I Am a Twenty Year Truck Driver, Part 2: How Truckers Are Paid

https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/i-am-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-part-2-how-truckers-are-paid-de86ea419f2f

by Geekette • 4 years ago

140 109 4 years ago

ta988• 4 years ago

I highly recommend https://www.overtheroad.fm/ a fascinating podcast about trucking in the U.S.

ransom15383• 4 years ago

First, I think trucks are a super important chain in our economy. Second, after reading this why do this? The only reason businesses can get truckers is that there are willing truckers to do it. Why not just quit? He clearly laid out that $25/hr is about the max you can get / $20 after costs is more realistic (pretax wtf?) - and there is no overtime. If I was in this situation, I would wake up, think of ways to not do this the entire day. I had shit jobs. The most important part of a shit job is know you are in a shit job - and to escape. At those rates I could just serve tables at AppleBees, crush $25/hr and get free food - also leave my car Turo'ed in the lot.

toomuchtodo6• 4 years ago

Because poverty and lack of economic options. There’s a reason trucking turned into a race to the bottom after the decline of unionization and deregulation of the industry.

ransom15383• 4 years ago

Sure, but this isn't 1956. I could walk into an AppleBees TODAY and walk out with a job - easily crush $25 an hour -- and my car will be Turo'ed at work.

zeroonetwothree• 4 years ago

$20/hr is still more than many other jobs pay, especially those not requiring much education.

alasdair_4• 4 years ago

It isn’t $20/hr. That’s just the claimed rate. The actual hourly rate is often well below federal minimum wage. The article goes into this in detail.

amalcon• 4 years ago

It turns out that $20/hr is really good for blue collar work in most of the US. It beats e.g. serving at Applebee's (except the bartender) by probably about a factor of 2, especially if you're not young and charismatic.

If you're in a big city, you might be able to demand a bit more than this. Most truck drivers aren't, and don't want to be.

blamazon2• 4 years ago

Truckers largely give up their ability to be firmly located in any one place. If you're willing to do this it stands to reason you might be willing to move to a high growth area somewhere like Cincinnati where the cost of living is low and the floor wage for simple warehouse work is legitimately 25/hour. Businesses in Ohio are begging for workers.

CPLX• 4 years ago

Not only that but anyone who’s actually worked blue collar or front line jobs knows that the ability not to be in the same room as your boss and/or customers all day is a huge selling point.

alasdair_4• 4 years ago

The problem is that it isn’t really $20/hr. That’s the claimed rate but they don’t pay you for the many hours a day spent waiting or unloading or doing anything other than moving.

mynameishere• 4 years ago

He clearly laid out that $25/hr is about the max you can get

He clearly laid out a lie. That's your answer. Go from driving box trucks to chemicals to driving your own rig and it can get to 200/year.

edmcnulty1012• 4 years ago

Gross or Net?

karaterobot• 4 years ago

I don't think he lied about anything, I think you just brought up some edge cases he didn't address. His argument holds true for the majority of drivers.

silisili• 4 years ago

Not discounting the author's experience, but it doesn't mirror my own. It's probably highly, highly dependent upon the company you work for. My father drove OTR for a certain brown courier service, and made about 150k a year. This was about 15 years ago. You did have to be gone for a whole week at a time, so certainly not easy or for everyone, but the pay was quite nice.

selectodude• 4 years ago

OTR pays way, way more. I'd be all over it in my younger days. Once you have a family, as you said, it can be a bit more difficult.

To the author, if you're reading, OTR drivers are in very, very high demand. Get that bread.

massysett• 4 years ago

UPS is union. Teamsters. The author is non-union.

alasdair_4• 4 years ago

Second, after reading this why do this? The only reason businesses can get truckers is that there are willing truckers to do it. Why not just quit?

Part of it is because a lot of truckers are owner-operators that have a lot of money in their trucks. They are effectively employees, not real contractors, and all the pricing power goes to the company that hires them but if they quit it means bankruptcy.

Johnny5552• 4 years ago

At those rates I could just serve tables at AppleBees

I've worked in a restaurant and worked in construction, (didn't drive a truck, but I rode along with the truckers to haul equipment).

