The Transportation Research Board (TRB) is conducting a compensation study to examine the effect of compensation on safety, in part. I attended the brief information session the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration held at MATS about the study, and my singular question was how they can possibly know or understand how safety is affected by driver compensation unless they have a psychologist and safety officials examining the issue. While they have assembled a very distinguished research panel, I think they are falling short in actual real-life understanding.
A common-sense approach to the subject should consider the long-term decline in truck driver earnings. Way back in 2016, news emerged of an analysis from the National Transportation Institute, well-known for its National Survey of Driver Wages at the time. That analysis showed that annual employee-driver wages averaged $38,618 in 1980. If adjusted to 2015 dollars, that would have been more than $111,000 a year, and well more than that today.
Yet for the average driver, we’re nowhere near that figure. Bureau of Labor Statistics data in 2021 put the average number at less than $50K in annual income. Owner-operators among ATBS clients last year netted just shy of $65K in income, averaged across all segments. Personally, currently in a company truck, I am on track to make about $52K this year, and that’s working 329 days of the year, or taking 36 days off at home -- two days a month and a two-week vacation to attend one of my required residency classes for my post-graduate work.
But that means I am still earning not even half of what I might have expected if operator compensation had kept up with inflation since 1980. And sure, erosion of the buying power of average annual incomes in the United States isn’t just a trucking phenomenon over that same time period, but for operators the erosion is stark.
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If the trucking industry wants to increase the labor pool, this must change. When I was doing my undergrad work, many among the younger generation I encountered there considered any work below a $100K annual salary as undesirable. Do we think a profession where earnings are less than half that is going to attract their generation?
