I treat every rule a carrier sets for its drivers and dock workers, from what a trainee owes to how fast a new hire must load, as a safety decision the board should see priced.
I am executive vice president and chief human resources officer of Brennoway Freight Lines, a privately held less-than-truckload carrier based in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We move about 41,000 shipments a day through 168 service centres in 24 states, and in 2025 we earned US$3.4 billion of revenue. I am responsible for hiring, the driver academy, pay, labour relations, HR operations and, jointly with our safety department, the workforce side of injury prevention for 15,900 people. Of those, 6,700 are drivers and 4,900 work on our docks and yards. Our compensation and benefits expense was US$1.71 billion last year. I report to our chief executive, Warrick Densmore, and prepare the papers our board's compensation and people committee works from.
I came to HR from the cab and the dock. In 1993, holding a history degree and student loans, I signed a repayment agreement to attend Tullwater Motor Freight's driving school, then spent four years on a city route in Toledo, Ohio. I later supervised a night dock and ran a service centre in Dayton until Tullwater stopped operating in December 2008. After that I ran driver recruiting and a company school at Stonemarch Transport, a truckload carrier, and led HR at Cordavine Fulfilment Services, a contract warehouse operator, before joining Brennoway in 2019.
Four questions have shaped my time here. Where should our next drivers come from, and should they owe us for their training? Why were our newest dock workers hurt so much more often than experienced ones? How should a company that prefers a direct relationship with its employees behave when some of them ask for a union vote? And which testing rules does federal law require for drivers, as opposed to rules we had stretched over everyone else? Each answer came with a cost.
Drivers trained from our own docks, with no bill attached
Since 2021 our academy has trained 1,380 drivers, 1,010 of them from Brennoway's docks, with no repayment clause. First-year retention of dock graduates is 86%, against 54% for the cohorts trained under the old eighteen-month agreement.
Injuries reduced where new dock workers start
Phasing pace standards in over sixteen weeks and ending discipline for pace alone helped cut our dock recordable injury rate from 8.3 to 4.7 per 100 full-time workers between 2022 and 2025. Dock productivity remains 1.6% below its 2022 level.
A union petition answered without delaying the vote
When 214 drivers and dock workers in Joliet, Illinois, petitioned for an election in 2023, we accepted the proposed unit and wrote conduct rules for our own managers. Employees voted for representation, and we ratified a first contract thirteen months later.
Testing rules that follow the work
We left the federal programme for drivers unchanged, kept testing for equipment operators, dropped the hair test for dock applicants and ended pre-hire cannabis tests for office roles. Dock vacancies fell from 8.8% to 4.0%; post-incident positives held near 1%.
Current focus
Most of my 2027 will go on two pieces of work. We are piloting automated freight dimensioning and software-assisted pickup planning at twelve service centres, which will change the work of about 310 dispatchers and freight inspectors, and I want the job changes, a year of wage protection and a training route agreed before the network rollout is approved. I am also preparing for bargaining over the successor to our Joliet agreement, which expires in October 2027 and will be the first renewal of a collective agreement in Brennoway's history.
Conversations I welcome
I have no interest at present in another executive appointment. I would consider one non-executive directorship, ideally on a board safety committee or a compensation and human capital committee, at a company that is neither a freight carrier nor a significant Brennoway customer or supplier, and only with our chief executive's agreement. I also accept a few advisory conversations and working sessions a year on driver pipelines, dock safety and testing policy.