If I had to choose between working at Applebees or driving a truck, I'd definitely pick the truck.

altcognito• 4 years ago

Why? Trapped sitting in a truck, anxious about traffic? Restaurant work isn’t isn’t or fun, but at least you get to go home to your own bed.

shkkmo2• 4 years ago

I think it is a bit unfair to be blaming the issues on truckers for not quitting. Our other industries get legal protections that ensure fair wage practices, we should extend those protections to truck driver.

We, as a nation, need these drivers. We have an obligation to extend them same wage protections we have. Even if some truck driver can and do make quite good money, that doesn't mean that the industry as a whole isn't rife with abusive labor practices.

pmoriarty2• 4 years ago

"Our other industries get legal protections that ensure fair wage practices, we should extend those protections to truck driver."

Don't truckers have unions?

anonymousiam• 4 years ago

A long time ago when I was in high school (late 1970's), I knew some kids whose father was a truck driver. They were better off financially than my family (my dad was a high school teacher/councilor). I asked one of them about it and learned that his dad earned twice as much as mine. (My father had a Masters degree and 35 years of tenure.)

Times have certainly changed since then. The trucking industry is now rife with exploitation.

trelane• 4 years ago

I believe this is a consequence of deregulation in the 80s, and everyone focusing on price.

throwaway0a5e• 4 years ago

Trucking is far more regulated now than it used to be.

robocat3• 4 years ago

The industry is willfully blind to the situation. It wants people to work massive hours for virtually no pay, blames the workers if they don’t work for free, and then threatens the workers with having no job at all if they don’t submit to these conditions. Then it wonders why people won’t go to school to get a job the industry itself says won’t be around in five years. Again, self-inflicted. This industry literally won’t even pay for chassis they desperately need (and chassis are really cheap compared to trucks), doesn’t want to pay its workers, but they are supposedly going to pay for millions of robot trucks in an amount to drive freight rates down to nothing for everybody.

Why personify “The industry” and make odd statements about it? Why is there no recognition for the actual systemic economic reasons for the issues?

For a comparison from New Zealand, my friend quit professional work to become a truck driver. It took a short amount of training to get the drivers licence. She got an entry level job that pays a little over minimum wage, but it is hourly and she gets paid for her hours. Minimum wage soon becomes NZD21 (≈ USD15/hour). However the cost of many things is much higher in New Zealand so the hourly rates are not comparable (a Big Mac Combo meal is ≈USD9 in NZ, a Big Mac Meal is ≈USD6 in the US?). The standard of living is fairly good in NZ.

For a great and geek-humourous take on the benefits of truck driving, I love this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQXVgniI-hw although he explains why he quit mid 2021 due to similar reasons as the OP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8AnMzhZZE

spaetzleesser2• 4 years ago

"However the cost of many things is much higher in New Zealand so the hourly rates are not comparable (a Big Mac Combo meal is ≈USD9 in NZ, a Big Mac Meal is ≈USD6 in the US?). The standard of living is fairly good in NZ."

Not sure McDonald's is a good way to compare. Crappy food is very cheap in the US but good food can be quite expensive. When I visit family in Germany I often feel it's the other way there. Good, but basic food is quite cheap but stuff like Mcdonalds costs more.

elvis10ten• 4 years ago

As someone that have lived in both Boston (USA) and Berlin (Germany), I don’t agree. What places in Germany are you comparing to US Macdonalds?

robocat3• 4 years ago

McDonalds is merely a canonical concrete example due to [1]. You are implying that good food is not expensive in NZ? The cost of living is slightly higher here [2], although like everywhere, ones standard of living really really depends on ones location and wealth.

Of course, part of the reason for high costs in NZ could be due to minimum wages being high (higher than the truck driver mentioned in article I think). The US minimum wage in plenty of states is half the minimum wage in NZ. No US state exceeds our minimum wage[3], even though we are a poorer country per capita.

Oh, and healthcare is free in NZ (although the system is far from perfect), and after retirement (currently 65 years) every single person in NZ gets ≈USD$1300 per month (I couldn’t find the US comparison but elderly poverty could be worse over there?[4]).

