They need to mandate hourly w/ OT after 40

Alot of drivers do. Now 70 a week every week might be difficult but still. I don't even run hard and most of the time I run recap the 2nd week I'm out so its possible.

 

Um, it's mandated for EVERYONE ELSE. It's called the Fair Labor Standards Act. Why are we they only exemptions and why are you ok with sitting 6 hours unpaid?

Maybe you get off on that, but that don't pay my bills. I have quit. I quit the job that made me sit unpaid for 6 hours. Now I work for a company that pays detention and layover. While its not EVERY hour I'm in the truck on duty, its MOST. Before, there were days when it was less than half. Sometimes less than a quarter. I took a 3 cent a mile pay cut to come to work for a company that ran me balls to the wall and paid me to sit and wait on loads. My paychecks doubled overnight.

That's what people here don't realize. With hourly pay, you may not get a pay RAISE but you'll get much steadier paychecks. I made a tad over 300 dollars 3 weeks before xmas because they sent me a load that didn't pick up for 22 hours. I sat and waited, they cancelled the load and gave me something else. I drove 3 hours, delivered an empty trailer to a shipper, and then sat 18 more waiting for another load. With salary you would get paid to be IN the truck. That way I'm not trying to figure out how to pay a mortgage of 1200 dollars with a 300 dollar paycheck. I'm sitting in a quarter million dollar vehicle making almost nothing. That don't cut it.

After all, how many people in the dispatch office would stick around after not being paid for 6 hours? They would leave after 10 minutes. Where do we go when we're stuck at a paper mill in the middle of the woods waiting 18 hours with no bathroom, no shower, no food, no nothing, unpaid, waiting for a load?

This is not how ANY "professional" is treated.

 

Need to take a chill pill there bud

If I was a company guy and they changed it to hourly I'd still want to get the job done in a reasonable time frame rather than drive 50 down the interstate and take 3 hours to get thru a fuel pump. Why? I want to get it done and go home. I have a life. You know what will happen? Someone will notice and say come drive for me I want to pay you a higher hourly amount than my slackers I have here. Don't forget sure we are all drivers but we are all actually in competition with each other. If it would make you happy knowing "I am paid for everything I do" would you be content with a completely hourly wage for every minute including sleeping from the time you start til the time you get back? Do your math on every hour including sleeping. Then feel good about collecting 3.50 an hour for 24 hours or whatever it works out to. I wont trade my life for whatever that number is. Find someone willing to work you. And get to work.

 

TIME TO STRIKE.

Let's all sit at home for a week. That will show them. They will be begging us to come back for $250,000 a year.

 

But I only want to work part time

 

I don’t sit around for 6 hours unpaid. Like I said, if you don’t feel fairly compensated for your time then you’re free to look elsewhere for work. I don’t want the government mandating hourly pay any more than I want the government mandating detention pay. All that will do is hurt the ones who already have a good thing going because whatever the government decides to mandate will then become the industry standard.

 

No it is not mandated for everyone else. Not even close.

Many jobs do not pay extra for overtime. Anyone who is salary or commission based is not getting paid extra for working more than 40 hours a week and most of them will end up working far more than 40 hours.

In the end, if you are not happy with the compensation find a better job with better pay. If you have been in this industry for any length of time you can do far better than the 75k salary that you mentioned. I know guys that would be taking a 50k-a-year pay cut if you switched them to a salary at 75k and they sleep in their own bed every night as well. If you just want to pull a single 53 doing truckload delivery you are at the bottom of the pile in the trucking industry, everyone with an unrestricted class A can do your job. Learn to pull doubles, get into hazmat tanks, or ltl type jobs that all require a bit more work and skill and you will find that the money gets much better.

For the record too. The worst jobs that I have ever had both in and out of the trucking industry were paid by the hour. Micromanagement is a real thing and it can be extremely prevalent in hourly paid positions.

 

If they pay you hourly, they can also tell you how many hours to work. Say a company doesn’t want to pay OT, they can tell you to shut down after 8hrs. In the middle of nowhere on Friday afternoon, shut down until Monday, no OT.

 

Do you really think that would happen?

 

Maybe not to that extreme, but if you have a bunch of trucks and one person has 50 hours or so for the week and someone else has 30 hours I can see them making you do a switch so the person with 50 doesn’t work much more for the week.