R:
Thanks for sharing your views, and thanks for doing so in a calm and cordial way, not an abrasive or confrontational way.
A few of the other posters at the EO website would do well to emulate your good example.
Funding the advance system should not be an undue burden to a solvent, successful carrier.
The daily cashflow of the carrier provides the liquidity.
Please do not overlook the fact that the carrier holds the pay of the owner-operators -- for up to 15 days at a time -- after delivery -- week after week after week.
The time value of the advanced dollars is less than the time value of the pay held back.
That means that the interest lost on the advances is less than the interest gained on the pay held back.
If a particular carrier has become so cash-starved that it must incur debt to fund the advances, then that carrier has run into severe trouble -- so bad that it may not survive or recover.
Is ThreeStates in that position?
Most likely it's not.
In my first post on this subject, when I suggested that maybe 3S should invite the TwoCats to buy 3s, I wrote that proposal entirely in jest -- facetiously -- in the manner of a joke.
Most likely the decisionmakers at 3S felt a need to improve their profit, and they jumped on the idea of imposing that "admin fee."
Most likely, I believe, they did so because, as I've said before, they figured that they could get by with doing it.
One might wonder whether they have called on their senior executives to take a pay cut to improve the company's P+L statement -- in the amount of 2.5% -- or in any other amount.
That's exactly what they've done to any of their drivers who wish or need to take advances (for whatever combination of their own reasons).
The wonderful new program reduces the pay of those drivers by 2.5% (on advances of 50%) -- with the result that the "admin fees" -- the dollars taken from the drivers -- go straight into the profits of the owners of the company.
The size of the "admin fees" is so large -- so disproportionately high -- that it's gouging.
Please recognize that 5% for two weeks equals an annual rate of 130%.
Does any carrier pay (or give up) an annual rate of 130% for any purpose?
Gouging is gouging -- and that's bad and wrong and unethical -- regardless of the motives or the excuses of those in charge at 3S.
It's not OK to gouge the drivers -- not for a benefit which is used, treated, and regarded -- and has been for many years -- throughout the trucking industry -- as a normal, usual, and customary practice.
They have misused their power to take unfair advantage of the drivers who wish or need to take advances.
There's a difference between legal requirements and ethical requirements.
The law tells us what we MUST do or not do; ethics tells us what we OUGHT or SHOULD do or not do.
The Biblical golden rule says that we should treat others as we want them to treat us.
Some have perverted the golden rule in such a way as to say that the people with the gold are the ones who rule.
There is much truth in that.
That's reality.
However, the people with the gold have a responsibility to behave with honesty, goodness, rightness, and integrity -- beyond the mere minimum requirements of the rules of law.
Please note that I did not write that the bosses at 3S are like the former bosses at Enron.
I referred to the crooks at Enron in response to a comment by another poster who said, in effect, that "stuff happens."
When I taught business ethics, the vast majority of my students were much older and more mature than typical undergraduate kids.
Most of them were graduate students -- in an MBA program -- and most of them were working professional people, including bankers, managers, a dentist, and a lawyer -- and even a dispatcher for a trucking company.
Those students were anything but rebellious rabblerousers.
It's OK for us to disagree.
I remain persuaded that the "admin fee" is very bad, wrong, unwise, unjustified, and unethical.
Best wishes to all -- especially those who become gouged,
Doc.
PS.
Even my undergraduate students were not rebellious rabblerousers -- with the exception of a very few.
They were at church-related private institutions, considerably more expensive than the publicly funded ones.
Most of those kids were serious about trying hard.
Some of them did extremely well.
I've counted my successes as a professor in terms of the successes of my former students.
They include many CPAs, insurance executives, bankers, managers, IRS agents, business owners, professors, lawyers, a district attorney, a public defender, and a university president.
At each of my three colleges, my own former students later succeeded me.
Two of them still teach at the same schools.
The third one later became the president of the university.
When he did so, he was the youngest university president in the nation.
.
