Trucker wages...decreasing as time goes by.

Well, if you figure in the inflation, which doesn't seem to keep pace to me, .12 cents/mile today is .70 cents/mile, so .12 cents was an acceptable wage. I remember, in the 70's, a good wage was maybe $4.50/hr, my 1st dump truck was $4.50/hr. My 1st T/T job in 1979 was about $6/hr. and was %, so less than $6 sometimes, but I was so elated to drive a truck, I'd have probably paid them. I didn't hit the "Big Time" until the mid 80's, when I was making$12.50/hr. pulling a reefer, I bought my house with that job. My best paying job was in the late 90's, when I got a union bread hauling job, and made $16.50/hr. Today, I wouldn't climb in a truck for less than $20/hr.

 

One of the first things we're all going to do when we get our wage increases is learn to flush the toilet after we use it.

 

On the surface it may seem like the MCA was the only factor that destroyed the trucking industry as we knew it, but the 50's through the 70's were the golden years for union workers in the US, and the greed of the large unions would wind up being their demise. When Nixon opened up China for trade in the early 70's, any idiot could see that they had a limitless untapped labor force that could manufacture anything made in the US or any other country for pennies on the dollar. Both of my grandfathers who died in the late 80's were each making around $50,000 per year in pensions when they died from lives in unions. Neither one of them made more that $20,000 a year in their lives. I grew up in a steel town on the Ohio river, and most of my friends had dads who worked in the mill, and they had homes just as nice as the college educated professionals because they were making just as much if not more money. By the early 80's, it was determined that 30% of the cost of a car built in the US was to pay pension benefits of retired union auto workers. The unions demanded unsustainable high wages and benefits for their members, and weren't paying attention to the less expensive products being produced in China and Japan. They got caught with their pants down, and our middle class was doomed from that point forward.

Today jobs like those are still around, but they're all government jobs. The city, state, and federal worker's unions still get those sweet high wages and retirement benefits at our expense. Until our current president came into office, many states were in financial trouble because they didn't have enough money to pay for retired state and local employee pension plans, but the "covid" stimulus bailed them out to the tune of trillions of dollars. One of my oldest friends recently retired as a captain in our local fire department at 120% of his annual salary. A great deal for him, but horrible for the taxpayers.

 

My father drove for a company out of Ft Worth hauling finished beef and pork for both Swift and Armour out of the stockyards. He would leave Sunday evening and return home Friday mid day. Sometimes he was home for a while mid week. In my mothers journal she has he brought home $75.00 a week. We lived in a nice 3 bedroom house in a typical residential area. Had a car and a pickup my dad drove to work. The house payment was $65.00 a month.
I wish i knew what his pay was based on but never asked.

 

All I know is my Dad made .33 cpm as a Casual, in 1980. Gross a $1000. Then 70% for a year after being hired, 90 days later. Full parity after 18 mo. I think it was .37 or .38 cpm in 1989, when they went out of Business. Pretty good pay for the time.

 

My Dad told me when he bought the first house in 1956 it was about $5K.
He said that was more money than there was in the whole world.
He said he was signing the papers wondering how he was ever going to pay for it.

 

Show me a job besides trucking where I can earn 110k+ with no formal training as an employee. All Truck drivers are not underpaid. You just don’t have the experience or skill to be well paid.

 

Trucks are significantly more expensive than they were in the past, and carriers spend a lot of money on fuel, taxes, and compliance costs to satisfy the numerous regulations that our industry is saddled with.

Every time cost goes up, it means carriers have less money to spend on driver pay and benefits.

 

Lots of aluminium, chrome and light installations. Really get the hard ship point across.

 

Older Man..Now age 85. I was getting min wage on a food service route in May 1953, (drive out 160 miles, make 42 meat packer stops with helper, drive 160 back. In May 1954 I went to flatbed at $75.00 per week; straight time pd every Friday nite, plus expenses most of which were banked as I lived on the road. In Sept 1955, went to cattle hauler at $0.05 (nickel) per loaded mile, (keep discounts, don't bump the tickets), and in Nov 57, went team for $0.08 (Eight cents per truck mile), THEN, joined the ARMY for $78.00 per month... Snap decision cost me 3 years.