Complaint Review: Swift Transportation - Phoenix Arizona

I have been sick many times on the road mainly I tough it out by meds and rest but it has been bad other times. I have been to clinics on the road and had to call 911 before. If your that sick put the emergency message out on your qualcomm or just call 911 and tell whatever company to sit on it. I called and told them I was sick the first thing they asked is "Do you need an ambulance?" What are you worried about your DAC? Haha, trust me you can still find a job with a "bad" DAC. I don't think it is any companies responsibility to seek medical attention to one who is sick. I wish corporate America cared but they don't, I know it sucks you gotta work when your sick. Just saying if it's that d**n serious then get help.

I feel your pain about your fiance being stuck on the road and sick. My story is similar, but I was the one that was sick and my driving husband was the one stuck on the road. I was put in the hospital with a severe infection in both legs. My blood pressure on admission was 82/48. The admitting doctor told my sister that he didn't expect me to leave the hospital under my own power, if at all. That was on a Tuesday afternoon. My sister called my husband. My husband Quallcomm'ed AND called his DM. He was in north-western Washington at the time and needed to get home. He was not under a load as he had just dropped his load. His DM made sounds like he was trying to help and said that he would certainly try to help and then told my husband that the only thing going south was in Portland but he would not authorize him to deadhead that far. There was a load picking up the next morning outside of Seattle headed to Portland and he could stack a total of 3 loads on him that would get him to Central California by Friday. Not a great answer, but the hospital had me stabilized, at that moment, and we all hoped I would be out of the hospital before then. He accepted the stacked loads and went to bed. The DM went home, and unbeknownst to my husband, on vacation for the rest of the week and the weekend. AND didn't mention the family emergency to anyone who would be covering his fleet, or leave a note on my husbands truck screen... Next morning hubby went to pick up the Seattle load. He was confirmed on it. He had accepted it. It had disappeared. The shipper didn't know anything about it and neither did Swift. He spoke to the stand-in DM. Got told again that they had to find him something out of Seattle as they would not deadhead him allllll the way to Portland... And as the initial load had disappeared he was no longer confirmed on the follow-up loads. Got told to sit tight, they would figure something out. EVERY HOUR for the next 10 hours my husband was on the Quall and on the phone to Swift. Every time he called he had to RE explain the situation and why it was suddenly (their word) necessary for him to get to central California, ASAP... His log book had already started. His clock was ticking. 4:30 pm he calls Portland again...re-explains the situation and gets told he will get layover pay for that day but there is nothing available until 2pm the next day. Thursday. And it's only down to Olympia. The person he was talking to "thought" there was going to be a load from there to Salem, Oregon the next day...but nothing was confirmed in the computer (did they have a crystal ball or something?????) Next day...this load is there, he picks it up and moves it and calls again to see what else is going south. Again, sit tight. Give us a little time and we will see what we can find... Now it's Friday. Half the office is "not in today" so he plays the re-explain game and begs for a load, any load, going south. All day, no loads, no deadhead order, nothing. His Quall suddenly goes off about 8p. It's a load. GOING TO SALT LAKE CITY AND HE IS ALREADY CONFIRMED ON IT. He sends in a decline and for his reason: wife is in hospital in California, need to get there ASAP, not sure she will survive. Gets an unsigned message to call dispatch in Portland. Calls dispatch. Gets left on hold until he hangs up after 30 minutes. Calls and Quallcomm's again. 15 minutes this time before he hangs up and nobody will answer his Quallcomm messages. 2 hours later he gets an unassigned load message. He has called home while he waits. They had put a PIC line into my heart as my pressure is still so low the IV lines in my arm keep blowing. I am on three different antibiotics plus pain meds and they haven't been able to stabilize me for the past 30 hours, blood pressure and heart rate all over the charts. He finally, at 1am on Saturday, gets a deadhead order to Portland. Is told there will be "something" there on Saturday morning. He heads to Portland and catches a couple of hours of sleep at the Burns Bros truck stop. Gets awakened the next morning by the Quallcomm with a load. It's a local load from one side of Portland to the other (Portland terminal is notorious for refusing to give anyone a high mile load unless they do a local). He's not happy, but he gets up and moves the local load. Calls Portland dispatch to get another dispatch as soon as he drops. Portland asks if he has a trailer.... He just dropped his loaded trailer at the last customer so... DUH! No he doesn't have a trailer... Portland tells him where a couple of drop yards are and tells him he HAS to have a trailer before they can do anything for him. 300+ miles later, after running all over Portland and vicinity... he finds a trailer that is not so trashed he is afraid to run down the road with it (and isn't full of WalMart pallets that WalMart is storing in them...). Calls Portland back (NOTE: he has been up all day by this point and all of this running around to do dispatches job is all unpaid miles). Oops. Nope. No loads tonight. Get some sleep and we will get you something in the morning. He goes back to Burns Bros and calls me again. It's now been 4 1/2 days since he started trying to get from Seattle to Tracy, Ca. I now have an IV in my neck artery, a 2nd PIC line going into my heart and they are talking about my losing use of my legs, and possibly needing to have my legs amputated at the knees if they aren't able to stop the invasion of this unknown