Road Drivers Hold Harmless Agreement

From the RD News Desk
A Road Driver's Hold Harmless? A wonderful tool to have in your briefcase when a dispatcher directs you to run an illegal load.

Any Road Driver that has been on the job for a decent length of time has been dispatched an illegal load or two. Some Road Drivers do it on a weekly basis without concern of their own welfare. Some Driver's refuse to run an illegal load. If the worst scenario were to occur and the Road Driver were jailed for a criminal offense, it's the Driver that is prosecuted, not his employer. It's happened before and it will happen again.

Jim Larsen, a Yellow Transportation Safety Supervisor recently reported the "MCMIS Carrier Profile for YRCW Operating Companies" The purpose of the report was to list out by company under the YRCW umbrella the top five violations of each company. Yellow Transportations top violation was overweight loads. This accounted for 19.96% of Yellow's violations during the period of 11/21/2006 and 11/20/2007.

The 19.96% may be a drop in the bucket, however during the holiday travel and winter weather, more accidents occur. If an incident occurred while going down the road with an over weight load, resulting in harm to a family off to see Grandma, the Road Driver is subject to being jailed. One of the first things law enforcement will do when investigating a fatality is check for FMCSA violations.

So with that in mind, when confronted with a testy dispatcher that refuses to scale a load, have them sign this document. Here at Road Drivers Weekly News, we assure you management won't sign the document. Perhaps however, the dispatcher might think twice and have the load corrected of it's violation(s).

Report Source(s):
http://www.roaddrivers.org/indemnity_agreement.htm