For those with their own authority…

[silvan]

Some carriers try to push owner operators to take loads that may not be profitable for them.

That's no joke. My last job, I was running an O/O's extra truck, in effect. The company he had it leased with was always trying to get me to take a load where I had to drive 75 miles round trip to get paid for 1 mile, because it was all in the same county. "Oh, but you'll get $18 stop-off pay." Yeah, OK, let's break this down. 75 miles for $19. Uhhhh, NO!!!

As far as NASTC goes, I spent most of my career as a company driver with a small trucking company that was a member. Back then, what is apparently now FleetOne was still TransPlatinum, and it was a PITA fuel card that wasn't taken most places. We paid cash price instead of credit at the pumps, and got a small fleet discount on fuel. When fuel prices skyrocketed after Hurricane Katrina, we ran into all kinds of problems with the credit limit, where we were having to wire them money three times a week to keep our trucks on the road. The last driver to fuel for the day frequently had to drag the owner out of bed after hours to get him to put fuel on his personal credit card.

Our afiliation with NASTC let us do our own drug and alcohol testing in-house instead of using one of those out-patient labs. Our fleet manager had to take classes in Nashville to get certified on all that stuff, and he administered all the tests himself. He seemed to be really happy about the money that was saving him. Also, they sent out a list every so often of who had to be drug tested, so it was truly random, and since it was some remote third party agency nobody could get mad at the boss when their number came up after they had just eaten the "special brownies" at some party. (One of our drivers, no NOT me, failed a piss test and had to go through all that counseling where you have to pee clean so many times in a row and talk to a shrink about your drug addiction problem. I'm pretty sure that was handled through NASTC too.)

I'm not sure if NASTC handled our fuel taxes or not. I don't think so, but I could be wrong. We had some outside place that handled that stuff. Drivers had to do a ton of paperwork by hand for him to send in.

You'd really have to talk to Jerry to get the straight dirt on whether belonging to NASTC was worthwhile, but I think it was. Jerry was a no BS kind of guy, and we were with NASTC the entire time I worked for that company (before they outsourced the trucking operation and kicked me to the curb with the rest of the garbage, but that wasn't Jerry's fault). I can give you his phone number in a PM if you want. But really, it sounds to me like NASTC would be more a benefit to a small fleet than an individual with his own authority running one truck.

We had an average of 10. I'd say that's probably pretty close to where the payoff of belonging to NASTC comes in.