They need to mandate hourly w/ OT after 40

There’s nothing stopping you or anyone else from paying hourly with OT after 40. The last thing we need is more “mandates”.

I bet if you started a company and paid like that and had the freight to go with it you’d have people lined up wanting to work for you.

 

I wouldn’t want to work by the hour OTR, with the resulting push to know what I’m doing at all time. I like working on my own clock. The load gets there on time every time. That’s all the company needs to know as long as my logs are legal, which they are.

 

OT is mandated for every other job after 40 hours, why not trucking? Why would that be so bad? Pay me by the hour and I won't have to drive as fast, won't cause a commotion when sitting for 6 hours waiting to be unloaded, etc. But pay me by the mile and I'm VERY impatient sitting unpaid for hours day after day.

People think being paid by the hour would result in less money. If it does, YOU DEMAND MORE PAY PER HOUR OR YOU LEAVE. 70000 a year is 35/hr for a full time employee. Ok, then pay me 35/hr with overtime after 40. You can't go lower because then you're trying to make mileage pay look better, when in reality you make decent money WHEN DRIVING but make NOTHING when stopped. If you don't think my skills at driving an 80,000lb rig safely in all weather and in all areas of the country with a million dollars of product in the trailer is worth 35 an hour, then I'll take my skills elsewhere.

In what other industry are you expected to work 70 HOURS IN A WEEK WITHOUT OVERTIME? Oh yea, and don't forget, in a normal job if your boss tells you that he's not going to pay you for the next 3 hours, you would just get in your car and go home. We can't do that. We aren't getting paid, we can't go home, we can't leave the truck. That sounds like jail to me, not a job.

One day I woke up and drove 10 min to get unloaded. It took 6 hours. I drove 18 miles to get reloaded. That took 5 hours. That company didn't pay any detention, so I drove 28 miles in 11 hours and 30 minutes earning about 15 dollars for the day. Is that REALLY ok? We're supposed to be "professionals." Well PROFESSIONALS don't sit for 11 hours unpaid in a day.

You people forget, there is an option of being paid SALARY. 75000 a year. Period. That way no matter what, your paychecks are the same, week after week. Get held up at a shipper/receiver? Oh well, that's dispatches problem, not yours. Get caught in traffic? Oh well. Who cares? This is a workable alternative to being paid hourly with OT.

 

Companies aren't going to just let drivers work 40 hours for the same pay. What will happen is, the hourly wage will be set low enough that you have to work the overtime for 60-70 hours to make the same as you're making now. There's not a chance removing the FLSA exemption for trucking would, on its own, result in any industry-wide significant pay raise.

 

It doesn't need to. It would simply have us paid for everything we do.

Let's do the math here.

Let's say you work 52 weeks, 70 hours per week. That's 3640 hours a year.

Divide 70,000 dollars (more than most of us make) by 3640 and you get a bit over 19 dollars an hour. That's without ANY overtime.

If you think a truck driver would be willing to work for less than 19 an hour so he can get paid OT you're crazy. We would finally get compensated for all hours worked. Even paying us 20 dollars an hour, with OT after 40, with 70 hours a week, we'd make a killing.

The math:

20 an hour times 40 hours= 800
30 hours times 30 an hour=900

So for 70 hours WITH OT at only 20 an hour, that's 1700 a week, which is over 88,000 a year.

So even paid as little as 20 an hour, with as many hours as we work, we would make more than we do now.

 

If you pay drivers hourly then all drivers will drive like Prime drivers

 

Wouldn't that be nice? It would be much more relaxed out on the road.

Here is some ugly math. Let's say you make 60g's a year. 3640 hours of work per year.

That's only 16.48 an hour. I got paid more than that to sit behind a desk and watch youtube videos while having a title of "dispatcher." And I went home every night and slept in my own bed. And was paid for every hour I worked.

 

More moving road blocks and people cutting each other off doesn't sound like more relaxing to me.