‘It’s just unconscionable’

There aren’t too many things in trucking that remain the way they were in 1938.

However, the lack of overtime pay for truck drivers is one of them. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 exempts motor carriers from having to pay overtime to truck drivers.

Eighty-five years after the exemption was passed as part of an effort to discourage truck drivers from working excessive hours, it now serves as a way to devalue a truck driver’s time.

In May, truck drivers and lawmakers made pleas to remove the overtime exemption.

“You need to require overtime,” OOIDA Board Member Doug Smith said. “It’s just unconscionable in this day and age that we don’t have overtime for truck drivers.”

Smith’s comments came as part of a driver compensation committee meeting on May 16.

The National Academies of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board driver compensation committee, which was launched in January, is tasked with studying the effects of various methods of driver compensation on safety and retention, including hourly pay, pay for detention time, and other pay methods in the industry.

Smith, OOIDA Board Member Bryan Spoon and OOIDA life member Stu Hochfelder spoke out against a pay-by-the mile system that forces many drivers to work 70 hours a week to make a living wage.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2021 median salary for heavy-haul truck drivers was $48,310. The OOIDA members explained to the committee that the average wage looks far worse when you consider that it takes many truck drivers to work 60 or 70 hours a week to make that amount.

“We should all be paid for our time,” Hochfelder said.

The current pay-by-the-mile system means that most truck drivers are not compensated for any of the time the vehicle is being loaded or unloaded, as well as when a driver is conducting equipment checks or pumping fuel.

Smith added that if company drivers receive overtime he believes those higher wages also will help owner-operators.

Spoon told the committee that the burden that is often placed on truck drivers needs to be spread out to others in the supply chain.

“My paycheck goes up and down, up and down,” Spoon said. “The trucker can’t be the one that carries all of the burden of that up and down. It’s a burden that needs to be shared.”

Removing the overtime exemption would move some of that burden onto shippers and receivers who would be forced to value a truck driver’s time, the OOIDA members told the committee.

Lawmaker gets involved

Truck drivers aren’t the only ones pushing for a removal of the motor carrier overtime exemption.

Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, R-N.J., encouraged his colleagues to make sure that truck drivers are being paid fairly.

“Truck workers need to be treated fairly,” Van Drew said during a House Highways and Transit Subcommittee hearing on May 10. “Let’s talk about the basic issues here. If it wasn’t for the truck drivers … we wouldn’t have a supply chain at all. The truck drivers are the ones who went out there, did the job, and kept this country moving.”

Van Drew spent several minutes advocating for ways to make truck drivers’ lives easier.

“They need things. They need a place to park. They need to take a break. They need rest. They need help with fuel costs,” Van Drew said. “They are hard workers. They break their backs. They deal with bad weather, dangerous substances and dangerous situations. But quite frankly, I’ve been in this Congress for my third term now, and we talk about it a lot. I know we care, and this is not a criticism … This is just the reality. We’ve got to do stuff. We can’t just keep talking about it.”

OOIDA Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh testified at the hearing. He told lawmakers that if they want to improve the supply chain, they can start by passing pro-trucker bills to add truck parking, provide restroom access and remove the overtime exemption for truck drivers.

As part of the previous congressional session, OOIDA helped craft the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act, which would have amended the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to end the overtime pay exemption for motor carriers. OOIDA contends that paying truck drivers overtime would decrease problems with detention time, improve the supply chain and would send the message that a truck driver’s time should be valued.

“If a shipper or receiver knows they won’t be responsible for paying overtime, they simply don’t care as much about respecting a driver’s time,” Pugh wrote in his testimony to the House subcommittee. “If repealed, drivers would either be fairly compensated for the extra hours they work, or shippers and receivers would find ways to reduce delays to avoid paying overtime. Simply put, the current law ensures that a driver’s time is less valued than other professions and enables inefficiencies to persist, and even worsen. If Congress is serious about fixing pervasive problems in the supply chain, this absolutely must change.”

Van Drew, who co-sponsored the bill in the previous session, asked his lawmakers to support the measure when it is reintroduced.

“Truckers are an essential component of our nation’s supply chain and compensating them appropriately is the least we can do to support them,” Van Drew said. “Let’s be fair. Let’s be decent to the hard-working men and women who do this job.”

Pugh testified that paying truck drivers’ overtime would do more to increase safety than efforts to mandate speed limiters on commercial motor vehicles.

“I think it will improve safety. It will improve drivers’ lives. It will improve retention,” Pugh said. “The same people who are pushing for speed limiters because they say trucks need to slow down are the same people who are against paying truckers overtime. Trucking has long been a piecework industry where you are paid by the mile. My opinion would be that if you pay truckers by the mile and you have some crazy concern that truckers are flying down the highway – which they’re not – but if that’s what you think, then probably paying them by the hour and paying them overtime would automatically put them to (the speed) they should be going.” LL