Lumper Fee Origins

Until the 60's everything is on the floor. All of it.

Pallets were invented in the mid 60's Containers shortly after. Until that time all of it was break bulk on the docks and trucks and trains. Even into the 70's I distinctly recall a seaboard boxcar unloading 2x4's a stick at a time in Intercourse PA off US 30 I have a picture of it somewhere.

Blue Diamond Trucking on Pulaski Highway was built on lumping. Everything was across the dock being consolidated into a trailer going that general direction.

If you went further downtown to a resturant supply house on say eastern ave, you will find a mountain of goods in the middle surrounded by trailers. All of it eventually gets touched.

I do not know the impact on Union and non Union except to say that there is going to be money involved either way.

I developed a total and complete distaste for lumping after wasting most of my 20's and 30's doing that both ways, loading and unloading. It's no fun anymore. So I choose very carefully what employers run which accounts so that lumping is no longer in my life the rest of my time in trucking. The money spent on lumpers came out of my pay. I can never get that back. It's gone. Not all of it. But generally.

One of the very last times I went into hunts point, I was told specifically that the trailer is packaged just so to spec for two customers in that property. No one touches anything. Supposidely. First customer got his stuff off and managed to talk his way into the second stuff. You would think I know better. I get to second spot, charged a fee to unload that. Next time I'll take that first shipper and his body in that trailer straight to stop two. If he wants out he can jump. Just so you know.

Walmart runs on lumpers. Teams of half a dozen or a dozen will attack about 15 docks in a section of the Searcy DC. I spent one evening as a temp worker lumping trailers in my late 40's the very last time I did something like that. I unloaded 12 trailers and loaded 8 in 4 hours flat until the dock boss kicked me out. I was getting expensive for them on the clock. So they cut me loose. I told the employer forget it. And that was pretty much that.

 

i don’t know much about the roots but I can tell you the lumpers are nothing but a huge scam in California for the illegal aliens workings. I think the whole lumper fee things is bull. Where ever you are delivering to that should already be included it’s not our job to pay people to unload the trailer. Just my own personal opinion

 

You are right, Peterman88. That's why I didn't last long in reefer. Lumper fees, gate fees, dock fees, etc. Just seemed too scammie to me. I only had one time anyone tried to get some fees from me while flatbedding. They pulled some crap about I was stealing a union guys job by untarping my own trailer. I reminded them that I wasn't union, and that wasn't their truck. That was in Ontario a long time ago. I still did my own work, and luckily never went back there.

 

I'd say lumping has become a multi million dollar business. Most companies charge 200-350 dollars to unload fully loaded truck. I don't know the history but from what I've heard used to be you'd pay like 50 bucks and a guy would do it. I think it became a big cash cow and I think it has become a way to shift money on and off the books for tax purposes.

 

I've unloaded my truck a couple of times, when it's a straight pull .
I din't get payed no where near lumper pay...

 

Ok this is what I know, sorry to step on any toes.

the term lumper comes from longshoreman in the 19th century.

When you had vehicle to unload or load at the docks, longshoremen where the employees of the dock management or owners and the dock would charge the fee to off set the cost of labor to unload or load the vehicle.

As a longshoreman, in many cases you earned your position at the dock, many were low on the ladder and as I was told they were called lumpers.

Labor has evolved to allow freelance labor on many private docks, we don't have the labor used like it was back then. Many places like small docks just allow people to unload the trucks peice meal.

As for pallets, these were invented in the late 30's - two way pallet that is. A four way pallet was invented during the war and patented in the late forties. There were already container freight being shipped before ww2 and that came out of Australia, it wasn't until the late 50's that what we have today in containers was created and started to be used by 1960 or so.

 

The term lumper does indeed come from longshoremen.

Pallets were patented in 1937 and used in WWII. Before pallets were skiffs, basically a flimsy pallet.

Lumpers as we know them know, are basically a product of deregulation from 1977-1980. It isn't so much that lumpers were invented then, because they weren't. As already stated they go back to longshoremen and have been used in trucking since the start.

What was invented, or did start, around the time of deregulation, was Truckload freight. OK, it wasn't invented, but most goods outside unregulated produce were transported by trucking companies that work more like the LTL model:Freight was handled, loaded and unloaded, by the driver. Independents and smaller operations that hauled the produced still hired lumpers, generally just bums off the street, to help unload trucks.

After deregulation started around 1977, grocery warehouses looked to take advantage of cheaper unregulated truckload freight. The problem is many grocery warehouses were unionized with contracts. Those contracts keep the grocery warehousemen from stepping foot on the truck, that had always been the driver's job. This left the truckload companies in need of a third party to unload the trucks, because they only wanted to pay drivers by the mile.

Of course around the time of deregulation, there was a recession so there was a surplus of labor looking for work. With kickbacks to the grocery personal, drivers often were obligated to hire one lumper over another to get the truck unloaded.

So now we are at the situation we have today. A few derelicts at the grocery warehouse have good union jobs and benefits. Trucking companies pay CPM. And the work of unloading the truck is done by lumpers, often immigrants, that are contracted to the trucking company so the delicate little flowers working the dock don't have to get their hands dirty. And the truck driver gets to wait, free of charge, as the immigrants re-stack the freight, so the union workers can count it.

 

I remember hauling a straight load of lettuce from southern ca to Kroger East Point GA, on a regular turn in the early 80's, handing a man, with the last name of Brown, $40.

I couldn't even guess what that cost today.