Why is trucking such a low paying industry?

Why is easy according to the labor board and federal goverment trucking is an unskilled trade that anyone can do there for you might as well be a waitress or flip burgers in their eyes. Now changing that ideal is the hard part, even with them doing the work for us to show it is a skill, they still dont think so.

 

& If you still want to drive & get close to the railroad, you can shuttle their grumpy overpaid ###e$ from the yard to the hotel in a van for 7 bucks/hr & dream that someday you can be like them.

 

Plus be ON CALL 24 hours a day, 6 days a week, EVERY week, week in and week out, talk about not having a life jesus. If you read up about some of these companies that do this like railcrewxpress they have made drivers work 16 hours, go home for less than 8 hours, and then have them out for 16 or more hours. Everybody can read up about it on the web and how they treat people. If I was a guy working on a train I'd be scared to death to have some guy drive me home in a van who was making $7 an hour and barely awake after the insane hours and working conditions the guys who drive them home work under.

 

I would like to see the OT exemption for trucking,agriculture, and railroading removed. It is absurd to me in this day and age, that we are held to the standards from the 1930's...

 

Any work done for monetary compensation is supposed to be logged. If you mow your neighbors lawn for $5.00 you are supposed to log it on duty-not driving. I've never known anyone that would actually log anything like that though.

 

Maybe it's because CDL mill recruiters give the impression anybody can be a truck driver and they never fail anybody . Many CDL mill graduates are in fact unskilled . You have unskilled drivers going to starter companies with automatics and some of these drivers couldn't find their way around the block without a GPS . They park on shoulders of ramps because they can't back into a parking space at a fuel stop .

 

No. I would disagree. This has been the thoughts of the Department of Labor for alot longer than these mega companies have been training and pushing wheel holders out. They never though a trucker was skilled.

 

I worked for USX and averaged $900/wk. It was teams, but I made it. Wouldn't do it again when I'm making that solo, but I'm with Averitt and I'm sure some would consider them a bad company. I like it much better than USX, but I also seen the bad ways of these companies because I started at USA.

 

If ppl are lined up to do then y is there a driver shortage?

 

There is no driver shortage. Don't believe the hype.