From the article: A few drivers told The Washington Post that they earn $100,000, but many said their annual pay is less than $50,000 (government statistics say median pay for the industry is $42,000). As for the bonuses, driver Daniel Gollnick said they are a “complete joke” because of all the strings attached.
This is the nature of truck driving, the headline has been $100k/yr job without the need of a degree for years, but in actuality, only those who work very hard & cheat the books get close to that.
Are you willing to drive while sleepy, break regs when the customer is demanding you drive longer to deliver their products (due to traffic delaying you or similar)? Its a really screwed up industry.
This is the nature of truck driving, the headline has been $100k/yr job without the need of a degree for years, but in actuality, only those who work very hard & cheat the books get close to that.
No, trucking was a decent living 'till deregulation in the 90s.
Presumably he was contradicting "This is the nature of truck driving" - saying, in other words, that the problem isn't inherent to truck driving but rather came about due to deregulation.
Agreed, my hope is that it isn't a foreshadow for other industries. Once breaking regs and cheating (whatever that looks like for a given industry) become part of the revenue forecast. It’s pretty hard for market participants to compete without doing those things.
Very hard to do that today with Electronic logs and most companies going to Systems that track based on what the truck is doing not what the driver reports.
This is one of the reasons there is a shortage alot of those drivers that used to "cheat the books" (which is a whole other thing) stopped making as much money, and can not pull the same number of loads anymore
The only one I’m familiar with is that you drive more than you report and that lets you take on more jobs. You’re not supposed to drive more than (for example) 14 hours / day for safety reasons but most drivers that pull six figures tend to have violated these laws fundamentally.
It may not be to take more jobs, it may be to keep the one you have. Say it takes 14 hours and 45 minutes and you can only log 14 hours drive time. How do you get the job done when dispatch is promising you'll be there? Start driving before you log the start of your day, log breaks when really you've been peeing in a bottle, log some time to inspect your truck when you are stuck in traffic. A little here and there. You can also fudge when you slept and start so you can get rolling sooner. The pressure to do this is huge. If you won't, someone else will, so you do it to keep your job.
Bonus, if you are caught the company doesn't care, they will hire someone else, but it sticks with your record.
> Are you willing to drive while sleepy, break regs when the customer is demanding you drive longer to deliver their products (due to traffic delaying you or similar)? Its a really screwed up industry.
Screwed up would be forbidding people from making this personal choice through regulation.
The problem is that it doesn't just affect them. If drunk drivers only killed themselves it would be a lesser issue not worth setting up checkpoints over.
Warrantless checkpoints aren't legal in Washington State, and having experienced them in other states I'm very happy to not have to interact with an armed goon at a random checkpoint.
Yeah I wish these articles wouldn't lead with the nonsense the companies claim. A thousand bucks isn't really a signing bonus worth the name, and if the median pay is $42,000 that means half of drivers are earning less than that. Even mentioning the high end of driver pay without heavy emphasis on the typical reality is misleading to the extreme. It's clear the conditions could be greatly improved, along with the pay, training, and other benefits. For a political culture that loves framing things with Econ 101, there's a major blind spot for simple supply and demand that strikes the writers and editors of these sorts of articles.
There was a truck driver on NPR a while back giving an interview. He noted the same thing. Only very few drivers with specialized skills make a good living. Everyone else is tied to a very low net salary structure.
It was an interesting observation that he contrasted to this myth of the independent truck guy working for himself... when really most are just as tied to company whims and rules that they have nothing to do with, and arguably have less freedom than most workers.
A passage from the introduction on the hierarchy of truckers that probably has some relevance here:
To the casual observer all trucks probably look similar, and I suppose people figure all truckers do pretty much the same job. Neither is true. There’s a strict hierarchy of drivers, depending on what they haul and how they’re paid. The most common are the freighthaulers. They’re the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are the car haulers (parking lot attendants), flatbedders (skateboarders), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers), chemical haulers (thermos bottle holders), and hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys). Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truckstop coffee counter or in the driver’s lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters, when there is one, mainly because I don’t have time to waste, but also because I don’t buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse. I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a three-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks, and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.
I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.
Yet the headline talks about 80 kUSD/year.