As I pulled into the warehouse for an 8:00am appointment, which was changed without notice to me to a 1:00pm appointment, I was not at all surprised by this retailer’s method of unloading when they told me to go park out on the street until 1:00pm and not a minute earlier. This five-hour drain of time on a Saturday (seven including the offload of seventeen pallets) made me think to myself, “This sure is the kind of load it would have been nice to be paid by the hour on!” It also gave me a while to thumb through some recent articles on trucking and the big question of driver pay as a result of my curiosity on this topic. Many industry experts have weighed in on what might be “safer” pay method, being paid by 
the hour or being paid by the mile, but it seems no one out there is willing to pull the trigger on actually paying drivers what they are worth in relation to the hard work they are doing. With all the studies out there that try so hard to prove what might be the “safer” way to pay drivers, it seems no one has really taken into consideration what the driver really wants in all of this…safe, as well as fair!
One particular news story by Larry Kahaner, published in the Los Angeles Times, got me to thinking about when I drive and was paid by the mile. In my entire trucking career, in which I have been both an employee and contractor ay various times, I have been paid by the mile by over half of the carriers (3 out of 5 to be precise) that I have been with. If I think back to the article I read, it makes sense that I always seemed to be running faster and was more willing to put myself in “questionable” situations to try and get more miles in when paid by the mile. When you depend on the speed of which your rubber rolls over the road as a method of calculating your pay at the end of the week, you undoubtedly are going to do what it takes to get more in any given pay period! To quote the Los Angeles Times article, “Paying by the mile is both unsafe and unfair. It encourages truckers to speed in order to make money.”
The article leans towards paying by the hour as being the great equalizer in the “Great Pay Question”. I will admit that the companies I worked for that had hourly compensation models seemed to give me not only higher and more consistent paychecks, but they also seemed to make me happier to work for them as an employee. I felt less like I had to speed or drive fast and likewise, was less worried about my paycheck when traffic came to a halt for no apparent reason.
I do see one problem with the hourly pay scenario though, in that it still lends itself to the greed of some companies that would rather justify two drivers working 40-hour work weeks, in order to avoid paying overtime to a single driver working a 60-hour or 70-hour work week. In my opinion, one solution to all of this would be type of pay that I experienced the happiest employment I ever had prior to becoming an independent operator, which was a percentage-based pay. In my eyes a company that is transparent enough to let the driver know what he/she is making them, but also for that company to be willing to give them their fair percentage of it, shows that a company cares about involving their driver in the equation of profit. After all, if the company is not making money, the driver is not making money and vice-versa! Of course, this still leaves a gap in the issue of detention that in my eyes should largely, if not entirely, go to the driver who is being held up as a result of the inconvenience.
I would like to hear from some of the Team Run Smart community members out there on this topic! You don’t have to specify the companies out there that you drive for. In fact I would kindly ask you to not specify any particular company. I am just curious to hear about this from the other drivers out there. Do you think that there is a “safer” method to paying us? If so, what might it be? Are you happy with how you’re paid now and what method might that be? Don’t be shy…there is no right or wrong solution to this, but all answers will help fuel curiosity on a very important topic.