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I Am a Twenty Year Truck Driver, Part 2: How Truckers Are Paid
- ta988 5y agoI highly recommend https://www.overtheroad.fm/ https://www.overtheroad.fm/ a fascinating podcast about trucking in the U.S.
- ransom1538 5y agoFirst, 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.
- zeroonetwothree 5y ago$20/hr is still more than many other jobs pay, especially those not requiring much education.
- alasdair_ 5y agoIt 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.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoBecause 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.
- ransom1538 5y agoSure, 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.
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- toomuchtodo 5y agoApplebees and renting your car on Turo is the bar? Peak HN. Go talk to more people living paycheck to paycheck. The struggle is shared and legitimate.
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- ransom1538 5y ago
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- renewiltord 5y agoI don’t know anyone living paycheck to paycheck but it appears you do. Care to share what they would say?
- ransom1538 5y ago
- toomuchtodo 5y agoI can share detailed portraits of the people I’ve spoken with, I will make time to put something together. In the interim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820753 https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/20/intergenerational-wealth-middle-class-spiral/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/20/intergenera... https://archive.ph/bNEAc https://archive.ph/bNEAc The above story is not an outlier.
- amalcon 5y agoIt 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.
- blamazon 5y agoTruckers 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.
- datavirtue 5y agoTurn around. No homes left.
- pmoriarty 5y ago"Businesses in Ohio are begging for workers." If the pay is so great and the cost of living so low, why aren't more people flocking to work there?
- chestnuttrees 5y agoPresumably the pay is great if you already live there, but not good enough to convince people to move there? Personally, it would take a 50%-100% raise before I would even consider consider uprooting my family and leaving my current city. But I’d switch jobs locally for half that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- blamazon 5y agoIt's a circle: 1. People flock there 2. Those people need services 3. More jobs needed to provide those services 4. Return to 1. Aside from this, Ohio is a convenient place for logistics and commerce owing to a centralized location in the US, strong infrastructure, and a business-friendly regulatory climate. Hence, warehouses and factories serving the rest of the US which means the economy isn't self-dependent and this raises the minimum wage floor for everyone. But, to answer your question directly, I imagine not everyone is eager to uproot their current lives and move to a suburb of an exurb of a suburb in Ohio.
- mynameishere 5y agoHe 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.
- edmcnulty101 5y agoGross or Net?
- karaterobot 5y agoI 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 5y agoNot 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 5y agoOTR 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.
- alasdair_ 5y ago> To the author, if you're reading, OTR drivers are in very, very high demand. Get that bread. The article talks about the authors experience with OTR and why it has a 90% attrition rate yearly compared to 12% for local. They already got that bread. The bread was moldy.
- massysett 5y agoUPS is union. Teamsters. The author is non-union.
- alasdair_ 5y 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.
- Johnny555 5y agoAt 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 5y agoWhy? 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.
- mjevans 5y agoThe 1-5% (I hope it's this low) of customers that are the only ones you can't forget because they make life hell.
- erdos4d 5y agoThis is literally why I quit teaching university and never went back to academia. Every class has one student who is a complete shit and 95% of your stress revolves around this one person. Work that doesn't require much human contact is so much better.
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- Johnny555 5y agoTraffic doesn't make me anxious, even when I'm driving a large vehicle, and not every truck driver is a long haul trucker.
- UncleEntity 5y agoTomorrow I have to sleep until noon, drive over to Yuma, AZ and take a nap while I get loaded, bomb into LA before the morning traffic starts up, drop the loaded trailer then go back to sleep until I get a reload probably at the same place I’m dropping the loaded trailer. Zero stress, zero hassle (well, I hope…) and I’ll get paid a ‘measly’ $200 to listen to the radio all night.
- shkkmo 5y agoI 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anonymousiam 5y agoA 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 5y agoI believe this is a consequence of deregulation in the 80s, and everyone focusing on price.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoTrucking is far more regulated now than it used to be.
