DART TRANSPORTATION Lies Greed Lack of care for the drivers and their families St. Paul, Minnesota Nationwide

I am an o/o (owner operator) leased onto Dart Transit based out of Egan MN I have been with the company about a year and a half or so. In the begining things were great like the rest of the drivers I was making good money. I'm driving on the northeast short haul account. The former dispatcher (Grant) was probably one of if not the best dispatchers I have had to work with. Feb. 2014 Grant got married and left Dart  as a replacement we (the northeast short haul drivers) got stuck working with 2 people. Person 1 Mike Turner the account/sales manager and person 2 Lisa Dawson the replacement dispatcher. Since Grant left, 1 the  price of freight has fallen by at least $100 per load, 2 the short haul account is now a dadicated account, 3 we (the drivers) have been told that we are no longer allowed to have back hauls if we get a load from Breinigsville,PA going to Foulmouth,VA paying $480 (this is after tolls,fuel,and our daily operating cost come out) thats $1 a mile now going back to Breinigsville,PA to get our next load well we have to cough up cost out of our pockets losing any profit we could have made, or get stuck with an ungodly amount of dead head miles on our dime to get a back haul that pays next to nothing.This is now being done on all loads.

 4 there are more times then not where we are dispatched on a load that picks up in the morning but delivers 24 hours later. thats a whole day of lost wages. 5 if we turn down a load regaurdless of the reason we have a dr. appt or we dont have the hours to run the load whatever we get a service failure. 6 Lisa relies on everything the computer tells her " the computer says you can do this,that,or the other" problem is the computer does not account for anything such as road work,weather,accidents,30 min break,getting held up at a shipper/consignee's yard. End result the driver gets a service failure and in a lot of cases Lisa will leave you sit for a day or two. Every time you try to talk to either one of them or try to explain anything to them they tell you " I dont know or I dont understand" when you ask Lisa for a back haul she tells you "I got nothing" since when does a driver have to beg for work? From what I was told the mileage Dart is giving us on the loads is based on zip code to zip code NOT point A to point B. Both Mr.Turner and Ms.Dawson are running us o/o as if we are company drivers,only wanting to pay us $200 a day. A company driver can work like that because Dart pays for everything the fuel,tolls,taxes,health care,truck payments,and insurance. Us o/o have to pay for all of that at $200 a day times 5 days is $1000 you take $300 of that for health care that leaves $700 then take $300 from that for taxes you have $400 so on and so on. How are we to pay our personal bills and support our families on nothing. We are being treated like a company drivers paying for Darts equipment.

If I'm not mistaken there are laws for things like this. Both Mr.Turner and Ms.Dawson get paid salary and take a pay check home every payday WHY cant we? This time last year I was bring home at least 12-$1400 a week since then I might see 900-$1000 once every 2 or 3 months the rest of the time 0-$200 a week what the hell happened. Most of us drivers have gotten together and talked about this we also have gone through all the channels Dart has to offer dispatch,the account manager,the "A-Team" all the way up to Darts legal team yet nothing has changed. Since I have been here the notheast has had so many drivers come and go its hard to keep up. I think there are only 6 or 7 of us left.

Since Feb.2014 I have lost everything I'm divorced paying child support with no money my car got repoed I lost my apartment I'm living in my truck now, when I did my taxes I went over 18k in the hole. There is another driver on this account that has it worse then me. He has a wife and 7 children to feed. Right now he is looking for work else where like most of us are. Due the the fact Dart and their office personal are not takineg care of their drivers we would love nothing more then to bring a law suit against the company problem is we are not making enough money to pay our bills much less hire an attorney