Recently I responded to a doctoral classmate and her thoughts on truck drivers, and thought I would share a little public education for those readers who are not truckers. While her views were not negative, they were a bit naïve, and prompted the following response.
I am actually a third-generation trucker and avoided it until I could no longer justify earning a minimum wage of $5.35 an hour with two babies in diapers. The average long-hauler or what we call an over the road (OTR) driver, logs anywhere from 500-700 miles a day, and might only spend two or three days at home a month, or 24-36 days a year at home. It takes a very strong independent woman to be a trucker's wife and raise kids pretty much alone. Though today's technology makes it somewhat easier, an OTR trucker's life consists of missed birthdays, anniversaries, graduations and supporting events like ball games and recitals. They basically sacrifice their lives to provide better lives for those they love.
But over the last couple of decades, the industry has begun to see a shift from OTR to regional operations, and many drivers are in fact getting home every weekend or every other weekend. In doing so, pay has dropped, because more than half of company-employed drivers are paid by the mile – that’s according to Overdrive’s recent compensation survey of such drivers in the publication’s audience. Miles drop when you are home every weekend, of course. Though many companies have raised pay closer to 50 cents/mile, it’s not hard to find an OTR driver running roughly 3,500-4,200 miles a week at a rate of 38 cents/mile, for $1,330-$1,596 in weekly pay (before taxes). A regional driver might average 2,500-3,500 miles, $950-$1,330 a week at that same rate.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual wage for truck drivers is about $47,000 as of May of this year, which is hard to justify for the amount of time and risk involved. Pay has a huge impact on retention rates, but even that does not explain the 94%-116% turnover rate at fleets, which has been more or less sustained for more than three decades now.
Still, if trucking had simply maintained the average cost of living increase for the last 30 years, drivers should be making closer to $125,000 or more a year. Although this cost would have been passed to the consumer in rate increases, the biggest issue remains, pay structure.
[Related: The driver shortage alarm]
It’s not uncommon for a driver to work 70 hours in a week, but most will not get overtime pay. They might spend 12-20 hours a week sitting at docks to load or unload and not be paid for that time, and if they are, not paid very much. Drivers spend a minimum of a few hours a week doing preventive maintenance in the form of pre-trip and post-trip inspections to adhere to federal regulations and to avoid downtime on the road, and again as like as not to be paid for that time.
