themselves into. I hadn’t met a truck driver until I got my first job out of col- lege working for a trucking company. I didn’t understand what all it entailed. It doesn’t take you long to realize ‘Wow, this is a lifestyle to be respected.’ It takes you understanding it, and decid- ing if you are cut out for it.” And because there are so many who
don’t live it and who don’t understand the value of someone well-trained deliv- ering freight on time, there are gaps in respect. There is a chasm between who the public thinks truck drivers are and who they actually are.
WAGES’ ROLE IN ATTRACTING DRIVERS The American Trucking
Associations’ recent Driver Compensation Study (based on 2013 data), covering 130 fleets and more than 130,000 drivers, found that the median pay for drivers was on par with the national median for all U.S. households ($53,000), and the driv- ers’ benefits are competitive with other fields. According to the study, “Median pay for drivers ranges from $46,000 for national, irregular route dry van truck- load drivers to more than $73,000 for private fleet van drivers.” The study confirms that driver
compensation is not bad exactly; in fact, it is comparable to the figures of other careers. However, the lifestyle of drivers is foreign to most other careers. Lifestyle and compensation really can- not be divorced. Overtime doesn’t start at 40 hours for drivers. For example, detention is an incon-
venient part of the job that isn’t always compensated. “They aren’t necessarily getting
paid for [detention]. It is kind of hurry up and wait . . . hurry-up-and-get-there, and then it takes six hours to unload. It’s like sitting in an airport for hours. It’s a waste of time,” Furnell says. “There are two different policies for
detention pay. Some companies pay no matter what. Some companies pay but only if they get reimbursed because they bill the shipper. Some companies only
ARKANSAS TRUCKING REPORT | Issue 1 2015
“CHANGE COSTS MONEY, AND CHANGE COSTS AN
INVESTMENT OF SOMETHING WHETHER IT’S TIME, RESOURCES OR CHANGING OF PROCESSES. IT’S AN INVESTMENT OF SOMETHING.”
—LORI FURNELL, VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AT ACS ADVERTISING
pay if they get their money back from the shipper, and some shippers just won’t pay it,” she explains. These are hours on the clock, away
from family, but for many drivers, they are hours with no guaranteed pay. So while a driver’s salary may be the same as the average household income, that may only be for the hours the tires are rolling. Of course, the recently (though
perhaps temporarily) reversed hours-of- service regulations affected wages for drivers as well, cutting back hours and productivity. And while driver pay comes in
different forms, many are paid by productivity. According to the driver compensation study, “three out of four fleets used multiple methods to pay drivers including the most frequent approach, paying some drivers by the mile and some by the hour.” ATA Chief Economist Bob Costello
says that the data shows, “now more than ever, trucking is an excellent career path,” but the study also recommends that carriers cannot keep wages the same and expect the shortage to slow. “Given the lifestyle challenges,
many observers have suggested pay needs to rise into at least the low $60,000 range for over-the-road dry van drivers to close the shortage, and some say it needs to go even higher.” In the last 12 months, more than
a handful of companies have raised wages for drivers including U.S. Xpress in August, Con-way in September and as recently as January 2015, Maverick Transportation. “Even very attractive driver jobs in
private fleets are going empty. Walmart, which pays drivers in the low $70,000 range, has of late been advertising extensively for drivers throughout most of 2014,” the study reports. The pay goes up to attract and
keep drivers as demand continues to rise, and benefit packages become more attractive, referral bonuses become more regular.
WAGES’ ROLE IN KEEPING DRIVERS It’s inevitable that when the econo-
my picked up, the wages would need to follow suit. And in the last year that has begun, but it has been a slow climb. Gordan Klempt, head of the
National Transportation Institute, says that wages for a dry van driver have gone from $0.36/mile (2007) to $0.372/mile (2013). Adjusted for infla- tion, those numbers are almost flat. “When you look at the pay over
time to see how it has gone up, it’s remained very flat. There hasn’t been a lot of increase. Thirty or forty years ago, the average truck driver made what he’s making now or even more than he’s making now. That was a great wage, but the economy is not the same. We didn’t increase with it, and that certainly plays a huge factor in the retention in the industry for sure,” Furnell says. According to the American
Trucking Associations, large fleet turn- over in 2014’s Q2 reached an annual rate of 103 percent, 4 percent over the same time in 2013 and the highest rate
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