Trucker pay

that's a tough one. i'd like a split pay myself..miles/hourly. but then too, maybe YOU can offer hourly ASAP when they dock, when other companies may offer it after the obligatory 2 hours waiting time.

then too, when i used to be long haul, what got me was the unloading pay....if i had 5 stops, the first was always free, many times, so was the last...wow, paid for 3 loads, and work for free on 2....

and if i was with-in the radius of a terminal, making a delivery..??? that was ALWAYS FREE..........

we were always told, "it's the service we provide"..

we meaning us drivers worked for free as a service......

 

yea you are right. thats a good point. if that be the case then there are a lot of jobs that do pay more hourly, look at New York for instance with a minimum wage of $15 an hour for flipping burgers. we sure never made money like that, or i didnt anyway.

 

Guess in would depend on the hourly rate?

 

well i am sure guys here on this site are older than me, but back in my days of youth, working minimum wages, i was earning a whopping $1.10 per hour..

i think just before i was getting paid that MUCH......lol...minimum wage was 90¢ per hour.....

and yes, some states are at $15.00 per hour now minimum wages......kinda sickens one when if we were to break down our pay for all the hours we work, we get paid, something like $8.00 per hour..

i was always told however, to NEVER figure your wages from a mileage pay to hourly pay, as it'll....well...sicken you...

 

In a nutshell it worked out to 20.00 PH, IOW my guys now can top out at around 1400.00 , sometimes a bit more but 1400 is a good reliable figure, and yes there are some weeks that are 1200.00 just depends on drops p/u's etc.

To me it was a way of making sure my guys weren't rushing inspections, speeding thru constructions zones, blasting around truck stops, actually doing a thorough pre/post trip, so on and so forth.

When it was shot down I really never got a good answer as to why, some said they would make less? Some said it won't work just because no one else pays OTR by the hour?

I thought it would take the "clock" and the "odometer" (we pay hub miles) out of it, and I don't run the company as a dictatorship, if the guys want something within reason, AND they can all agree on it, I have no problem trying to accommodate them.

But I had put a LOT of time into the pay-by-hour and it really left me scratching my head, what I came away from it all with was the old adage, "People aren't happy unless they have something to ##### about", laugh if you want, but I think it really applies in this case.

You see now, if a driver is stuck at a pickup or a delivery, or he is sitting in traffic, they inevitably pickup the phone to #####, if they are being paid by the hour, and I say yeah so, your getting paid 20 per to sit there, what is their response going to be???

 

I once made a comment to another driver during orientation who was complaining about the trucks being governed at 65 MPH. I stopped the whole room in its tracks when I said, "We're paid by the hour! They can govern the #### truck at 45 MPH for all I care."

To this day I'm still not convinced he understood my point of view. He was so ingrained with the Miles! Miles! Miles! mentality that he couldn't think about making money any other way.

unloader

 

Thanks Unloader, pretty much what I think I ran into.

 

This add basically sums up what we go through that the rest of American working public doesn't have to deal with.

 

Conversely......

Last job I worked at I was paid by the hour as well and one of the other drivers had a similar mentality. "We're paid by the hour so who cares how long it takes...I can spend all day doing this..." I told him on numerous occasions "That's nice. You can spend 20 hours out here wasting time. Meanwhile, I'll bust my ### for 10 hours, get my job done as fast as I can so I can go home and hang out with my wife and kids and kick back in my recliner instead of in the cab of a truck."

He would come in at 4am for no reason other than to milk the time clock, would stay until 8 or 9 at night and would come in on Saturday just change the oil on his truck....for 6 hours. I could drop my low-boy, get a front loader on it, chain it down, and get the trailer picked back up in 20 minutes if I took my time and the guy in question would come over and ask me what my hurry was and why I was always running (which I was)... "we get paid by the hour slow down a little there, you make the rest of us look bad...." and my response was always "Yeah, we do. But I'd like to go home sometime today."

There are always differing points of view.

 

Sounds a lot like what happened in farming years ago. Substitute O/O for independent family farmer.