[1] https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index

[2] https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php

[3] https://www.laborlawcenter.com/state-minimum-wage-rates

[4] https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/03/03/does-social-secur...

lostcolony• 4 years ago

Depends where in the US; a Big Mac Meal in LA will run you close to $9 USD as well

mortenjorck• 4 years ago

This industry literally won’t even pay for chassis they desperately need (and chassis are really cheap compared to trucks), doesn’t want to pay its workers, but they are supposedly going to pay for millions of robot trucks

Interesting perspective on autonomous freight. Even if self-driving trucks become technologically viable in the coming years, their economic viability may still significantly trail that of personal autonomous vehicles.

elefanten• 4 years ago

If the terminal unit economics convincingly work, capital will happily fund someone ready to burn cash to establish market power.

bombcar• 4 years ago

Exactly. It'll be someone like Amazon just bypassing the shipping/trucking companies entirely.

Or imagine robotic trucks full of sweet crude cruising down from Alberta.

joe_the_user• 4 years ago

That's a good point,

The thing is, self-driving trucks seem more plausible as something technologically viable compared to self-driving passenger cars. I've heard proposals to have loading docks directly off major highways, so the only driving the things would need to do would on highways (and even in special lanes). At the same time, I wonder what the advantage of this over just trains would be.

worik6• 4 years ago

The part of truck driving that can be automated is the part of truck driving that is not a problem. (The article discuses this). Those parts are the easy parts

It is all the other little hassles and problem solving that you need the driver for.

Proper pay for everybody is the obvious solution. Are markets going to get us there? If so, why not now?

spfzero• 4 years ago

The article mentioned something about the company being liable for anything that happens if there is no driver. At first that didn't sound quite right to me, aren't they already liable to that degree? Then I remembered contractors etc.

I do think, having a human in the loop who's life is on the line in any accident, will tend to be more creative in avoiding one than software would be.

Training an AI to avoid simulated accidents is not a complete solution. For one thing, there will always be novel situations not trained for, and for another, the AI has no visceral fear of its own death.

mwint2• 4 years ago

But that’s kind of like saying a calculator can never be as creative at solving math problems, because it will never have the visceral fear of failing an exam.

Well… yeah, I guess, but it’s not really relevant. We don’t need creativity in avoiding accidents; the solution space is small: accelerate, brake, and/or steer.

The machine knows the velocity vectors, accelerations, and sizes of all other objects on the road. That alone is a huge advantage over a human, which don’t look in all directions at once. You can probably drop the AI part altogether and have an always-running routine that takes over when collision is imminent based on relatively simple vector projection.

Avoiding collision isn’t the hard part here, adhering to the myriad rules (spoken and unspoken) we’ve set up is. I think that’s probably why we all cringe at the Tesla videos of it doing crazy stuff, but somehow it’s not hitting stuff very often.

cproctor• 4 years ago

Also, "when a person isn’t on board, the company is on the hook for everything that goes on in that truck." Having a driver is a way of offloading risk.

jwithington• 4 years ago

bleak. why are there minimum wage laws that don't apply to everyone?

lostlogin• 4 years ago

Having a universal law would soon hit into some huge structural problems. Maybe rail actually is more efficient? Maybe cheap prison labour isn’t the best way to do things? Maybe massive too management wages while the bottom tier get less than a living wage is bad?

after_care• 4 years ago

There are millions of jobs that minimum wage laws do not apply to in the US.

* Tip workers

* Gig workers

* Undocumented workers

jnwatson2• 4 years ago

Tip workers absolute have the same minimum wage laws. The minimum wage is lower ($2.13) and they are guaranteed to make at least the regular minimum wage if by their tips are not high enough

thaumasiotes2• 4 years ago

Minimum wage laws do apply to tipped workers in the US.

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

"Truck drivers, farm workers, and restaurant staff are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)."

Not the bleakest [1], but yeah, bleak. Long, lonely, boring, life-sucking, thankless hours. Essential, yet at the Bottom of the 'skilled' totem-pole. Mostly these people are heros, and our lives are dependent on their sacrifices. (Many heavy-equipment drivers are 'skilled' enough to make much more - but working conditions are similar).

FLSA created in 1938 (end of Depression) by US Congress. Same body that has left minimum wage at $7.25 for 13 years. The best in the OECD (Australia) is US$12.9 (much more in line with purchasing power.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

amluto• 4 years ago

It seems to me that forcing reasonable labor practices on the industry might improve efficiency. For example, if freight companies don’t pay their truckers for loading and unloading time, then they have very limited incentive to reduce loading and unloading time. If this time started costing the industry even an extra $15/hr, that might give a substantial incentive to optimize.

thaumasiotes2• 4 years ago

If truckers don't get paid for loading and unloading time, they have lots of incentive to reduce it.

rideontime• 4 years ago

But the truckers don't have the power to reduce it.

black6• 4 years ago

The trucking industry would quickly find out the same thing Uber found out about their self-driving cars, which is that when a person isn’t on board, the company is on the hook for everything that goes on in that truck.

