Where a carrier's people decisions meet its safety record

I plan driver supply from the inside out. Before Brennoway hires an experienced driver from another carrier, I want to know how many of our own dock workers, yard hostlers and technicians' helpers could drive within a year, and what it would take. Our academy trains to the federal entry-level driver training standard that took effect in February 2022, and it is listed on the federal training provider registry. Trainees keep their full wage through seven weeks of classroom, range and road instruction, then spend twelve weeks beside a mentor driver before running a route alone. I have run schools with and without repayment agreements, and I now argue against them for any carrier that can afford the alternative. The measures I watch are first-year retention, preventable crashes per million miles in a graduate's first year and the vacancy each class leaves behind on the dock.

On an LTL dock, people move freight from inbound trailers to outbound ones by forklift and pallet jack, against a clock set by linehaul departures. Engineered pace standards are needed to plan that work, and they also decide how hard a new worker pushes before learning to handle freight safely. I work with our industrial engineers and safety team on three questions: how standards are introduced to people in their first months, how they are explained in writing and whether a shortfall leads to coaching or to discipline. I read injury data by length of service, shift and freight type rather than by service centre alone, because in 2022 more than half our dock injuries happened to people in their first 180 days. I also insist that service centre managers' scorecards weight injuries and early turnover as heavily as cost per hundredweight.

Brennoway prefers to deal with its employees directly, and 167 of our 168 service centres are not represented. Joliet has been represented since 2023, and we administer a collective agreement there. I think both situations call for the same discipline. Employees decide whether they want a union. Management's part is to state its view honestly, train supervisors in what federal labour law permits and forbids, and avoid tactics whose main purpose is delay. Where employees have chosen representation, our part is to bargain in good faith and apply the contract with care. I also run the work that keeps a petition from being about something we should already have fixed: yearly wage benchmarking for every service centre, a complaint route that bypasses the employee's own supervisor and a quarterly review of discipline by location.

Commercial drivers fall under the Department of Transportation's testing rules: pre-employment, random, post-accident, reasonable-suspicion, return-to-duty and follow-up testing, with queries to the federal Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse. I treat that programme as fixed and keep its administration separate, with its own medical review officer and records. Other roles are governed by company policy and state law, and the states in our network differ on cannabis. I design company policy by asking which roles are safety-sensitive by the nature of the work, such as forklift and yard tractor operation, and what testing those roles need. With our safety department I run reasonable-suspicion training for supervisors, which I regard as the weakest point in most carriers' programmes. Applicants who may later join the academy are told in writing that federal rules apply from their first day of training.

I have managed automation twice: goods-to-person robotics in two Cordavine warehouses in 2018, and the freight dimensioning and pickup-planning pilots now running at Brennoway. Both times the technology arrived with a business case that counted labour savings and said little about who would do what afterwards. Before approval I ask for a role-by-role account: which tasks disappear, which change, which new ones appear and what training each needs. At Cordavine we held pickers' pay for twelve months while they retrained, and 290 of 340 stayed. At Brennoway I want the dispatcher and freight-inspector changes settled, with wage protection and a training route, before the network rollout reaches the board. I distrust headcount reduction as the only measure of an automation project, and I am equally wary of telling anyone that their role will never change.