Ritter, a former freight broker himself once based in Austin, Texas, describes an office culture of Adderall-popping ne\u2019er-do-wells, 9 a.m.-beer-guzzling frat boys and stoners who high-five each other whenever they sell a $5,500 load for $3,000 to some unsuspecting trucker of Eastern European birth they universally refer to as Vlad.<\/i> <\/p>\n The story is told through the eyes of Ritter\u2019s protagonist, Chris. As Chris explains, “Some of them have too many k\u2019s and v\u2019s and y\u2019s to pronounce, so the guys just called them all Vlad.\u201d<\/p>\n Chris details one such incident in the book:<\/p>\n Vlad was desperate as soon as he called in. Noah chatted him up a bit to find some tells; the poor bastard had been on the road for eleven days and had a barbecue to attend back in Hackensack. He\u2019d just delivered a load in Los Angeles and had no clue where his next load was.<\/p>\n Jackpot!\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Noah sifted through our board and found a load to sell him: Commerce, California, to Hackensack, New Jersey. … Time was running out on Friday, so when Noah floated out his low-ball offer of $3,000 (which barely covered the cost of fuel, let alone insurance or maintenance), Vlad reluctantly accepted. “I take it,”\u00a0 Vlad said. “Send contract.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And bang — just like that, Noah had the load booked with $2,500 in margin for the company and $500 commission into his pocket.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There\u2019s so much to unpack from this one account. Front of mind is to be careful of your own tells<\/i>. If a broker asks where home is, he may, in some alternate universe, be taking a personal interest in you or he may just be probing for weakness. If you tell him you\u2019ve just got to get back home to a family barbecue in New Jersey, and he doesn\u2019t know you, you\u2019ve probably just made yourself his lawful prey.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not sure who started lying first, brokers or truckers, but I was damn sure we brokers had no interest in setting things straight.\u201d Second, if Ritter\u2019s account of the underbelly of load board-brokerage culture is accurate, for every three dudes who blow your doors off doing 70 over Elk Mountain this winter<\/a> while you\u2019re barely holding it together in the snow and ice doing 40, there\u2019s likely a stoner like Noah hitting a bong in an Austin jacuzzi, boasting to his buddies how he stuck it to a few more Vlads<\/i>. <\/p>\n For me, Ritter\u2019s fictional account suggests any link between low compensation and compliance will never be remedied,\u00a0despite the\u00a0feds\u2019 attempts at locking down some of those compliance <\/i>areas with GPS monitoring<\/a>, ELDs and the like.\u00a0Therefore, the culture that produces the Noahs of this world, according to the FMCSA’s transparency proposal<\/a>, is in dire need of structural alteration.<\/p>\n The “Confessions” book was so thought-provoking and, at points, outright triggering that I asked my old broker friend,\u00a0Brian Hardman of Fulmer Logistics<\/a>, what he thought about FMCSA’s transparency proposal in light of the seedy culture described in Ritter\u2019s book. Hardman sounded\u00a0like a lot of other brokers<\/a>\u00a0when he contended that,\u00a0<\/span>\u201cin the end, it will hurt rates in these already troubled times. If I\u2019ve got a load of Tropicana going to Atlanta [from Fort Pierce, Florida] that pays $1,200 and I\u2019m paying you $1,050, once the whole world knows that the load pays $1,200, come contract time someone will come in at $1,175.\u201d<\/p>\n While FMCSA’s transparency proposal, of course, doesn’t guarantee the rates in that example would become truly public <\/i>knowledge, it’s also true the staid trucking universe that was available to older guys like me with years-long associations with reputable brokers like Hardman, and plenty others with direct freight contracts with established shippers, is largely out of reach to those newly arrived to the business — not to mention to U.S. shores themselves. So many just get their freight on their devices from digital boards of this or that variety, which Cameron Ritter’s narrator compares to Tinder swiping, a dystopian hellscape where the most inexperienced operators are being managed and exploited by the least principled actors in the industry.<\/p>\n The Noah<\/i>s of this world are not your father\u2019s freight brokers.<\/p>\n [Related: <\/b>Brian Hardman, broker of Fulmer Logistics: ‘Load boards are a gamble, for me and for carriers’<\/a>]<\/p>\n To Hardman’s point, in the book there’s an account of a load disappearing for weeks that was supposed to arrive within three days. \u201cIt happens,” Chris\u2019s boss explains. Other nightmare scenarios rear their heads: tales of fraudsters putting loads on trains to get them hauled across the country dirt cheap and still expecting to be paid when the load is three weeks late, for instance.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the truckers of Ritter\u2019s narrative, who neither know their costs nor their worth, are too desperate to hold the line.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some have a plan to overcome the rates, though. Enter what narrator Chris describes as the \u201cStrong Single Sergy,\u201d that 1,000-mile-a-day supertrucker from, you guessed it, Eastern Europe. He’ll declare himself a team if necessary to get the miles he wants. <\/p>\n I can personally verify the practice is not new nor relegated to guys originally from Eastern Europe. I once had a boss that booked me as a team. My go-to co-driver was an imaginary friend named Clayton. That was a couple decades ago. So, yeah, I used to be one of those guys. The brokers had a different description for us then. They called us hillbilly produce haulers.