A 1938 law guaranteed most American workers minimum wage and time-and-a-half pay if they worked more than 40 hours in one week. However, that law excluded truck drivers.
The bill introduced Thursday in both the House and Senate would nix the clause in the 1938 law that exempts motor carriers from providing overtime pay.
The bill will face fierce resistance.
Lots of people with lots of money love their discounted American labor. The entire supply chain loves using trucks with waiting drivers as free storage. And there is no shortage of stupid drivers who would rather work more time for the same money.
I hope they overcome all of it. This is long overdue. There never should have been an exemption to begin with.
I think it was done that way because it was hard to determine exactly how many hours they were driving. So just pay them by the mile. It’s not shift work. UPS drivers get paid overtime for example. Or anyone that works shifts. It’s easy to tell how far someone went, not so easy to tell how much they worked. Especially when you’re not being watched.
But I’m guessing modern technology can determine how many hours you drove in a week.
They do more work than driving the truck so that’s a case of nearly everyone doing it wrong. The bosses are all too happy to extract free work from their employees
Meanwhile, large trucking employers see massive turnover rates, which they typically attribute to larger lifestyle problems in the trucking industry. Others believe that this turnover rate, which averaged 94% at large truckload carriers from 1995 to 2017, is because drivers aren’t paid enough.
Turnover has been a problem for a long time and I’ve noticed that over the years, the drivers are becoming younger and younger. IMO that increases the probability of a serious accident involving these large trucks. This is a good law that’s been too long in coming as long as this doesn’t flip and allow employers to be financially raped?
IMO it shouldn’t be hard to figure out how far someone drove in a day or week. If your employer expects you to drive 60 hours in a week, you should get 20 hours OT. I’m just not sure how easy that is to track. If it’s easy, then it’s a no brainer to me.
I work for a school system, our bus fleet is outfitted with GPS tracking and a tablet. The drivers “clock-in/out” on the tablet and Transportation Department has a “Command Center”. They can track in real-time each bus providing a precise location, where it is on the map, it’s movement on the map, or whether they are in “idle time”. The data provides updates for planned maintenance and interfacing with the payroll system.
If they system loses cell connection, it stores the data onboard and dumps the upload once back into good cell range.
Depends on the carrier and if terminal destination.
For example, a lot of OTR freight moves terminal to terminal. A driver logs in, hooks up to a loaded trailer transports to a destination terminal, drops then repeats. Warehouse workers do the unloading. If they have to wait, they’re on the clock. Lots of carriers pay drivers “PTO”.
Car transport is the worst in my opinion. They pickup, transport and have to unload the vehicles at the destination. They’re good at it but still.
I did a stint for a few years OTR when I was younger, saw a lot of the country, met a lot of people.
Ah yes, government mandated wages. That’ll fix all the ■■■■■■up regulations they’ve consistently inflicted on drivers over the last couple of decades.
