Chief Human Resources Officer / United States
Four decisions and what each one cost Brennoway
- Colleagues
- 15,900
- Brennoway Freight Lines, June 2026
- Annual compensation and benefits expense
- US$1.71bn
- 2025; separate from the US$57m HR operating budget
- First-year retention of dock-to-driver graduates
- 86%
- Academy cohorts 2021–2025, with no repayment clause
Decisions & consequences
01Ending the training repayment clause and recruiting drivers from the dock
In 2020 Brennoway had 430 unfilled driver positions, 6.4% of the fleet, and paid sign-on bonuses of up to US$8,000 to experienced drivers. Our small academy trained about 150 outside recruits a year under an agreement requiring repayment of US$6,900 if a graduate left within eighteen months. First-year retention of the 2017–2019 cohorts was 54%. We billed departing graduates about US$1.3 million a year, collected roughly a quarter, and in 2019 referred 61 former trainees to collection agencies.
I proposed rebuilding the academy around our own dock workers. Any colleague with six months' service and a clean safety record could apply, keep full pay through seven weeks of training and owe nothing on leaving; outside recruits would join on the same terms. Our chief financial officer, Solveig Vasternak, argued that the clause fairly recovered a US$14,200 investment and that dropping it would let competitors hire our graduates cheaply. Corwin Haddleston, our vice president of safety, wanted new drivers kept off dense metro routes. Service centre managers objected that we would strip their docks of their best people.
We gave up the repayment income and accepted a thinner dock for a period. To meet the safety concern, graduates ride with a mentor for twelve weeks, run suburban routes for six months and pull no double trailers until they have a year on a city route. Our chief executive approved two pilot classes in January 2021 and expansion across the network that July.
From 2021 to 2025 the academy graduated 1,380 drivers, 1,010 of them from our docks. First-year retention reached 86% for dock graduates and 71% for outside recruits. Driver vacancies fell to 2.2% of the fleet, and sign-on bonus and recruitment advertising spend fell by US$8.6 million a year, against academy costs of about US$3.9 million. Graduates' preventable crash rate in their first year was 0.44 per million miles, against 0.37 for the fleet, converging in year two.
The academy is now our main source of drivers. My error was the dock. Its vacancies rose from 4.1% to 8.8% in 2022, and the overtime fell on the people who stayed. I would now open dock hiring at each service centre eight weeks before its colleagues start a class, not after they have gone.
Phasing in dock pace standards for new workers
In 2022 our docks recorded 8.3 recordable injuries per 100 full-time workers, mostly strains, struck-by incidents and forklift contacts. When our safety team and I sorted the cases by tenure instead of location, 58% involved people in their first 180 days, who worked about 30% of dock hours. Pace standards, set by our industrial engineers in 2014 as minutes per shipment adjusted for weight and handling units, applied in full after thirty days, and anyone below 85% of standard for two weeks could receive a written warning.
I proposed three changes. New dock workers would reach the full standard in steps over sixteen weeks. Nobody would be disciplined for pace alone; a shortfall had to accompany an observed problem of method or conduct. Every dock worker would receive the standard in writing, with how it was measured and what time was credited for safety checks. I also asked that service centre managers' scorecards weight injuries and 180-day turnover alongside cost per hundredweight.
Our chief operating officer, Garrick Ollerton, opposed the plan. He expected later departures and believed that ending pace-only discipline would undercut supervisors. He was partly right. Dock productivity fell 5.2% in the second half of 2023, about US$9.6 million at an annual rate, and several supervisors told me I had taken away their one objective tool. We gave up that tool and a year of dock output to test the idea.
By 2025 the dock recordable rate was 4.7, lost-time cases had fallen 44% and turnover among dock workers in their first 180 days had dropped from 57% to 38%. Productivity recovered to 1.6% below the 2022 level. Because we self-insure workers' compensation below a high retention, claims costs fell about US$6.9 million a year.
