Beware! All who enter...
The industry sources are saying that truck drivers average 42,000 per year. My own income is ballparking that after a year and a half as a driver.
The problem is that as a company driver, I'm not in control of my schedule. An owner operator or lease purchase driver either contracts to a company or scrambles after their own loads through brokers.
Either way, a driver's schedule is controlled in varying degrees by others. The company sends me a load assignment. I accept the load assignment. I wait for my legal running time. I prep for the trip and arrive to pickup my load as scheduled. Anywhere from an hour to OMG! later, I get to run the load toward it's destination.
I have to stop when I'm told to stop, rest/sleep when I'm told to, and run only when I'm allowed to.
Any American driver will tell you we run a 70-hour work week. That's amazing, right? You work 40? 30? 20? I grant that a 70-hour work week sounded pretty outrageous when I started this career. But, here's the problem with deciding to set an hour limitation on the work week, and driving day. WE GET PAID BY THE MILE!
Some owner/op or lease purchase drivers get more control. They can choose to be paid by a percentage of what the company gets for the load or by mileage. I'm not an owner/op or lease purchase driver, so I cannot say what is better. However, these drivers pay fuel, tolls, taxes, maintenance costs, licensing, etc. They are owners of their own businesses. Everything that needs to be paid for to run the business, they have to cover. If you're a bad business person, you go broke. If you're not, you build until you're happy with the business you made. But, I'm discussing company drivers, not the other guys.
Okay, so you only are allowed 11 hours of driving time per day. You might take a day off, but most drivers keep running for 2 or 3 weeks. But, for the sake of argument you take a day off. 6X11=66. That's under 70 hours so you're legal.
Also for the sake of argument, you actually get to drive all of the 66 hours. You have a truck that averages 60 mph. 60X66=3,960. That means in 6 days, 11 hours a day, at 60 mph you could get a whopping 3,960 miles behind you.
Wow! Almost 4,000 miles per week? That's an awesome accomplishment! You do this every week?
The math adds up, the SCHEDULE does not. As I said, we're regulated by the hour, paid by the mile, and other people tell us where to go and determine how long we have to be there.
Say it takes 3 hours of my drive time to get 30 miles through Atlanta? Say it takes 4 hours to do 50 miles because of construction detours? Say it takes 7 hours to load? Where does my clock go?
Every single day is a fight to get as much pavement under tires as possible. We push the speed limit to reach destinations as quickly as possible so we can move on to the next load as quickly as possible. The more loads we move, the better the miles, the more the paycheck.
The catch-22 here is that we don't control anything except the driving. The other catch-22 is that we don't get paid for every mile the truck moves. Since October 2016, I've put 85,000 + miles on my truck. (I say my but it's owned by the company I work for.) I guarantee that I have not been paid for every mile that truck has moved.
Each load is given an empty miles value and a loaded miles value. My company pays less for empty miles than for loaded miles, but every company has different pay rates. Some get "all truck miles," and some get all loaded miles same as empty. For our purposes we'll just say all miles are the same and call it good. The math is easier.
The miles are determined usually by zip code to zip code, NOT address to address. Do I stop as soon as I reach the zip code? Of course not. I deliver to a specific address. The mileage from the start of the zip code to the address varies, a lot. It might be 2 miles or 15. Those miles take up the clock AND are considered freebies.
The time in a fuel island, at a shipper or receiver, even the time taking a pee break will be counted against the 14-hours of on duty time per day. Driving hours are part of that. So 3 hours of your whole work day is available for things other than driving like fueling, inspections, checking in and out of customers, dropping and hooking up trailers. We even have to use that on-duty time when we break down out on the road and are waiting for a repair truck to come help us.
Enough waiting around at a shipper and your 11-hours of driving time disappears. Waiting in traffic? Huge drain on driving hours and you don't rack up the miles.
Consider this, we are paid pennies per mile. Anywhere from $.26 to a high of $.65 (there are others that pay lower and higher but I haven't personally seen or heard.) This is just the average range. If you're day is spent at traffic lights or in a traffic jam, you still get only the miles of the load. It doesn't matter how much of the next day's potential gets wasted.
Two other points. One is that I've never made this much in my entire life. The other is that earnings in 2017 are the same as earning in 1990. In other words, there's no pay increase that has kept up with inflation or cost of living. If you earned 32,000 in 1990, it would be the same as 64,000 today.
That puts the millions of men and women who work out here away from their families for weeks and months at a time firmly in the category of the working poor. We are literally paid less than a burger flipper. We just work more hours so it doesn't seem like it.
Thanks for watching,
Renae - The Truck Driving Woman
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