Bipartisan lawmakers have introduced a bill that would give America’s 2.19 million truck drivers the right to overtime pay.
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.
In a larger study of the American freight industry, the Biden administration urged Congress to enshrine drivers with overtime pay, according to the February 2022 document. A Democratic lawmaker introduced a bill to guarantee overtime pay for truck drivers in April 2022 but the legislation did not move forward.
In the most recent effort, two Democratic senators and a bipartisan team of two House representatives are pushing for the bill. It still faces a long road ahead, which includes committee review before potential votes in front of the full House and Senate. Control of Congress is currently split, with Republicans holding the House majority while Democrats run the Senate.
Bill would furnish truck drivers with more pay but squeeze employers
A group of academics wrote for Overdrive magazine last year that passing this bill would likely benefit truck drivers and challenge employers. Truck drivers, under current federal regulations, operate under strict hours-of-service requirements; they are not allowed to drive more than 11 hours in a 14-hour window and are capped at 70 hours of work in an eight-day period. They’re typically paid per mile.
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.
“There’s a retention problem,” Michael Belzer, Wayne State University professor, told FreightWaves last year. “It’s simply because you don’t pay these people. After you’re paid for working 40 hours when you really worked 65, you get to be unhappy. And that’s why they quit.”
Studies suggest that increasing pay for truck drivers reduces crash count. Reducing uncompensated work, like the hours that drivers often spend unpaid waiting at warehouses to get loaded or unloaded, also is a boon for safety and overall supply chain efficiency, studies suggest.
Trucker, safety advocacy groups embrace the bill, while American Trucking Associations slams it
Groups such as the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Teamsters union, Truck Safety Coalition and the Institute for Safer Trucking supported the bill in statements Thursday.
“Unbelievably, trucking is one of the only professions in America that is denied guaranteed overtime pay,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said in a Thursday statement. “We are way past due as a nation in valuing the sacrifices that truckers make every single day. This starts with simply paying truckers for all of the time they work. With this discount on a trucker’s time, ‘big trucking’ has led a race to the bottom for wages that treats truckers as expendable components rather than the professionals they are.”
Meanwhile, the American Trucking Associations believes that the law, if enacted, would bring about “supply chain chaos and the inflationary consequences for consumers.”
“This proposal is nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to boost trial attorneys’ fees,” ATA CEO Chris Spear said in a Thursday statement. “It would reduce drivers’ paychecks and decimate trucking jobs by upending the pay models that for 85 years have provided family-sustaining wages while growing the U.S. supply chain.”
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers earned a median annual salary of $49,920 in 2022. Data from the ATA, a lobbying group made up predominantly of large trucking companies, found that average pay for truckload drivers was about $70,000, before benefits, in 2021.
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Robert Palma
Interesting on the overtime issue looking forward to see how this plays out, brokers are the ones going to be whining the most. I think shippers and receivers abuse drivers the most and need to pay drivers from the moment they arrive if they are delayed beyond the 2 hr grace period and bol’s should be required to be time stamped upon arrival
Keith Finklea
The ATA is the problem in itself, ran by some of the worst companies on safety issues. Personally, drivers should be paid while at shippers & receivers since they abuse drivers the most. The biggest problem in trucking is the over regulation. Driver retention issues is due to ridiculous company regulations put out by some of these mega carriers.
Jr
The reason why there’s not enough pay and there’s not enough miles. you have changed the hours of service so many times and keep screwing it till its fubar. the problem is that it’s politicians that are trying to tell us how that we can do our job more efficiently without actually talking to the drivers. I honestly think this is another attempt to destroy. The transportation center and the supply lines to the nation. Another way to increase driver pay, stop allowing untrained foreign drivers (Amazon prime is a major user) and increase trained drivers miles, which will increase their pay.
Larry LeBlanc
So, a driver will drive 40 hours, then park until the following week to not go over 40 hours.
Knock out 4 hours in 4 days then be stuck in a truck stop for 3 days. Then start over.
Sounds good.
That’ll reduce drivers pay by about 40%.
Ken
It’s about time, its all about fairness. But the fight over it will take year more to complete. Legislation is only the beginning. Ken
Chris
I’m a small business owner, and not a fan of organized labor. But this issue transcends the typical “mgmt vs labor” battle. Professional truck drivers made a great living pre-deregulation, and the economy was not suffering due to ovepaying truckers. Deregulation got us to where we are now. It’s a race to the bottom, with the drivers getting squeezed.
I do not think that mandating OT is the answer, or even a good answer. I think federal interstate rate regulation should be looked at again as a way of truly reflecting the value truckers provide in the economy, and let the private market decide how much of that the truckers get.
bobby joe
Trucker drivers quit because theyre whiny brats that think they should make 200k a year and they spend every single pay check that they get. Overtime pay would bakrupt hundreds of thousands of companies in a blink of an eye and doesnt really make any sense from an otr perspective
Thomas N Kirkpatrick
Of course the ATA isn’t for the drivers. The mega carriers are having retention problems for more than just pay. Most large companies treat the equipment better than their drivers. You have to ask yourself, why is the trucking industry in the shape it in, because of the ATA. Anytime something comes along that could benefit the drivers, the ATA is against it.