- alistairSH 5y agoThe trucking industry was massively deregulated in 1980, opening up pricing competition and making entry into the industry easier. While this was likely as net positive for society (lower prices), trucking wages have been on the decline ever since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Carrier_Act_of_1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Carrier_Act_of_1980
- missedthecue 5y agoBy "deregulated", this doesn't mean safety standards were eleminated, which i think is how many would interpret this. Instead, it ended price controls, competition barriers, vendor cartels and so forth. The Carter administration also did this to the airline industry which made flying affordable to the average person. Tickets today are cheaper than they were in 1970. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-airline-ticket-prices-fell-50-in-30-years-and-why-nobody-noticed/273506/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...
- robocat 5y 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8AnMzhZZE
- lostcolony 5y agoDepends where in the US; a Big Mac Meal in LA will run you close to $9 USD as well
- spaetzleesser 5y 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.
- mortenjorck 5y 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 5y agoIf the terminal unit economics convincingly work, capital will happily fund someone ready to burn cash to establish market power.
- bombcar 5y agoExactly. 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.
- anamax 5y ago> Or imagine robotic trucks full of sweet crude cruising down from Alberta. It's unlikely that robotic trucks can compete with Buffet's railroads. (According to industry definitions, Albert's crude is not "sweet".) Then again, railroads can't compete with pipelines when it comes to transporting oil. Good thing we stopped that.
- jsnodlin 5y ago
- joe_the_user 5y agoThat'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.
- jwithington 5y agobleak. why are there minimum wage laws that don't apply to everyone?
- lostlogin 5y agoHaving 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 5y agoThere are millions of jobs that minimum wage laws do not apply to in the US. * Tip workers * Gig workers * Undocumented workers
- jnwatson 5y agoTip 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
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoYou just confused two things, tips are not wages, if you get a tip that's a gratuity from a customer. The customer isn't paying to relieve the owners of paying [minimum] wages, they're giving a gift to the people who served them. The level of tip (your last sentence) has nothing to do with a person's wages, they either get a minimum _wage_ or they don't. Reducing their wage because they got a tip would be not paying minimum wage; it would also be callously transferring a tip from a worker to an owner. If the owner wants to be richer stealing the tips is not the way, it's immoral for one. An owner should put up sales prices or have a separate 'jar' for "tips for the owner".
- jnwatson 5y agoYou’re literally arguing against the FLSA. Any dollar a customer tips counts as “tip credit” that an employer can deduct from that employee’s minimum wage. See https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/tip-credits#definition https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/tip-credits...
- amluto 5y agoIt 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.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoIf truckers don't get paid for loading and unloading time, they have lots of incentive to reduce it.
- rideontime 5y agoBut the truckers don't have the power to reduce it.
- jsnodlin 5y ago
- black6 5y 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 5y agoNever 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoReliable 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.
- missedthecue 5y agoAccording to brief internet research, these trucking companies offer CDL training with a job upon completion of their program. Most of the major carriers are on this list. CRST Trucking School C.R. England CDL School Knight Transportation Prime Trucking School and Prime Trucking Company KLLM Trucking School and Company FFE Trucking Roehl Transport Schneider Trucking School and Company Swift Transportation Stevens Driving School (Stevens Transport) Wilson Logistics Training Millis Transfer USA Truck Carter Express Pam Transport Estes XPO Logistics Maverick Transportation Werner Enterprises
- Falkon1313 5y agoThis is true, but look into the terms and conditions. For many/most, it's basically indentured servitude until you've paid off your debt to the company. Which may not be entirely unreasonable, given the economics and how it's structured. It may be a decent alternative to the military for some. But it's not at all the same as being hired and trained on the job as a part of your work, as many jobs used to be and a few somewhat still are.
- travisporter 5y agoI miss outline
- edmcnulty101 5y agoI 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 5y agoOddly 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 5y agoAre 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.
- UncleEntity 5y agoWell, 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 5y agoThis sounds like a really interesting story.
- kilroy123 5y agoSo would you say this quote is true? "All militaries suck, the one that sucks the least wins."