Pman,
We recently had a 27 yr driver with over 15 years of safe driving crack a mirror while going down a rural, tree-lined 1/2 mile long driveway.
He called it in, and the center responded by sending a supervisor out on a 4 hr round trip drive up into the hills of the Oregon Coast range so that he could take about 15 pictures of a tree branch.
That night, I sat in with the driver as a shop steward during a 40 minute meeting to discuss the "accident".
The next day, the supervisor spent 10 hours riding with this driver. And for the next 5 days, the driver was required to show up 15 minutes early and report to the "safe zone" in order to regurgitate safety acronyms.
If we assign a value of $50 per hour to the 13.5 hours that the supervisor spent investigating, analyzing, photgraphing, documenting and prosecuting this "accident"....it comes to about $700, including mileage on his personal vehicle.
To that we add almost 2.5 hours of driver overtime (80 minutes for the driver and myself at the meeting, plus the hour and 15 minutes that the driver spent in the "safe zone") which cost the company another $150 ($45 an hour OT plus pension contributions, Social Security etc.)
Bottom line: we made a business decision to spend over $800 on a cracked mirror that costs the shop about $6.
Its not the cost of our drivers that is making it harder for us to compete. It is our bloated, top-heavy, inflexible, incompetent, paranoid, metrics-obsessed management structure that is making it harder for us to compete.
You have the best and hardest-working drivers in the industry. Want us to succeed? Then set us up to succeed and get the hell out of our way!