 10,000 dollars in damage to another company tractor in Hahn out of New Market, effectively totalling that tractor and creating big problems that day. They fired me later that week.
Would I have paid the 10K? Sure. You bet. It would have taken me about roughly 6 months but they would have been paid in full out of my wages. No problem and I would have learned never to make that mistake again. But the summary firing, dismissial and routine punishments and so on over the years just reinforce the idea that Truckers are disposable. To be thrown away.
Guess what, I dont need trucking anymore because they continue to this day to badly throw away truckers that they fail to train properly. Or make them pay for further lessons in not breaking stuff with their wages. Fire em. Hes gone. Paper over the losses and continue on.
One company gave me very old tractors. I broke I think three of them in two months. They could not give a :
:. But I learned to stop breaking them. They are in the scrap yard to this day rotting and rusting as monuments to my newbie stupidity from trucking school. To be new is to be a very dangerous liability to any company. But they should not embark on a policy of throwing them away if they scraped something.
Once companies adopt the idea that new truckers are like young children, and should be allowed to break a vase now and again and then made to learn not to keep breaking that vase,
But thats not going to happen. Truckers are considered trash and will be such forever.