Added duties + modified pay = ?

[Deserted]

Friday I was called into Big Green Cab Co's training office. They told me that they wanted me to be one of their "driver advisors". Me: Found out pretty quick that DA is the title used for the people that do the on-the-road training for new drivers. That's right, I'm now effectively an unpaid trainer.

Well, no, that's not accurate. On days that I have a trainee, I get a training credit applied to my account. It's about 1/3 of my daily lease, and as I take more trainer training classes (around a dozen of them total) that credit increases. The downside is that I get significantly fewer rides with a trainee in the cab than I would otherwise. (About half what I would've had on a normal Tuesday. Has to do with the actual process of training.) Bear in mind that even though I'm a DA, I'm still not an employee of Big Green Cab Co, so I still have to get enough rides during the training day to pay the bills.

So, I had my first trainee today. As I'm getting the paperwork I need for the day, the trainer turns to me and asks, "You won't have any problems training a woman, will you?" Well, no, but thanks for verifying that you think there might be issues with me. Sigh.

Luckily, the day went by pretty smoothly, and she was an attentive student... although she seemed to think that she needed to go below the speed limit. I had to tell her to match traffic more than once. (Phoenix area traffic never goes as slow as the speed limit -- never -- unless a police car is visible.)

As the day went on, we both kinda relaxed into the situation. (Remember, this was new for both of us -- new job for her, new responsibilities for me.) We didn't pick up any difficult passengers (although it probably would've been good to get at least one so she could see how I handle them) and I was glad to find that doing the training wasn't as stressful as I thought it might be (but the trainer told me he was giving me an easy one... can't wait to see what a hard one is like ).

[EricKei]

I would think that a trainER would normally get MORE than usual pay >_> Heck, many places cut the tips a trainee gets or has them split it with the ride-along person, for exactly these reasons. I can't comprehend why training someone should cause your base pay to go down, as you're doing extra work and you're being prevented from earning money the way you usually do...

[dalesys]

... I had to tell her to match traffic more than once...

"Those speed limits are what you are never to be caught going slower than..."

Utah drivers Ed

[jedimaster91]

They're more like....guidelines than actual rules.

[Deserted]

I would think that a trainER would normally get MORE than usual pay >_> Heck, many places cut the tips a trainee gets or has them split it with the ride-along person, for exactly these reasons. I can't comprehend why training someone should cause your base pay to go down, as you're doing extra work and you're being prevented from earning money the way you usually do...

To clarify: I'm not an employee, I'm an "independent contractor". In the Phoenix area, to my knowledge, every driver is an IC. I don't get any sort of actual paycheck; my pay is what I bring in on the road. That pay has to cover the cost of leasing the car for the day, along with gas, car wash, and various fees associated with cab driving.

On a typical day I'll bring in around $400. (That's a 14-hour day, mind you, and I'm somewhat of a low earner.) Of that $400, the lease is ~$150, the fees will run around $40, I can expect to drop $35 at the gas station, and $3 for the car wash, plus whatever I spend on lunch, sodas, munchies, and whatever else I fritter away my money on during the day -- call it $10. $400 - $(150 + 40 + 35 + 3 + 10) = 400 - 238 = $162 profit for the day. $162 ÷ 14 hours = ~$11.50/hour. (Not terrible, but I'll never be able to retire from this job.)

On days that I have a trainee with me, the training credit I get is mostly intended to offset the fact that I won't be able to take as many calls -- but since the credit increases as I take more of the trainer training courses, I stand to potentially make more on a training day than I would otherwise. Yesterday my profits were in the neighborhood of $35, a pitiful day -- but not my worst, not by a long shot, and I expect that as I get more experienced, I'll be able to handle more calls without skimping the training.

The company doing it this way actually makes pretty good sense, because the vast majority of the company's income comes directly from us drivers, and if they had to hire 15 employees specifically for on-the-road training, that would have a very noticeable impact on us.

Also: trainees don't get paid at all for their training. This is not something that the company hides from potential drivers; they're very up front about it. I covered lunch and incidentals for my trainee out of my sense of common courtesy; I don't know what other DA's do, but the fellow who taught me did the same.

"Those speed limits are what you are never to be caught going slower than..."

Utah drivers Ed

They're more like....guidelines than actual rules.

I'm not sure what the drivers around here are thinking (aside from "I hope that car isn't a cop" ) but when someone is on the road doing the speed limit, that person is being passed by literally every other car on the road.