Injury data by tenure band now goes to the board safety committee every quarter. What I left too long was the standards themselves. They had been timed against a 2014 freight mix, before heavier household goods and bulky retail freight took a larger share of our tonnage. When we re-timed them in 2025 with dock workers taking part, a third of them changed. That review should have come first.
Answering an organising petition at our Joliet service centre
In August 2023 a national transport union petitioned the NLRB to represent 214 drivers and dock workers at our service centre in Joliet, Illinois. No Brennoway location had been represented in the company's seventy-one years. Our general counsel and chief operating officer recommended contesting the unit, arguing that the appropriate group was all three of our Chicago-area service centres, about 690 people, and retaining an outside labour-relations consultancy to run employee meetings. A hearing on the unit would probably have delayed the vote by months.
I recommended accepting the unit as petitioned, using no outside consultants to address employees and holding no mandatory meetings about the vote. The company would set out its preference for a direct relationship in a written question-and-answer note reviewed by counsel, and every Joliet supervisor would be trained within a week on what federal labour law allows and forbids. Our chief executive agreed and chose to write to employees himself, which I thought proper. Two directors asked whether we were inviting petitions elsewhere. I said I could not rule that out, and that delay would not change why Joliet employees had signed cards.
We gave up time, and with it any chance that opinion would shift before the vote. The election was held five weeks after the petition. Of 214 eligible employees, 207 voted: 118 for representation and 89 against. The union filed one unfair labour practice charge over a supervisor's remark in the first week, which we settled with a notice posting. We then bargained a three-year first contract, ratified in October 2024.
The wage comparison we prepared for bargaining showed that Joliet dock pay had slipped 9% below the local market, a gap our regional benchmarking had averaged away. We now benchmark every service centre each year, and in 2024 we raised dock pay at eleven other locations at a cost of US$4.2 million.
Joliet's employees may well have chosen representation whatever we had paid, and that was their decision to make. My regret is narrower. We should have found the wage gap ourselves rather than across a bargaining table, and supervisors should have been trained on the law long before any petition, not in the week after one.
Separating the federal testing programme from company policy
By 2022 Brennoway applied one drug and alcohol approach to everyone. Drivers were tested under federal rules, as they must be. Every other applicant, from dock workers to payroll clerks, took the same urine panel, cannabis included, and dock and driver applicants also took a company hair test reaching back about ninety days. In the states in our network that had legalised adult cannabis use, 7.6% of dock applicants tested positive before starting, against 3.1% elsewhere, and about one in five withdrew once told about the hair test. With the academy drawing people off the docks, dock vacancies had reached 8.8%.
I proposed separating the programmes. The federal programme for drivers would continue unchanged. Roles involving powered equipment, including forklifts and yard tractors, would keep pre-employment urine tests, post-incident tests and reasonable-suspicion tests by trained supervisors. The hair test would remain for driver applicants only. Office, sales and customer-service applicants would no longer be tested for cannabis before hire, though impairment at work would stay a disciplinary matter for everyone. Dock workers applying to the academy would be told in writing that federal rules applied from the first day of training.
Corwin Haddleston argued that one rule for everyone was easier to defend after an accident, and our excess liability insurer asked for a written rationale. Two drivers wrote to our chief executive that we had created a double standard. We gave up the simplicity of a single rule and accepted that after any serious dock incident we would have to explain the policy in detail.
The change took effect in October 2022. Dock offer-to-start conversion rose from 61% to 76%, and dock vacancies fell to 4.0% by the end of 2024. Post-incident positive results among equipment operators were 1.1% across 2021 and 2022 and 1.0% from 2023 to 2025. Driver results under the federal programme did not move in any meaningful way.
Our board safety committee now reviews testing results and reasonable-suspicion referrals by role group each year. I had the sequence wrong. Dock supervisors were trained to recognise impairment four months after the policy changed, and until then they referred almost nobody. I also met the two drivers after their letter, when I should have explained the distinction to drivers before the announcement.