Training Pay and Afterwards

Lot of us do stand up for decent wages. You're the one who signed on with someone to work for peanuts. 1st you didn't do your homework. You never believe a recruiter. Especially at one of the huge companies.. What company did you work for. That is the purpose of this forum. To warn the next guy about scammers. Glad to see you using you math skills NOW and realizing that too many companies don't pay squat in exchange for the stars in wannabes eyes. And the economy has everything to do with it. No jobs and these rats have much larger pool of broke folks to go after. During a booming economy you right the check. Under Obama economy they have the upper hand just as at the end of the Bush fiasco.

 

The money is there but you need to earn it and more importantly (to any employer) you need to prove that you can handle life on the road and everything that goes with it. At the moment you're not worth big bucks to your former employer because you haven't yet proved you have the skill and knowledge required to safely go out and make money for the company in your own. Yes. Trucking is a business and companies don't pay you just because they like you, they're in it for the money. Nothing wrong with that.

Also, keep in mind that all of your comments are from when you were in TRAINING. According to my math you made roughly $1350 over three weeks of training which averages out to be roughly $450 per week. That's the same or more than you'd make at most training companies while you're a student driver.

I'm sorry you had a rough experience but it's similar to what every driver on the road today went through to get where they are today. I personally made $300 per week during my 6 weeks of training. I dealt with what I thought was b/s at the time because I knew that the money was there, I just had to earn it. After training I had a 26cpm OTR job. I earned raises, put in 5 years of my time and a ton of safe and legal miles and eventually found a job with a company that paid better. Almost 8 years later I'm making 48cpm running dry van OTR and I love where I'm at (most days).

The bottom line here is it sounds like you're in the wrong career. If you can't put with a small amount of hardship for a short period of time you'll never make it as an OTR driver IMHO. Good luck in the future.

 

I think most of us took pay cuts to get into trucking, I took a little pay cut, but was in the truck 24/7 and it felt like I went to prison, but you have to tough it out, the better times will eventually come, you have to work at it.

 

what wa s the name of the company?

 

Sorry OP, I dozed off. Would you mind repeating that?

 

What was your question?

 

Obama has notning to do with how the industry pays drivers.Back in 2002 when I first started I received the same pay going thru training as you did kingpin.Thats one thing that hasn't changed since the economy went south because the pay is bad to begin with companies don't dare lower trainee pay.You kingpin knew about the pay when u started as a trainee,but probably wasn't aware of how many hrs you would be working.Companies make a killing of drivers and off trainees otherwise they wouldn't be in business.Can't even begin to think how much they spend just on advertising.So its not that companies can't afford to pay a decent wage is because they choose not to.You don't like it then quit,they could care less.I'm waiting for the day when companies don't have the drivers to keep above water especially the mega starter companies.You're right kingpin,drivers aren't even making minimum wage.Companies and the government thinks all they do is drive.If that was only the case they would be getting more miles and a lot less sitting.Its all the hidden things that come with trucking that companies refuse to pay the drivers.I do think you trainees should receive more then salary.Kids in highschool working at a fast food joint are making more then drivers mainly OTR.

 

Newsflash:::
Truck drivers, driver's helpers, loaders, and mechanics are EXEMPTED from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
As such, they do not get overtime pay.
Read about exempted workers at this link: http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/screen75.asp
Government you deserve, etc.

In Germany, truck drivers can only work for 48 hours a week. Ponder that.

That said, a driver paid 36 cents per mile makes $21.60 per hour when driving 60 mph. At 70 mph, that rate is $25.20 per hour, which is about $50K per year in 40-hour-week cubicle time. But trucking is not a nine-to-five job. Would you rather sit at a desk for 70 hours a week or sit in a cab? Chose your poison.

On the other hand, name me any industry in the United States in which a person can walk in off the street, get trained for five or eight or ten weeks then start making forty or fifty grand a year, provided that person choses a good company. An opportunity isn't an opportunity if you don't grab it and take advantage of it. Part of the problem here is that everyone thinks everyone else is making more money and has it easier than they do, grass is greener syndrome. This is nonsense. When I had a desk job working in media at the national level, I netted $700 a week, plus benefits, living in an area with a pretty high cost of living and I had eight years of experience in my field. Everybody loves to whine but nobody wants to work. After my media job, I was a stay-home dad for years, making zero dollars except for seasonal jobs loading trucks at a distribution center, which paid for Christmas those years. Entering trucking has been a shock, but I'm getting over it. It is what it is.
I'm getting $100 a day for training, which I consider pretty ###### fair, and they're running my butt off. But I'm learning, you betcha, and my body is telling me about it.

The intent of the HOS rules completely miss out on the reality that if a driver is ALLOWED a certain number of hours to work, you can be ###### sure an employer will EXPECT him or her to work all of those hours or it's hit the bricks, jack or jill.
And the days missing daily family life, breakfasts, dinners, bedtimes, are kind of a nightmare if you have kids.

If you divide the money by the hours, sure truck driving sucks, but lots of other jobs suck like that too, even the white-collar ones. Lots of professions put in ungodly amounts of overtime and nobody is mandating that they take 10-hour breaks. Try to start up and run a small business and see how much sleep you get.

But where else are you going to put your foot down and hear a turbo whine and then let off and hear that jake snarl?
Where else does your office weigh 17,000 lbs and you get to drive over mountains in the dark and fog and rain and snow and have a constantly changing view out your windows? Where else do you get to take a personal stake in moving the physical economy of the nation forward instead of sitting at home in your underpants kvetching and whining about it and blaming Obama or Bush about it on the internet?
WHERE?!