Unbelievably Low Pay for US Truck Drivers

That’s like saying if farmers would have held out for $100/bushel corn in 1985, they’d be pulling in $200/bushel today. That’s ridiculous in many ways. The free market is the free market. For better or for worse. But it works well for long term success [for all parties] through economic highs and lows.

Besides, when you effectively have had an “open borders policy” the past 30 years and have flooded the labor supply with low and unskilled laborers, you can’t expect to have a lot of leverage. Any moron can get a CDL today

 

^^^ yep. Foreign labor willing to work at a discount has stagnated wages for decades and will continue.

 

Money was different in the prior to 90's Any youngster went to trade schools during highschool or just after. Learned enough in a short time without BS liberal coursework for say metal work. (Welding) then go to the shipyard downtown at Beth Steel and bring in 60K solo annual.

Industry went away in the late 70's and were replaced by condos. As did the vocational and trades. (Too expensive the schools said...)

I used to stand at the harbor which was a working harbor with tons of jobs all over under the sky as far you could see. As a kid. As a teen, all of that went away. Poof. Demo'ed.

Deregulation for trucking came along about the 1977 or so. THAT was very important. Im not going to get into details here. The things we did when I started at 21 dealing with multipule Class A's Bingo cards, tags, ICC and so on etc etc etc do not exist today.

You could NOT get truckers to be more together than we were already until about the first 2.00 fuel price problem. That showed then just how divided we had become across the land.

And I repeat, the inflation took off. Partly because the money was very good. We were in a business growing up and our costs rose to the point of not having much to do in the late 80's to early 90's that got busy again when people finally started coming back in to spend money. It is fortunate we sold off a huge albatross and moved into a much smaller place during that time. It was a very smart thing.

I can go on. But keep in mind also one of the reasons our pay was lower as a team is because that year FFE mainly had us a sort of a national firetruck. To race about the entire USA solving problems. Grabbing loads off solos who dawldled too much in the west casinos or whatever and causing a real problem with customer in chicago or some place threatening the account for being late. Sometimes we took late loads off bad trainers and students. And did other things that were needful to FFE and later to McKesson.

The pay that we had, we ran savings in excess of 10K up to the 9-11 time period which meant we can and did run 6 weeks without pay. I hate to go into all of that. It was no problem.

I refuse to get into the old versus young. It's immaterial to us. I understand the young are doing things differently and that's fine. This is a free country. The problem is how is the industry going to be 10 or 20 years from now? I don't think I will be around to find out.

 

comparing labor to a material item is a poor decision, at best. i’ll almost agree with the 30 year influx of unskilled labor affecting things. which still ultimately falls on the tax payers and voters of the era...

 

I graduated high school in 2002. Why is it this generation's fault or that generation's fault? There so many another factors that go into driver pay. People get paid what the "market" says we get paid. Who knows what the market really is? All I know is that it is out of our control and these folks right the same articles regurgitating the same vocabulary with no ideas as to what should be done to attract and retain drivers. And besides those numbers the author put up, they are based on how many years experience?

 

I love the fact that the bigger companies are screaming driver shortage at a time when the economy has just come off a hot streak. And these news outlets are reporting this nonsense. Where does one think the unemployed will turn in the next recession with crap like this being brodcasted?

I remember very clearly what happened in the last recession. Some of those who were out of work decided to give trucking a try. Some did really well I'd imagine, and then there were some others that made the industry look truly pathetic. And, yes, I'm aware that this has been happening for a long time. But it just seemed worse this last time.

I imagined when I started that I'd do this until I retired. But, I'm not so sure anymore. At 37 years of age, and another five to go until the house is paid off, I wonder what I'd do next . I'll be 42 and looking to change careers. I'm just not sure that's going to work so well.

Then again, there's always Powerball..

 

I thought the same thing in 1985, and look at the national average truck drivers pay today , 35 years later and 85% still arent making 75k. Nobody represents us as an industry. Trump has spoken out about many blue cllar workers but i never hear him talk about truckers.