"because you run a business....and it is YOUR freight...Express 1 is only an agent between the customer and yourself."
Technically, that's not true if you are running under their authority. They are an agent, and you do take surety bond virtual ownership of the freight once it goes on your truck and are financially responsible to a degree for the freight,but they are also a carrier to whom you are leasing your equipment to, and as such it makes it their freight.
"You do NOT work for Express 1...you are contracted to them to find you loads and pay them a fee for doing so.."
That fee is for a lot more than simply finding you loads. Among other things, it also covers collections and factoring, expressly so that you can get paid faster than the paying customer is willing to pay. As jaminjim said, the carriers pay out at the speed they do because they want to, and because they can, and it's way easy to do that if you can convince your contractors that it's either (a) a good thing that you should wait at long as you do for your money, or (b) that's it's really, really, necessary that you have to wait for it.
Actually, and no one is going to do this, but actually, if they tell you that they can't pay you for 2-3 weeks because their customers don't pay them for 2-3 weeks, then, actually, they should be refunding you the roughly extra 10% that you're paying them to factor your loads. LOL
But, a realistic compromise is getting 45% of the line haul as POD money. And it should be paid to you without you having to incur an additional fee to get it.
Here's a kewl slight of hand. Some carriers will offer you a choice of contracts. With Contract A, you get POD advances on every load, but your total line haul will always be reduced by a small percentage in order to cover the burden of them paying you your money more quickly. With Contract B, you won't get automatic POD advances at all. POD advances would still be available, but for a fee, of course, except it's at a rate that even Tony Soprano wouldn't charge. However, your line hauls would be paid out at a small percentage higher than normal, so you'll be getting paid more to not take regular advances. Sounds good, right? Yay. Mo money, mo money, mo money!
While they're doing all that with the left hand, the right hand of over there paying out line hauls that are not even based on 100% of the line haul, but on 95% of the line haul, so they're taking 5% right off the top of every load as it is. Hey, they got expenses, ya know.
Some carriers pay 60% or the line haul, or 58%, instead of the more standard rate of 62%. If they pay less than 62% of the line haul, and the line haul isn't even of 100%, then they're skimming off both ends of the load. It's all about whatever they can get their contractors to agree to. It's all good. Many, many carriers go even further and employ the equally legal (tho no less scummy) practice of filtering the line hauls through one or more in-house brokerages, so that the in-house broker becomes the customer and your percentage of the line haul will be paid off of that line haul rather than the tariff the originating customer is paying. Kewl. Some carriers just pay a flat rate per mile regardless of what the line haul is, and the rate they pay may or may not be anywhere close to 62%, and more often than not it's less than you' get with a percentage contract, anyway.
All this is just to illustrate that, no matter how much Kool-Aid you are drinking and want to think otherwise, you're carrier will, absolutely, take advantage of you, especially if you are a willing participant in the venture.
