Poor pay

Yer right! And yer right, steven! Trucking has lifted many a guy/gal off food stamps or worse and there is light at the end of the mega tunnel. Good jobs still exist. I'm also a former IT guy where top driving jobs hit at about the bottom of what I made in tech.

I got tired of tech and came back into trucking. It has changed pay-wise compared to where it was when I drove years ago. A $15-$20/hr job is pretty good today. It could be better, too, and the lifestyle could be better along with HUGE health issues, like giving up 15 or so years of life expectancy.

I believe the present situation needs to change and I think if the public were more aware, they would insist on it. No way McDonalds or Wal-Mart would get away with requiring workers to put a couple free hours in before and after their shift. But that's what most OTR drivers do.

Free work before paid work starts.

That's hooey.

 

I agree and I've often wondered what happened to truck driving unions. My dad was a union driver for a long time but I can't tell you the last time I ever heard about one. Honestly its not the cdl mills or the mega carriers that are killing pay its the drivers not taking a stand. If a carrier with say...800 trucks fills every truck then they can't train new drivers unless they either purchase more trucks or lose drivers. If drivers quit leaving and instead take a stand for better pay then the 140% turnover slows down drastically. Stop the turnover and you stop the mills. Stop both and you CAN make carriers pay better...but the OTR drivers will still have to work 70+ hours. Thats the nature of the job.

 

Can't agree that 70+ hour weeks is nature of OTR. It's what's wrong with OTR.

Neither the public nor shippers should want that. To change the 70+ hour weeks would require structural change again. Moving to a 'hub system' where freight moves from hub to hub, is one idea. So drivers drop-and-hook, turn around and go back. Home for the night. Whoopie with sweetie.

It can only happen if driver quality of life becomes important as it should be.

 

[QUOTE="Hang - Man";3697539]AAHH OOOHH --really maybe a Democrat can clear this all up --oohh crap, strike that.[/QUOTE]
You mean those republicans in drag??? :smt021

Just remember that your precious republicans are the ones who "bailed" out the banking industry with $850 billion of YOUR taxes.

 

Ummm... Walmart has already been nailed with forcing their people to work off the clock. And let's not forget that they cost local municipalities between $200 and $450 MILLION per year due to the fact that their workers cannot survive on their pay, and must use government aid programs like food stamps and welfare; while the Walton family wipe their butts with $100 bills and smoke their weed with $50s.

 

Sadly, worker quality-of-life is a lesser priority than mega-profits, mega-returns, and mega-bonuses to the precious few, the 1%ers.

 

Sorry for the long post, I will try to be brief with my thoughts and comments. I tried to make these quotes in order to get what you guys are saying.

The problem is when people talk about IT, even many within the industry don't get that it is BIG, a lot of things going on and no one person (especially if they are paid hourly) would see much of it.

It wasn't their greed that cause outsourcing, it is economics and how things work. No matter how you want to spin it, IT has evolved into a global thing where we lack many resources to compete, one really important problem is we produce people who can't do basic math or have basic language skills through our public schools and our institutes of higher learning. These people, even with masters degrees are not as good at math and even in some cases English that allow them to compete and win against the kid who passed his secondary school exam living outside of Mumbia India.

It seems that way to many with a myopic view but the truth is we make it what we want it to be, no one forces anyone to do something they don't want to, no one is forced into this industry. I never thought of myself that I was a slave to any one company or any one profession, let alone selling myself into it or living cheaply because I had no choice. Pretty much I think your view is obtuse that shows a limited knowledge of what the industry's big picture is truly about.

If someone really applies themselves, learns what they can and takes advantage of opportunities with risks being weighed carefully, then one can do a lot of things and make a lot of money in a short period of time. But thinking you are a victim, under paid and all of that gets you no where.

But remember that this is a profession where experience and skills are important. If you can't get the skills or have poor ones or lack the experience, then of course you will end up driving as a company driver for little money.

This isn't the reason for the eventual change nor is it even the change in the industry, I mentioned why, it is because information flow became easy <<<=== that was the biggest reason for any change.

The JIT system you describe is old, decades old and the hub system was the system they used with rail freight. JIT, which has been around for 100 years (Ford used it when he built the Model T and they used it during the war) has been refined at best to save time in the past but it was refined to a science so to speak in the last 20 years because of the way we handle information now. It has not been so severely pushed as it in the past 10 years by looking at what is sitting at some of these plants today.

Really?

I think you need to look around, they don't give a crap. As long as their stuff gets to them, then it is ok with them that we suffer.

BUT that said, I think you need to look at the bigger picture too. I mean most of what goes on in our industry isn't this type of freight hauling. seriously.

I have no problem paying the bills and I have a lot of them. I think it is the same thing that has plague most of the country, people not being able to handle money in the first place. On top of that, as I said for many this is the last place they can go to for a job so of course they won't make it.

Again this isn't about politics, it is about a realistic view of the entire industry and just because you hold a grudge over being outsource doesn't mean that the entire country has been outsourced.
Still you are missing the entire fact that this has been going on for years, the ebb and flow of economical prosperity has been a fact of life since man has started to walk the earth.

We can interject politics into it but the truth seems to be that trucking isn't run by a few trucking companies, it is run by outside industries that it services of which is done by many different types of services made up of a lot of companies and a lot of people. We asked for deregulation which opened the flood gates to having thousands of companies come into existence and saturating the field, which drove down prices at first but then something else happened ===> going back to the idea that information is king, we got easy access to all the info we ever could use or want and that is a major cause of what we face.

Nope I've seen both sides of the fence, I understand what the problems are and in this case we allowed ourselves to become 'victims" of our own progress and wanted to be left alone to make the money we can make. No more are we or could we be a unified force because we look at this as a job, not a career, not as a profession and we let others deal with fighting for us while we can't come to grips with why we are not being paid well.

Nope that won't help. No one gets blackballed in this industry like my previous one. The 'megas' make up a small percentage of trucks on the road, even though it looks like they don't and they don't dictate the rules. Just like hireright isn't used by everyone, I have yet to have a company pull my DAC report and I've been with a few, so there are always jobs there for someone who needs work.

I will repeat my post here.

 

Ha ha, Ridgeline.

Underpaid is underpaid.

Poor quality of life, health is poor quality of life, health.

HireRight enables abuse by retaliatory employers.

Your stick stuck.

Change needed.