bacteria, even with all of the meds... My sweet husband is frantic. I am scared and alone except for calls from my sister who can't spend every minute with me as she has a handicapped adult child and a job that she has to keep, and my husband is not even half way to me. In 4 1/2 days he has been moved from Seattle to Portland. I tell him I'm still breathing, get some rest so IF a load does come in he has the strength and energy to run it and not run off the road. Sunday morning. Nobody on the morning shift knows anything about him needing a load south, but they have a load going to Idaho.... He calmly tells them what has been going on and what he has to have immediately. Gets told he has to do a local to get a long run. He blows his top. Hangs up on the dispatcher and calls his home terminal again and lets them know exactly what has been going on and that if he doesn't get a load immediately he is going to leave his truck in the yard at Portland and catch a flight to California. By this time he isn't sure if he will find me alive or get there just in time to plan my funeral. The hospital won't even let him talk to me this morning. His home terminal contacts the terminal manager and he calls my husband back. Finds out what is going on and tells him to stand by. Suddenly a load to San Jose appears on his Quall with an already setup T-call in Lathrop. BUT... this load doesn't pick up until MONDAY morning... A note is sent immediately after the load comes in going to San Jose that it is the best they can do. He spends the rest of Sunday on the phone to my sister and the various doctors at the hospital. I am still so out of it that they won't let calls go through to my room and I am now in isolation. Tuesday night...7 days after he started trying to get to me, he finally gets to Lathrop. He is exhausted, both physically and emotionally as you can imagine. He drops his trailer in the yard and takes his paperwork into dispatch for his T-Call. The wonderful people in dispatch inform him that "Sorry, even though the T-call was already set up they are not going to accept his paperwork and reassign the load as they are short on drivers and already have loads they aren't sure how they are going to deliver." He drops his paperwork on the counter in the dispatch window and tells them to figure it out and walks out. Gets in his truck and comes to me in the hospital. Enroute to the hospital he gets a quallcomm message from Lathrop that if he doesn't come back and pick his trailer and paperwork up and deliver the load that he could be fired and would definitely get a service failure. He comes to the hospital. By this point he doesn't care. He can't get any information out of the hospital. My sister won't give him any details because she is scared he will wreck his truck in his panic to get to me. It had gotten that bad at the hospital. When he gets to the hospital he isn't even allowed in my room until the doctor is paged and is able to talk to him. They still weren't sure if I would ever walk again as I still couldn't bear weight on my legs, after 7 days of antibiotics and tests, and they wanted to warn him that I was not in very good shape... He stayed by my side for the next 4 days, kept the doctors from killing me twice with penicillin, worked at saving our marriage, and blocked 4 parking spaces in the parking lot at the hospital. When they finally released me he went back to his truck for the first time since he had arrived. He had 4 more messages from Lathrop threatening him with termination. 1 message notifying him that he had a service failure for the San Jose load. 2 new loads assigned to him, 2 more service failure messages due to those loads not being responded to... and a request to return his truck to Lathrop or they were going to report it stolen. Ultimately I was in the hospital 12 days. I crashed on them 8 times. They never figured out what caused the infection in my legs but thankfully I am able to walk today. With a lot of work and understanding we did save our marriage, but due to all of this it was touch and go for almost a year. Eventually he received a verbal apology from Lathrop, a verbal apology from his home terminal and nothing from Portland. The service failures were removed from his record and no charges were filed for him "misappropriating" their truck. The only thing that his DM could say was that he was happy I survived and that he didn't expect the loads to fall through. But, he had done HIS job.... I could write an entire book on what my husband went through while in so-called training, but it has all been said on here by other victims of bad trainers. If you are looking at going to Swift, read through the bad trainer stories on here and don't let anyone convince you that they are lies. Read through the bad DM stories... and the S L O W shop stories... and the bad shop stories... The stories aren't lies. Some may be exaggerations, but for every exaggeration you can expect at least 10 others to be understatements... And if you still choose to go with Swift, go with your eyes open. It can be a stepping stone to better companies. Stay out of accidents, don't get tickets, don't abandon your truck or a load, give at least a 2 week notice IN WRITING when you are ready to leave, return your truck to your home terminal and make someone SIGN for it, (and print their name under their signature so you have proof of who received your truck) AND check your DAC and the other company Swift reports driver information to BEFORE you turn in your notice or apply anywhere else. As soon as you apply elsewhere Swift will know. They will contact you to find out why you are applying elsewhere, and if they think you are serious they are known to trash your DAC and your report with the other company. My husband is still driving. 5 years with no accidents, no tickets and a spotless DAC. He is now with a company that values him as a driver and he is being courted by too many other companies to count because he is gold. He put up with the trash at Swift, stood on his log book and ran legal every day of those 5 years (3 of those years with Swift), has only been with 2 companies in that 5 years and he still loves being in the seat. Good luck and safe roads. His wife.

