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Ryder awarding $30 million in bonuses to front-line workers

Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

Ryder is spending about $30 million in December to give one-time bonuses to its front-line workers.

The company announced Wednesday that about 30,000 of its workers will receive the bonus. Eligible full-time employees will receive $1,000 while part-time workers will get $500, the company said. About 98% of the workers to be paid bonuses are full time, according to a Ryder spokeswoman.

Ryder Chairman and CEO Robert Sanchez said in a prepared statement that the bonuses would be paid “as an expression of gratitude to Ryder’s drivers, technicians, service employees, rental counter agents, dispatchers and warehouse employees who have been the backbone of Ryder’s response to the pandemic.”

A spokeswoman for Ryder said this is the first pandemic-related bonus the company has paid out. 


Those 30,000 workers make up about 75% of the company’s total workforce. These employees are otherwise not eligible for incentives, she added.

Ryder employees who are unionized will receive the payout. Companies paying one-time bonuses sometimes exclude unionized workers because such a payment is not covered by the company’s collective bargaining agreement with the union. 

Ryder had non-GAAP earnings of $63.8 million in the third quarter. On Wednesday, it reached a 52-week high of $59.53 per share, up about 13.75% in the past year. 


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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.