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Drilling Deep: Dart takes steps to increase pay and retain drivers

Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

Soon after Dave Ables took over as president and CEO of Dart Transit Co. and as the first days of the pandemic receded into a strong freight market, he knew there was a problem: retaining and attracting drivers.

So the Minnesota-based company put through an increase in compensation on several different fronts. It wasn’t just a straightforward increase in pay. There were other steps taken to ensure the company retained the drivers it needed to hold on to for its business to succeed.

On this week’s Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston talks with Ables about the process for making those decisions and how those new policies were greeted by the driving community.

Also on Drilling Deep this week, Kingston talks about the latest federal government report on diesel prices out to next year and how their fate will be even more tied to crude than usual.


More articles by John Kingston

Drilling Deep: Buying and selling logistics companies in a pandemic and a great freight market

Drilling Deep: New drivers aren’t coming out of CDL schools and that’s a problem


Drilling Deep: Staymetrics data digs into driver retention during pandemic

John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.