First of all, Swift is a horrible company. They have ruined the trucking industry. At Swift a driver can be a "trainer" after only 6 months with the company! How can someone with only 6 months "experience" train anyone?? This is the blind leading the blind! Newsflash! A person with 6 months experience is barely able to get his/her own truck down the road safely! And, Swift is the number 1 cheap freight hauler in the nation. They have destroyed freight rates. So take your propaganda elsewhere.

That is ridiculous that you would say that. He tried quite a few options until he FINALLY found a gentleman that gave him clearance to go home. What you don't understand is that he was throwing up, almost had a jaundice like appearance and was on his way to having pneumonia. So had he stayed on the road....lets see dehydration could've caused him to pass out and have an accident killing himself, and/or someone else. I find the companies practices ridiculous....the job of the DM is to keep the driver out on the road...they are not making money when the drivers aren't out. I believe his DM was looking out for their own interests only. My fiance doesn't whine about anything. He loves his job. But when he gets sick, he gets sick. And this could've been dangerous for him and the individuals around him. He is not going back out until he is 100%. I made sure of that. Health comes before a job I am sorry.

I have been working for Swift transportation for a year and a half now along with attending their driver training academy in Richmond, Virginia. during this time i have heard alot of negative opinions about this company in which i find none of them to be true. yes of course we do have some bad drivers, as does every trucking company out there, we just seem to be noticed more because of how much larger our company is than others.now as far as getting home when needed because of an illness, they will get you home. if your husband did not get home he must not of been trying.and as far as the gentlemen below complaining about the mentors not letting him drive enough i would like to ask, did you go to a driver manager and try to get on another trainers truck? if not, you should have, so it's your own fault you didn't get the training you were entitled to. and i would like to say to any one else with a negative opinion, that if you don't give 100% to the things you do in life you won't be able to succeed anywhere else either, so next time you wanna try to sucker punch the company, take a look at yourself first. and see what you could have done to make the situation better