[REPOST]

This one is from decades ago, otherwise it would get me in deep doo-doo.

I worked as a truck driver in the mid-90s. The company I worked for (can’t name them here, but their favorite color is orange), decided to try out a new pay package. The details were complex, but it basically replaced the standard pay-per-mile with a set weekly salary, and not a good one. The new package was instituted on a small scale trial. The company quickly realized that they could make a lot of money if they didn’t have to pay their drivers, and the package became the company standard.

Because of the complexity of the package (please don’t ask), it took the drivers a few weeks to figure out we were getting screwed. Then we started fighting back.

A couple of things you need to understand about a truck driver’s work week. There are 4 lines on a DOT (Dept of Transportation) logbook. Lines 3 and 4 constitute the hours we can work daily, and weekly. 10 hours (Now 11) driving/day, 70 hours driving and other duties (line 4) / seven day week. In order to maximize our income, we put as little time as possible on line 4 (for which we normally did not get paid), and logged the maximum legal speed on line 3 (driving), even if we couldn’t actually drive that speed (due to weather, traffic, terrain, etc). While this was of course, illegal (and impossible with current electronic logs), It wasn’t a secret. As long as your logbook was neat, and showed you driving at or under the speed limit, the DOT inspectors wouldn’t give you a hard time about it. They had more than enough work with the drivers who were wildly abusing the rules.

Once we were put on salary (weekly earnings drop of about 33%), We had no incentive to “cheat”.

Examples: A run from Portland OR to San Francisco CA is 635 miles. You could log this as one day at 550 miles (55mph x 10 hours), leaving you 85 miles (85/55= 1.75 hours logged) the next day. That would leave you 8.25 hour to drive on day two, after your delivery. Of course the reality was quite different. There are some 300 miles of mountains along the route. With 45,000 pound load, you only averaged about 35 mph through them. And anyone who has lived in the San Francisco bay area can tell you how likely you are to be able to drive 55mph at 8 AM. Under the new pay package, we logged it as it actually happened. The result being that I would arrive in San Francisco in time to make my morning delivery, and be out of hours to run for the rest of the day, for which I had to be paid. Not only did the company have to pay me to sit for the day, They had usually booked a load for me for that day (it took awhile for the load planners to catch on) that either had to be covered by another driver, or lost entirely.

Now all those things we had glossed over in order to keep moving got tossed into the company gears. You lost three hours throwing chains and driving across mountain pass at 25MPH, and now you can’t make a Friday delivery (so sorry, no more hours to drive) and the receiver isn’t open on weekends? Not my problem.

Cargo receivers didn’t care much for it either. A lot of them would use the threat of not being unloaded in a timely manner to force drivers into abusive situations. I can remember with great fondness, telling a number of them I didn’t care if they EVER unloaded me. I got paid the same either way. THAT got back to the company, but as long as I was complying with DOT rules, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Also removed one of the big hammers the company would use to threaten the drivers, that is a reduction in miles dispatched. Fleet managers sure didn’t like that aspect of the pay package.

All this occurred six months before my three year anniversary with the company. At the three year point my 401K vested, and I got my last two weeks of vacation pay. I figure during that six months I just about broke even on what I lost in wages. The salary pay package lasted about a year, before all the problems it caused forced the company to return to pay-per-mile. Writing this story out has reminded me of all the other things this company did while I worked there. I will save those for future posts.