Driver pay

Correction: They'll pay them for every stop AFTER the standard two stops that it takes to complete a trip. So only on the 3rd stop do most OTR dry van and reefer drivers get paid "stop pay" and 3rd stops, even in reefer, aren't super common either.

 

What if a dental hygienist was told they wouldn’t be paid for their first 2 cleanings of the day? Or an electrician was told they wouldn’t be paid for their first 2 hours of running wire? Or someone at Taco Bell was told they wouldn’t be paid until they handed out 75 sauce packets?

i find it so bizarre and insulting that’s truckers are expected to work without pay.

 

Couldn't agree more. As far as I'm concerned, every minute of a drivers days should be compensated. If you're rolling, then you get paid by the mile. Sitting somewhere..getting loaded/unloaded...whatever...then a driver should get an hourly wage. Anything less than that, then yea companies are expecting drivers to work a certain amount of time each day for free.

 

So you want it all.

But are you going far enough?

Many loads have us running on slower roads, through traffic and towns that slow us down.
So we make less (often much less) per hour while rolling through those areas.
How would you calculate those times in terms of being paid by the mile while rolling?

Get creative, and let's see how complex and complicated we can make trucker pay be.


And never forget...
To be paid hourly while sitting at a customer, you would have to be on duty that whole time.

 

As opposed to sitting for hours and hours off duty at a shipper/receiver getting no pay? No thanks. Been there, done that. And sitting for a few hours for free, then getting some sort of half assed detention pay? Again, no thanks.

 

Correct. And in the LTL P&D world, that is why I never spent more than 1 single hour at any shipper or receiver and if it took the full hour to load, that was not because I was sitting on a dock waiting to be loaded. It was because it was a larger load and you had a big load stop where you had to tag a bunch of different boxes and then fill out and sign a bunch of paperwork/enter the paperwork onto the tablet.

And if a shipper or receiver didn't let the drivers load the trailers themselves and were going to be more than 15 minutes before they could start loading or unloading the trailer, we were expected to bounce and leave right then and there. See ya. Come back tomorrow, maybe. Or maybe not. 10 other stops and they all had freight for us, we didn't have time to waste sitting around at 1 particular warehouse because said warehouse was behind for the day or whatever. If it was a receiver well tough luck, let me unload the pallets within 15 minutes of arrival with a pallet jack or the freight's going back to the terminal lol.

Amazing how that works, when you're paid hourly then suddenly your time is actually respected and the standard drops from 2 hours on the dock to 30 minutes per stop.

Look, I prefer OTR over local work. So don't take this post as me complaining about something when I could just go back to local LTL work if I wanted to. But that said, let's not act like OTR dry van and reefer companies don't have big problems with uncompensated work. They do.

You can call it "wanting it all" if you want to, but yet somehow the Estes and Old Dominion's and UPS' of the world are all extremely profitable companies that are paying in the $25 - $30 per hour range or if they're on CPM pay like the linehaul guys, they're getting paid accesorial pay like building/breaking down sets, or fueling, or breakdown pay starting the minute you call in the breakdown, etc. etc. Don't act like OTR companies can't do the same. They can. And they should.

 

You are correct, there are other options available without going LTL to get paid for everything you do. Just do your homework with your job search and don't just go with the next mega available.

 

If you believe that, then you dont no how per diem OR taxes from an employers position works.

 

It doesn't have to be complicated at all, Way back anything under 100 and/or the first 100 miles was paid by the hour . That included if you took a load to nyc from la for ex. any city work was hourly.

Not true , being paid or not, has nothing to do with duty status.