Safety and driver pay are linked, economist says

Higher pay means safer drivers. That doesn’t necessarily mean that paying an individual driver more will make him or her safer. It does mean that a well-paying carrier has a better, safer pool of drivers to hire from.

That’s according to Michael Belzer in a recent conversation. We had not spoken for years and spent an hour catching up on the phone. Michael also said whatever you think of conditions for drivers here, they’re worse in Europe.

Belzer is a professor of economics at Wayne State University in Detroit. We talked about trucking and a presentation of his latest research on driver safety. He calls the presentation “The Business Case for Safety.” While the data derives from U.S. trucking, the presentation itself was before a committee of the Australian Parliament in April.

Belzer’s research shows that of measurable factors relating to safety – things like hours worked, substance abuse, vehicle maintenance, driver’s age, marital status and more – pay has by far the greatest impact on safety performance. Fleets that paid well had 3.2% fewer crashes, he found.

“That’s approximately seven times more impact than all the other factors combined,” Belzer said.

The effects of those other factors were in fractions of a percentage point.

That may not sound like a lot, but across the industry it represents a substantial savings in lives, livelihoods and property.

Pay and safety

A trucker once himself, Belzer has spent decades researching trucking economics and driver compensation. He is the author of the landmark book “Sweatshop on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation.” It was published in 2000, two decades after the deregulation of 1980. The poor pay and conditions he found then endure today. So does the longstanding myth of a “driver shortage.”

“It’s the ‘do you get what you pay for?’ question,” Michael said.

His research shows that, where driver safety is concerned, the answer is yes – pay and safety are definitely related. Higher pay means better-qualified applicants and a safer fleet. Conversely, lower pay results in less qualified applicants.

While it’s the biggest factor in Belzer’s presentation, it is not the only contributing factor in crash experience. For example, long hours raise the risk of crashes. In the presentation, Belzer cites other studies pointing out many drivers are pressured to log wait and unloading time as off-duty to increase available driving time. That means more working hours overall.

That’s not exactly a surprise, and neither is a study noted in the presentation showing that detention times also are associated with increased crash risk. The “first 15-minute detention beyond two hours increases the average expected crash rate by 6.2%,” Belzer noted. That works out to one crash per 1,000 trucks, or 6,509 crashes a year. Truckload detention is associated with an earnings loss for drivers of well over $1 billion annually.

At least in the U.S. various agencies record and make available all kinds of trucking data. That’s not the case in the European Union, where the organization with most of the data shares it – or not – as it pleases.

Belzer said his years of research that question both government and company policies are known there. As a result, he finds it difficult to gather the kind of data there that he can here. The information agency all but told him carriers don’t want him to have it. Meanwhile, long-haul trucking in the EU is in worse shape than in North America.

“There are lots and lots of rules,” he explained, “but virtually no mechanism to enforce them.”

Wage imbalance, social dumping

Much of the challenge there has to do with the economics of EU member countries. Member states in Western Europe – France and Germany, for example – are prosperous and worker wages are relatively high. That’s not the case among Eastern European members like Romania and Bulgaria, where wages are low – including driver pay. Drivers in Eastern Europe earn as little as a third of Western driver pay. The practice of exploiting wide minimum wage differences among EU countries is called “social dumping.”

So, drivers from poorer countries dominate long-haul trucking across the EU. Not only do they earn little money, but they’re subject to abuse by carriers, including what Belzer called “bandit carriers.” Based in Eastern Europe but connected with carriers based in western EU countries like Belgium, these carriers pay drivers the minimum wage of their home country and often drive them in vans to the higher-minimum-wage countries where they go to work. At the end of their contracted time, they’d be bused back home. Once in the prosperous West, many of those drivers live in their trucks for months at a time – up to a year, in extreme cases.

What are the safety implications? Belzer is denied the data by carriers aware of his work in the U.S. In fact, he has been trashed by some. His response?

“I don’t care,” Belzer said. LL