The road not taken.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Old Domininion Freight Line Inc. - Company Profile

It's a less-traveled route, but you won't find a union driver behind the wheel of an Old Dominion truck.

The sun hasn't been up long, but at Old Dominion Freight Lines Inc. in High Point, Earl Congdon is engrossed in what he considers one of his most-important responsibilities as chairman of this $205 million-a-year trucking company. Spread across his desk are birthday cards. Each of his 3,500 employees will get one this year, personally signed in Congdon's rough script. "Communication," Congdon, 63, explains.

Good employee communication is just one of the reasons Old Dominion's initial public offer three years ago was over-subscribed. Investors bought 30% of its stock at $11 a share, netting the company $17 million. At its current 15%-20% annual growth rate, revenues could top a half-billion dollars by year 2000.

"They're doing a lot right," says Neal Kaplan, an analyst with Scott & Stringfellow in Richmond, Va., where Old Dominion was born 60 years ago. "Pricing is good, they're adding equipment, they're expanding in the Northeast and Midwest, and they're building interregional business."

In the last few years, Old Dominion has spent $75 million to modernize its fleet of 1,140 green-and-white Volvos, Freightliners, Navistars, Kenworths and Fords. Most are equipped with an on-board computer to track and monitor their location and cargo. The 220 employees at headquarters on Westchester Drive work with an alphabet soup of innovations: TQM (total quality management) for quality control and attention to detail; an IBM AS/400 computer for information management; and EDI (electronic data interchange) for customers who want paperless shipping and billing with computers and modems.

But Congdon considers something else even more important: "Seventy-five percent of the nation's trucking companies have gone bankrupt since deregulation," he says, warming up to his favorite theme. "The fact that we've maintained the loyalty of our nonunion workers is the reason we survive."

Nonunion.

It's a popular word with Congdon and other Old Dominion executives. For every mention of what it does have, Old Dominion stresses what it doesn't have - labor unions. The company profile that it hands out to potential investors and customers gives nonunion status equal billing alongside its selection by Forbes as one of America's 200 best small companies in 1993, based on sales and earnings growth. Lest anyone miss the point, the union-free work force is mentioned on five of the next 10 pages.

The company's pitch is that nonunion wages and efficiency translate into profits. "There's so much nonunion textiles and furniture in this area, some companies feel they can gain an edge on the competition by shouting from the rooftops they're nonunion," says R.V. Durham, president of Kernersville-based Teamsters Local 391, the state's largest union local.

Analysts haven't missed the point: "One of the main things about Old Dominion is they're nonunion," Kaplan says. "That gives them flexibility and allows...