Drivers do a lot more than just get the vehicle from Point A to Point B, whether the cargo is alive or not.

faangiq• 4 years ago

Never forget - labor shortages are actually always wage shortages. Especially in the tech industry. Start paying programmers a more reasonable share of the millions in profits we generate and your hiring problems will magically disappear.

ghiculescu• 4 years ago

I think this is true regarding truckers, as there seems to be many people who can drive trucks but choose not to. If they got paid more, they would drive (the author suggests, and I agree).

But is it true for programmers? Are there many people who can code but choose not to, but would if the pay was higher? That seems less likely.

tuatoru• 4 years ago

Reliable sign that there is a labor shortage: employers are willing to take people off the street and train them at their (the employers') own expense.

If I don't see this happening, I don't see a labor shortage.

worik6• 4 years ago

No.

You cannot magic up good programmers by paying more money.

It is a complete system, starting when education starts. It does require proper pay (the missing piece of the truck driver problem) but computing (and other creative technical professions) require aptitude and training!

That requires long term planning and educating the population.

sjtindell• 4 years ago

The “No” is a terrible way to converse. Condescending about a nuanced topic, also not great. Their logic is that when you raise wages, you will attract more workers. This is probably true. Seeing high wages, workers may choose that field earlier on, etc.

aahortwwy• 4 years ago

If the demand for labor exceeds the population there will be a labor shortage that is not a wage shortage...

tehwebguy• 4 years ago

There is not a lack of population or even a lack of population capable of trucking, there is a lack of population willing to do it for the current wages being offered

travisporter• 4 years ago

I miss outline

edmcnulty1012• 4 years ago

I was an OTR truck driver for a year for a big company called Prime. This was like a decade ago.

I made around 44 grand in a year for around 60 to 80 hours a week of work.

You get paid 'per mile' but you spend many hours at docks unloading. There were constantly times I would wait in a dock all day to unload and since the truck wasn't moving, that was considered my 'time off'. Then they would finally unload you and you would have been considered to have rested 8 hours and have to drive 10 more hours even though you didn't sleep because you were waiting for your name to be called to unload.

On the upside, got to see a lot of cool stuff around the country and driving those big trucks was badass.

I was on bad terms with my dispatcher because if I got someplace early I would spend that extra time sightseeing instead of delivering the load early.

After a while, being away from home sucked massively because you have such little time off in those big companies.

I think that was a 'paying your dues' type job and if I stuck at it there are better trucking jobs out there.

Tech hasn't been a walk in the park but it at least pays really well.

lifeisstillgood• 4 years ago

Oddly the truckers who are paid a salary are Armed forces. I would be interested in knowing how the economics of army logistics compares to commercial - and if the comparisons take this article into account?

Nikbul• 4 years ago

Are you talking about actually military MOS truck drivers, or the contractors? If actual MOS-it will depend where it located, but generally military work is 24\7 work without any side income. Spend week in the field with no shower? Work a year in a war zone? Driver fuel if the middle of nowhere and freeze your ass while waiting for special tow truck because no adequate heating in the cab? If you like those-you welcome to join.

UncleEntity4• 4 years ago

Well, I was a truck driver during the last Iraq invasion hauling fuel for the 3rd ID.

Got like 9 hours of sleep the first week of the war. Every single truck in the company had “red line” issues but if would run we ran it, we had one where the whole electrical harness caught on fire that couldn’t be shut down and we ran that too. Had to “reallocate” parts from other units who were stupid enough to leave their equipment unguarded. And random firefights, shit blowing up, bases getting overrun around us all the time.

Forgot what an E-5 made in ‘03, a lot less than my civilian truck driver job at the time.

warmwaffles• 4 years ago

This sounds like a really interesting story.

kilroy123• 4 years ago

So would you say this quote is true?

"All militaries suck, the one that sucks the least wins."

I Am a Twenty Year Truck Driver, Part 2: How Truckers Are Paid

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