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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Danny
I work for a large parcel company, if drivers are paid time and a half after eight hours. They wouldn’t have any trouble retaining drivers.
Amjad jamal
That will be a great victory for the truck driver. Large companies always complain about the higher turn over, but never wants to pay more. I need to know the name of the author of the bill, so I will contact them for future reference. I pray that Bill pass and become the Law.
Arouna Ouedraogo
I quick my job because it s very dangerous job you can go to jail or dead and get tickets by the police single move worse weight station DOT inspection NC OHIO drivers always get tickets and the money is very bad you sleeping in the highway 3or 4 days no shower you don’t have time
David McDonel
Bad idea. Why not stop with subsidies that large companies get from government to train new drivers and immigrants. That’s why there turnover continues to be high. At these large companies. Ltl companies pay 100k a year. Not much turnover either. Brokers are the problem. Get rid of brokerage industry. Make shippers deal directly with the trucking companies large and small. Even a minimum mileage pay would help new drivers if it was high enough. Even if they just required pay at all live load and live unload. From your appointment time. Would encourage more drop n hook frieght increasing productivity nationwide. If you force hourly pay on industry they will lower mileage pay to make up for it. That’s what Schneider did. This past year. Took 3 cents a mile away for $10 hourly pay when ever onduty. Well it reduced our pay. So if this were to become law. They could cut mileage pay in half. And drivers will make less money. These activist lobby groups need to banned from pushing this stuff in government. They know nothing about trucking at all. Just lower our wages so nobody will want to drive truck. Empty stores eventually ..bad idea this piece of legislation.
Trucker chuck
Only way now to guarantee that you are paid overtime is to have it spelled out in your union contract. Make trucking a decent job, not one that has a 100% turnover rate. Raise rates to compensate the driver, pretty simple concept, but we all know the lobbyists in the us house will put this bill to shame !
Josh
I started driving for a smaller company of only 70 trucks 3 years ago. They pay by the hour and overtime after 8 hours in the day. I personally am a MUCH safer driver knowing my hourly pay isn’t tied to a speedometer.
Pete D.
Anyone who supports overtime pay, your deluding yourself if you think a carrier is going to pay you the rate that your currently making today (at the truck company I drive at in Central Florida, we are making about $82,000, all local work), AND time and a half over 40.
I’m going to tell you right now what is going to happen if this passes, the carriers are going to calculate how many hours “it should” take you to do what you currently do, then see how much money that a driver makes in those forecasted hours, then reduce the linehaul rate you are paid, so that by the time you work your typical 60 hours in a week, with overtime, it will come out to being the same.
The only difference is, the first 40 hours you work, your going to be paid absolute garbage….which will incentive the carrier to work you only 4 days a week, as they will get the same productivity in those 4 days now as before, but there getting a discount on it.
Any driver who thinks that there going to magically make over 120,000 a year because of overtime, your a gullible fool.
This law is one of the best things that could happen to carriers.
Dustin
So the same government that cut hours for truck drivers so that they can’t work overtime is going to mandate overtime pay for the overtime they aren’t allowed to work. Got it. Oh, and other than some short haul, truck drivers get paid by the mile, usually loaded mile. How does the math work there?