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.
Email rpremack@freightwaves.com with your thoughts. Subscribe to MODES for weekly trucking insights.
Daniel Ruskin
The problem is in the trucking industry, drivers are limited by laws of service time but the whole sleeper birth or off duty isn’t truthful. No company pays drivers for those two times. If ur stuck at some truck stop for your log to reset, how can that be considered rest? If you can’t sell the hour to another company, that means you need compensation from your original company. Plain n simple, enough living at work without compensation!
Listen to the ppl
This will only make things worse for company drivers they will limit them to 40 hours to avoid ot like every employer does this is not a fix get rid of the brokers or lock in a bill where brokers need to be transparent with a locked in percentage
TC Boggs
It’s long past time for equal Worker’s Rights for truck drivers. In no other profession do you have expectations to work for free. The 1938 classification of truck drivers being labeled as unskilled labor is beyond the pale. This law should have been modified as soon as a CDL became a requirement. Today. A new driver is forced to go to a school and then obtain subsequent endorsements in order to perform their job functions. That very process negates the unskilled classification and is therefore unlawful. There has been a bipartisan effort to keep the working man and woman down. Remember, this bill passed in 1938 which was during the FSR administration. He’s the so-called greatest Democrat President…
Aaron
Turn over is because there is no
RESPECT for drivers plain and simple.
1. Detention is a problem
2. Companies don’t respect when u say u need to be home and give them plenty of time in advance and most the time are late getting you there.
3. Pto or vacation time is lagging very badly in this industry and I see very little even said about it.
Most people in any other perfession is starting out with 20 to 30 days of pto a yr this is including holidays
We as drivers work half again more hrs but get 10 days at best till 10ys and never get any more days of pto this is a safety issue to recoup yourself from your job duties and enjoy things you don’t get to do like most on the weekends. And 34 breaks are not breaks to relax.
WE SHOULD BE GEETING 3 WEEKS AFTER A YR at least 5 weeks by ten yrs.
The overtime pay is gonna be a mess lots to work out.
I’m on board with vacation or pto time being addressed and detention time
Plus bathroom access at customers.
Bojan Krantic
Yes they should do that and also they should establish minimum load rate that Brokers have to pay to carriers so carriers can operate safely and pay their employees!
We need that really bad!
Steve
office worker, the warehouse, the factory workers is OT after 8 per day and 40 per week, the scheduled work week
employer makes demand based decision to offer OT work
Truck driver scheduled 7 day work week is 4 on 3 off or 5 on 2 off
so regular pay for scheduled work week ( 4 day or 5 day ) and 1.5 times regular pay rate for day 5 thru 7 or 6 thru 7
employer makes demand based decision to offer OT work
this works for OTR drivers and local drivers
yes, as with any ER – EE agreement, OT is not a given but an agreement for as needed labor
and yes an OTR driver may need to wait for their 7 day cycle to restart before able to clock back in
Eric Benson
Simply put this is WAY PAST DUE!!!
They claim they want the roads to be safe. But they don’t want to pay the drivers. This is simply GREED!!! EXPERIENCED drivers are the best PERIOD!!! When you don’t pay people they leave! Then you are left with a rookie majority equaling unsafe roads.
BEING A COMPANY TRUCK DRIVER FOR MOST COMPANIES IS EQUIL TO BEING A MODERN DAY SLAVE!!! They can make more money at a minimum wage job if you count the unpaid work hours!!!
It should be a crime to treat the people that ACTUALLY keep our country moving this way.
Life as we know it doesn’t exist with out them!
Ever man made thing you touch was on a truck at some point EVERY THING!!!
Roscoe Lipps
It is about time drivers get paid for time setting at a warehouse waiting to get loaded or uploading some times for days because some one’s lack of planning on inventory
Lack of planning on there part puts an
Emergency on the carrier to get the product to customers before they run out of product
So now you have a drivers setting waiting to load or unload they need to be paid for waiting