Otr/Regional & paid by the hour…

I've seen a few ads from RUAN for paid hourly OTR gigs. Hourly pay is the way to go. Since the ELD and the HOS are hourly it makes sense to pay per hour. It also seems there is less room for shady stuff. Nothing requires drivers be paid by the mile or the load or any other way. It's mostly a hangover from the old days and it shifts the burden of delays onto the driver. Hourly pay still leaves room for frustration, and customers and traffic still cause delays which screw up plans. Getting paid for delays doesn't mean there will be a parking spot for you at the truck stop later or getting home after some appointment you missed. If I can't be paid on salary, then I want to get paid hourly.

 

Funny thing - a few years ago Washington passed a law saying that an employee who wasn't paid on salary or hourly (such as by the mile) got a paid 10 minute break every 4 hours. Overnight, most driving jobs started paying hourly. No one went blind. No one went broke. Business goes on as usual with one notable exception - a lot of the, "chores" that employers forced drivers to do when they were free (training, meetings) were minimized or disappeared altogether. Trips that used to be scheduled to start a trip just as rush hour started suddenly got rescheduled to morning or evening off-peak hours (it can take 20 minutes or 3 hours to drive across Portland depending on the time of day). It was as if driver's time suddenly became valuable to employers when they had to pay for it!

 

Boy I sure am missing my paid ten min break as a Washington based otr driver.

 

I drive through Atlanta a lot. Usually at least once a week. I keep stats on my trips through Atlanta because I hate it. Lol of the last 19 out of 20 times I’ve been across Atlanta it’s taken me at least 2.5 hours. A drive that would take about 40 to 45 minutes at speed limit. A few of those trips took in excess of five hours. On one particular outing my dispatcher sent me back-and-forth across Atlanta four times in a 30 hour period. The steam cooker had built up to the point that I called him and said if you send me back through Atlanta again you’re gonna have to pay me hourly. And I said “I’m not joking“. Enough is enough. There’s days out here that I start at 3 AM in the morning and I’m still fiddling around doing something truck related at 10 or 11 o’clock that night. And because of the way the day unfold it I may be only drove 250 to 300 miles. Total rip off. Hourly would be the way to go for everyone.

 

I got paid hourly while at UPS.
Terminal to terminal drops and drove a pup with a team helper home delivery.

If they can do it any other company should be able to handle it.

Free time in docks local shuttles and automatic trucks ran me out of otr. And I enjoyed it really.

Your ad sounds like a similar setup. I hated local personally I liked being just a number.

 

It really depends on how much the hourly pay is. I've had a local job that paid hourly, time and half after 40, all meetings, corporate presentations etc paid. Even the driver appreciation cookouts were on the clock.

When things were busy I would run out my 70 nearly every week meaning I got about 30hrs OT every week.

I am back to OTR now and even with all the free labor I give away, unpaid time waiting to unload, unpaid detention etc, I still make more than double what I made at that local job (Teamsters Union BTW) with all that overtime and being paid for every minute at work.

A local job would need to pay $35+ per hour to tempt me out of my "free labor" OTR job...and I would still be taking a significant pay cut.

 

Other fixes to the mileage pay problem are weekly minimum pay, or pay per day. My goal as a regional/OTR company driver is to earn $250 (including any per diem expense reimbursement) for every day committed to my employer away from home, including 34hr resets if needed… working 11 days then 3 days home on average. Is this a reasonable expectation for a Southeast based, 7+yrs exp, good record driver?

 

Yes I would say this is very obtainable, however a lot of companies buy ball at the 11/3 ratio. It always cracks me up and I’m dealing with that situation right now. At my company they’ll let you run five days a week and then take two days off at home. This includes your reset each week. Well I’m like basic math tells me that’s approximately eight days off per month. For me, I stay out around 14 to 16 days at a time and would like to go home for three days. That equates to about half the days off that are 5/2 driver would get. They don’t seem to understand that though. No matter how long I stay out they want me to only take two days off. So far I just take my third day off and ignore their complaining. I’m not stupid, I know they look at my miles, they look at their take and profit margin on me and they realize it’s more than the other drivers. So what are they gonna do fire me? I don’t think so.
You really have to learn how to stand up for yourself in this business. You will get walked on if you don’t. Do you want to run 11/3, then do it. End of story