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n The toxic symbiosis such a trucker forms with guys like Noah is an American story as old as that of the\u00a0Triangle Shirtwaist Factory<\/a>\u00a0and the factory owners’ exploitation of workers, in that case many of them recent immigrants. (A fire broke out at the factory, killing many women and girls working there in part because they could not escape — doors to the outside were locked to prevent unauthorized\u00a0breaks.)<\/p>\n Yet is the Noah of the story in “Confessions” actually breaking any rules? “Is it the government’s job to save business owners from our own stupidity?” I asked an independent trucker friend, Marcus Sommers<\/a>. <\/p>\n For Sommers, the responsibility of negotiating falls squarely on the motor carrier. \u201cIn order to haul a load, two parties have to sign a contract,” he said. “Nobody\u2019s holding a gun to anyone\u2019s head here. I\u2019ve altered contracts sent to me to include accessorial charges like [Truck Ordered Not Used fees] and detention if they weren\u2019t in there. I tell them, ‘I can\u2019t dispatch my truck until you sign off on that.’ You\u2019re either running your business or someone else is.\u201d<\/p>\n Protagonist Chris, a buttoned-down college grad, only survives the high attrition of his corner of load board-brokerage culture by lowering his standards. The chronicle of his decline is an all-too-familiar story in trucking. Toward the end of the book, he conveniently neglects to mention that a load is hazmat to yet another\u00a0Eastern European-born operator. When an angry message arrives demanding an extra $500 for hauling a hazmat load, he just ignores it.\u00a0<\/p>\n [Related:<\/b>\u00a0POLL: Your view of FMCSA’s broker-transparency proposal and potential impact?<\/a>]<\/p>\n The timing of \u201cConfessions of a Freight Broker\u201d could not be any more serendipitous. The FMCSA\u2019s proposal would oblige brokers to provide carriers with detailed transaction records<\/a> in digital format, precluding the carrier from having to conduct audits of hard copy records at the broker\u2019s office (which, according to most accounts, almost never happens). Ritter’s work of fiction, to the extent it gets to a truth about today’s trucking world, makes for a compelling example as to why making an extant regulation actionable through updated technology, and tweaks in regulatory language, might be a worthy cause.<\/span><\/p>\n In a world where everything we do is digitized, scrutinized, recorded on a camera and curated<\/a>, maybe it\u2019s time to have a conversation about how many of the billions of dollars this industry generates are going to the people who are doing the actual delivering of freight.\u00a0<\/span>At the very least, to my mind, Ritter’s book serves as a chilling look at how recent arrivals to U.S. trucking are jerked around for profit.\u00a0I\u2019m just an old trucker who types with one finger on a tablet, but it feels to me that current practice stands for marked improvement.<\/p>\n But Sommers feels more regulation isn’t going to help. \u201cWe need smarter motor carriers,” he said, “not more government interference. Half these guys don\u2019t even know their costs. I\u2019ve had good relationships with C.H. Robinson. The more work I did for them, the better loads I got. Some of your readers may not like this, but I\u2019ve had nothing but positive interactions with TQL. You have to negotiate.”<\/p>\n I had a chance to ask Cameron Ritter how he came to write the book. Here’s what he said: \u201cI took what I heard on the phones, read about online, and experienced with my own two eyes and combined it all into a story that I thought would resonate with the masses.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n It definitely resonated with me.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cameron B. Ritter can be found on Substack via this link.<\/a>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Long Haul Paul<\/a> is a four-million-mile trucker, writer and singer-songwriter. He can be reached at [email\u00a0protected]<\/span><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Confessions](\"https:\/\/img.overdriveonline.com\/files\/base\/randallreilly\/all\/image\/2024\/11\/confessions_of_a_freight_broker_book_cover.67474b6f7d6a5.png?auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max&q=70&w=400)
Author Cameron B. Ritter’s new novel is out as of early November.<\/a><\/span><\/source><\/picture><\/span>Talk about your broker transparency! If half of Cameron B. Ritter\u2019s new novel, \u201cConfessions of a Freight Broker,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0has its basis in fact, then Overdrive<\/a><\/i>‘s Alex Lockie\u2019s recent \u201cBrokers plan to fight FMCSA\u2019s transparency push\u201d report<\/a> may be the understatement of the year.<\/p>\n\n
—Cameron B. Ritter<\/b>‘s protagonist in ‘Confessions’<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n![\"Made](\"https:\/\/mindful-org-rr.imgix.net\/workspaces\/default\/uploads\/2024\/11\/JBLFLIP6BLKAM.CpkYwcbYwm.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=167&w=250&auto=format%2Ccompress&q=70\")
<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"Cameron](\"https:\/\/img.overdriveonline.com\/files\/base\/randallreilly\/all\/image\/2024\/11\/Cameron_ritter.67474bc60788f.png?auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max&q=70&w=400)
“Confessions of a Freight Broker” author Cameron B. Ritter<\/span><\/source><\/picture><\/span>But my old friend Hardman brings me to heel, reminding me there are risks on both sides. \u201cLook, I\u2019ve taken money out of my own pocket hundreds of times to cover a load. This notion that us brokers are all running around in G-Cars is far from the truth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n