unfair labor standards in the industry in general

Megas are actually the minority of trucks on the road. There are more independents than megas companies. Independents have the ability to serve more niche markets or to offer services the megas cannot such as JIT or white glove.

On the flip side, smaller independents can't service a very large customer with volume. They simply don't have the ability to leave 300 trailers sitting at a customer's location so they can load at will or use for overflow portable warehousing. Megas control the market with their money. They pay Congress to pass laws that benefit them.

Most of the pay issues stem from a law passed in 1935 that exempt interstate drivers from being paid overtime. Also, the pay protocols of mileage, percentage, load etc are all designed to make the carrier more money, not to maximize driver's salary.

Drivers give away so much labor for free when not paid hourly. It's amazing they continue to find people willing to do it. I guess that's why so many of them are homeless.

 

I read somewhere that when the exemption for paying drivers overtime was made a regulation the idea and reasoning behind it was to keep drivers from pushing too hard and working too many hours. The theory being if drivers weren't paid overtime they wouldn't want to work a bunch of extra hours. It was for safety and keep in mind this is also when the original HOS regs were created. But it ended up backfiring and not working out as intended. The cynic in me thinks that somebody with an interest in cheap driver wages put that BS out there to get support for the driver overtime exemption.

 

As an owner-operator this may sound absurd, but I grew up in a teamster household. My father was a city driver, only worked for 1 company his whole life so...

I dont know if it could be done, but what they truly need to do to "fix" the problem is to bring back regulation in the trucking industry. It would effectively kill most owner-operators but it would bring back the standards and pay the drivers once had in this country. The side benefit is it would dramatically reduce the numbers of foreign drivers that so many of you worry about...

 

Amazon isn't just single owner operators. All those brand new semi trucks in the Amazon colors and logo's you see are owned by contractors same as FedEx Ground. Amazon doesn't own any of those. They're all lease arrangements separating Amazon from liability and shucking off expenses on gullible "fleet owner entrepreneurs".

 

They're all over the country everywhere daycabs, sleepers. See pic below. Looks like company owned equipment all late model stuff but it's not.