I can’t stress this enough. I DON’T WANT EXPRESS DRIVERS!!!!
They’ve been powdered and pampered for far too long.
I don't think it's so much "powdered and pampered" as much as it is the simply reality that the nature of the work at Express is nowhere near as labor intensive.
At Ground they'll steal any piece of motor freight they can grab off the LTL's while the dimension and weight limits are not rigorously enforced. Not surprising given that the liability for an on the job injury falls not on the company but the contractor.
Comes back to what I said earlier about delivering at Ground....the job is a joint killer.
Today you have all these non driving contractors. They're not out there destroying their joints. They just send some other guy out to destroy his. And after he does what's there to pay his medical bills and give him something to try to live on?
Well....nothing.
And it's not necessarily a negative reflection on the contractor. The trouble is that Fat Freddy and all his righteous greed has hacked contractor settlement rates so low that as has been mentioned here leaving some contractors having to give the guy literally everything the route makes just to get him to do it. And therefore the challenge for contractors has and will continue to be finding a guy who can pass a drug test and deliver an exceptional amount of production for an impossibly low rate of pay.