Pay by the hour vs. by the mile

If the hourly pay is adequate and over-time is paid on a daily basis ( anything over 8 or 10 hrs a day is over-time ) the company I retired from paid that way til they went to what they called component pay ( which was even better). If I had to choose I would take hourly , but your questions has as many variables to it as there are trucking jobs too.....so its kinda hard to pin it down to which is Really better. I'm sure you'll get a few different answers to this one!

 

Hourly pay is impractical for OTR work...which is why you won't find very many jobs offering it. Local work, where you punch in to start your day and punch out and go home at the end of the day you might find some hourly jobs...management knows what SHOULD be accomplished within the given work day and are close enough to the situation to make sure employees are actually working while on the clock. That oversight is not possible in an OTR application, and far too many would abuse the hourly pay if it were offered to them...which is exactly why it won't be offered. If I'm paying you to move freight from point A to point B, I shouldn't have to pay for your time spent in the truck stop playing video games....but there is no way for me to know if you are working or goofing off. When paid by the mile or by the load, you are paid to move the freight from point A to point B. If you choose to waste time along the way, that's your choice.

After the war, my grandfather worked piecemeal at a factory...paid for the number of pieces he processed, not by the time it took him to process them. If he wanted to earn more, he figured out how to be more productive in his job and waste less time during his shift. If the guy next to him decided to slack off and not work as hard, the guy next to him wouldn't make as much. Being paid by the mile is the equivalent....and I really don't see anything wrong with it as long as the mileage calculations are fair to both the company and the employee. The employer shouldn't have to pay you for the out-of-route miles you traveled to visit your grandma who was kinda-sorta-in-the-general-direction-of your destination. Nor should they have to pay you for the extra miles you ran after taking the wrong exit and getting lost. They SHOULD have to pay for the most direct, most practical truck-route miles from point A to point B.

Or they can pay percentage, which is what I prefer.

 

No doubt about it by the hr.Getting paid mileage,you don't get paid sitting in traffic or sitting at the dock unless you're there for so long and even then,depending on the trucking company,detention could be an insult.At least hourly,you could only do one load that lasts all day and you're still on the clock.

 

Pay by the load.

 

Hourly pay is one of the easiest systems to abuse. A base salary per day with an incentivized work schedule that rewards productivity during the work day is a hybrid concept that some unionized companies offer.

Example would be for each day your available to work then you would receive a base salary of say $100.00. Each load you pick up or deliver would add more money to that days earnings. Such as $25.00 for each pick up or delivery. Mileage pay would be calculated by actual distance driven based on approved truck routes from customer dock to destination at say .30 cpm. Have to drop or hook at a customer? $12.50 for a drop $12.50 for a hook. A base hourly wage for breakdowns while under dispatch, detention at a customer, or road closure due to an accident or inclement weather paid at a base hourly wage (say $15.00 per hour) would at least compensate drivers for problems during the work day.

An employer that offered something like the above would have no difficulty in finding top quality drivers.

 

A complex system like that would be difficult to ensure the accuracy of everybody's pay...which is why it isn't widely used. Employers would need documentation for everything they were willing to pay for...and next thing you know, drivers will want to be compensated for their time completing the paperwork necessary to prove they earned the money they are trying to get paid for.

K.I.S.S.

 

If you are running local,coming back to the same terminal every day you are better getting paid by the hour ,bu generally running otr you are better running by mile