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As someone who's worked inside the industry, the economics of being a trucker push drivers to bend or break the rules to make ends meet. Wages have been depress
by futhey 11y ago
As someone who's worked inside the industry, the economics of being a trucker push drivers to bend or break the rules to make ends meet. Wages have been depressed over the last three decades and have seen a drop in real wages in many segments of the trucking industry. I saw many drivers keeping multiple log books, skipping or cutting-short rest breaks.
Professional drivers can and do operate safely. But with some carriers paying as little as 20 cents per mile, you can do the math and figure out what a typical work-week looks like if you want to eek out a very meager living as a trucker today.
- sokoloff 11y agoWho would drive a truck for $11/hr max? You could make more driving Uber or bartending/waiting tables...
- roflchoppa 11y agoMigrant workers from asia / south america. whom might not speak enough english to do other work. I say this by hanging around my fathers freight forwarding company for the past 15 years.
- wpietri 11y agoMaybe you can answer a question I've been wondering about: what valuable things do truck drivers do besides driving trucks? There's a lot of hype around self-driving trucks these days. But there's this common tendency to assume that if you can replace the visible part of a job with technology, then those jobs are doomed. The classic example for me is a restaurant replacing waitstaff with computers screens so that people order without talking to a human. But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around. So what else is in the job description of a trucker that's valuable?
- douche 11y ago> But waitstaff do a lot more than simple data entry, so that ends up being worse all around. Yeah, they do it poorly and inaccurately, with lots of latency between requests.
- spdionis 11y agoDepends a lot on the staff quality. The value of a qualified waiter is much more than simply taking your order.
- douche 11y agoPerhaps for high-end places where the human touch is important. But for your run of the mill, fast food and cheap chain restaurants, hiring staff is a liability, if you are forced to hire the kind of staff that is willing to work for $8/hour. I've never decided to frequent a particular establishment because their staff was better than average, but there are a lot I won't go back to because they had awful, incompetent staff. Average here means that they deliver something vaguely resembling what you asked for, within a reasonable timeframe, and they can total the order up on the cash register without over or undercharging by an order of magnitude, or crashing the entire POS system of the restaurant. That's rarer than you might imagine...
- dalke 11y agoIf you visit the Netherlands you may be interested in stopping at FEBO, which is a hybrid automat/fast food chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEBO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEBO
- Jach 11y agoWhen automation is not complete, humans can hang around for a bit longer, but there will still be fewer of them than before. If all restaurants did was automate order-taking and paying (some are painfully close to this already with on-table tablets that it's actually annoying they haven't already), they just need a human who doesn't speak to the customers to make the food, deliver the requests, and clean up. Maybe a traditional waitress or two if they wish to serve the occasional customer who can't or won't use the new technology. The needed staff size to run a restaurant is lower in any case... I'm also curious what truck drivers' value is besides the driving. The main thing I see is doubling as role of security guard -- a minor deterrent to anyone wanting to rob the contents of the truck. So there may be some value for them as ride-along security once automated driving is here, but perhaps only if the problem of people blocking the road to trigger the truck's automated driver to stop and be robbed is serious enough or happens roughly equally along all routes at all times (unlikely).
- jdhzzz 11y ago"In the future factories will only have 2 employees: a man and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog, while the dog's job will be to bite the man if he dares to touch the controls."
- roflchoppa 11y agoSorry for the late response, my dad said "sometimes they just wonder around the area looking at nature" "They think shit why did i become a truck driver" For the younger guys / girls that work there my dad says he's trying to get them to go to school. as for the last question he said " they are going to at some point be replaced, although situationally i can think of times where a person is nicer to have, rather than a computer" " i can see drivers getting replaced, or becoming operators for the machinery, theres needs to be someone there to be liable for the cargo and freight" personally i think that we can solve a ton of traffic related issues with self-driving vehicles
- ZoeZoeBee 11y agoDriving for Uber won't be an option too long either, why do you think they've hired over a dozen robotic engineers from Carnegie Mellon?