[Grendus]

On a typical day I'll bring in around $400. (That's a 14-hour day, mind you, and I'm somewhat of a low earner.) Of that $400, the lease is ~$150, the fees will run around $40, I can expect to drop $35 at the gas station, and $3 for the car wash, plus whatever I spend on lunch, sodas, munchies, and whatever else I fritter away my money on during the day -- call it $10. $400 - $(150 + 40 + 35 + 3 + 10) = 400 - 238 = $162 profit for the day. $162 ÷ 14 hours = ~$11.50/hour. (Not terrible, but I'll never be able to retire from this job.)
:

When it comes to liveable and retireable wages, hourly is a bit misleading. Many jobs offer "liveable" wages hourly but nowhere near enough hours, for example, and some jobs have lower wages but good benefits and steady hours that make them much better than their more numerically endowed competitors. Weekly or annual salary is a much better indicator imho. Given your take on a 14 hour day, you're making roughly $800 in a 5 day week or roughly $40k a year (assuming that's an average day), the equivalent of $20 hourly on a 40 hour week. So that's very liveable (depending on the local cost of living), fairly retireable (at a 10% return you only need $400k in your portfolio to retire at your current salary, which is doable if you invest over a long time)... but almost certainly exhausting and probably not good for your health at your current hours (it also assumes five days a week). Hope the trainer thing works out.

[Deserted]

When it comes to liveable and retireable wages, hourly is a bit misleading.

I didn't mean it to be, I just think in terms of dollars per hour. I could've just as easily phrased it in terms of annual income, as you did.

Many jobs offer "liveable" wages hourly but nowhere near enough hours, for example, and some jobs have lower wages but good benefits and steady hours that make them much better than their more numerically endowed competitors. Weekly or annual salary is a much better indicator imho. Given your take on a 14 hour day, you're making roughly $800 in a 5 day week or roughly $40k a year (assuming that's an average day), the equivalent of $20 hourly on a 40 hour week. So that's very liveable (depending on the local cost of living), fairly retireable (at a 10% return you only need $400k in your portfolio to retire at your current salary, which is doable if you invest over a long time)... but almost certainly exhausting and probably not good for your health at your current hours (it also assumes five days a week). Hope the trainer thing works out.

The job offers no real benefits -- hell, the car insurance doesn't even cover the driver. (Passengers, yes, but not me.) The only "benefit" are very intangible, such as the ability to walk away whenever I want, and return whenever I want, without any bad consequences.

It's a bit tough on the survival end of things, as I'm supporting not only myself but my girlfriend/likely future wife and her 3 kids. (She could work, but we've decided that, for various reasons, it's best if she doesn't work for now.) Right now we're definitely in a "living paycheck to paycheck" situation, but as the kids mature and (hopefully) get jobs, the financial situation will ease... but yes, 70 hours per week is rather tiring. If I didn't love this job, I'd find something else. (I'm a computer programmer, but I don't do it professionally because I need a loose schedule, for various reasons. Hell, the last time I wrote a program for somebody who intended to pay for it, I told them to donate to their local homeless shelter instead. Shrug.)

[Javarod]

Unfortunately its hard to make a living ifn you drive. There's the work like he does, remember you're supposed to pay taxes out of that too, then there's work like what i do. I'm a courier, primarily mail (delivered by the sack, hence my title), i have a regular route, plus i do some pick up work most days, and for that i get a contracted rate from which i have to pay my costs. Of course as a contractor my costs are everything, from taxes to insurance, vehicle payments to maintenance, fuel to.... well, out of things, but since my money's always going to something, i must've forgot something. Alternates to this are cab work like him, or picking up a job doing parts deliver ($9/hr or so out here) or delivering pizza unless i want to learn to drive something bigger (tried that), and even then a living wage is iffy.

[Deserted]

So I had my second trainee on Wednesday. This one was much more difficult than the first. He had previously driven for a different cab company, one that is much, much smaller than Big Green Cab Co. (Small as in "can count the number of cabs with your fingers" -- Big Green Cab Co has somewhere around 1000 cabs, statewide.) I had to spend big parts of the day disabusing him of certain notions he had acquired there. (Things like "police can't search a cab" -- WRONG!!!)

During his training, it became very obvious to me that he had no clue how to operate the terminal we receive our calls on. Literally every time I had him do anything on it, I had to walk him through the procedure, even if we had just done it half an hour earlier... or 2 minutes earlier. Right there, I was strongly inclined to fail him.

Despite having driven a cab for 2 years, he was very unfamiliar with Phoenix's street system. His excuse? "I usually drive the east side." (The valley is roughly divided into "west side" and "east side", but large parts of the east side still use the west side's street/address system.)

Also, his driving was... tiresome. His driving style involved alternately accelerating and decelerating. It was like some sort of insane rocking chair. I had to tell him CONSTANTLY to smooth out his speed. Toward the end I was getting carsick, something that hasn't happened to me since I was a child. More points against him.

And finally, he had an accent that was so thick I had to ask him to repeat almost everything he said, sometimes more than once. I swear, I've never said "What?" so many times in a single day. (Not really a problem, but it might make things hard on him if a customer misunderstands him.)

But on the bright side, he was eager, polite, pleasant, and had good customer service skills. I passed him, but told the trainer that he probably needs to go over the terminal with him.