Overtime bill for truckers gets it right

U.S. lawmakers have an opportunity to right a longstanding wrong and to show they’re on the side of America’s working people. Passage of the GOT Truckers Act would make America’s truck drivers eligible for time-and-a-half for their work over 40 hours in a week – just like nearly every other worker in the nation.

There’s much more than simple fairness involved here, including highway safety, and I’ll come back to that. But first, there’s the matter of an amazing public statement issued by Chris Spear, president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations, the D.C. voice of the biggest corporate trucking companies in the nation.

Yup, they’re precisely the folks who have benefited from not fairly paying truck drivers overtime for all these years – since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 exempted interstate truckers from coverage. That’s the awful wrong the GOT Truckers Act would finally correct.

It’s not unusual for Chris to be clumsy with words, and you have to forgive him from time to time. After all, he has to speak for a grotesque system that actually encourages a driver turnover rate of 90%.

Since newbies crash more than veterans, driver turnover is a shameful, ongoing safety risk.

But that constant river of new drivers keeps pay rates down, you see. Poor Chris has to defend it all with a straight face.

With his GOT Truckers Act statement, though, Chris was clumsier than usual, sometimes bordering on the stupid and occasionally stepping across. Let’s look at that statement point by point:

“It (the GOT Truckers Act) would reduce drivers’ paychecks and decimate trucking jobs by upending pay models that for 85 years have provided family-sustaining wages …”

Holy cow. Chris is telling you what? That treating drivers like everyone else under the law would somehow make shippers stop shipping? That his members would lay off drivers because, well, just because? That the shock of overtime pay for truckers would cause the entire economy to seize up? That driver pay would fall? That would occur only at a carrier’s discretion.

And I guess Chris forgot that for 42 of those 85 years, most truck drivers earned overtime pay through union contracts. It was deregulation in 1980 that signaled the rise of mileage pay and the end of good wages in trucking. That also was when that trucker exemption began taking a serious toll on the burgeoning truckload sector.

The Great Depression still lingered between 1938 and 1941, but the years from then until 1980 were the most prosperous in our nation’s history – at least for working people. I was a young union driver in those days, and because of that, my wife and I were able to buy a small, old starter house when she became pregnant. How many young drivers can do that today?

Family sustaining? A better word for today’s trucker pay, particularly for those earning below the average, would be subsistence.

Calling all of his twaddle an overstatement is an understatement.

“Lawmakers interested in actually supporting drivers could begin by fixing the nationwide truck parking shortage that costs drivers on average $5,500 in lost earnings annually,” Chris also said.

I hope the government does address the very real and dangerous truck parking shortage. He’s right about that. But then he offers the head-spinning concept of blaming a loss of pay on something other than the employers who control every dollar a driver does or does not receive.

It’s all a function of the indefensible mileage pay standard that does not even pay drivers for legally required truck safety inspections and has long encouraged many drivers to drive too fast and for too long. The one and only reason the parking crisis costs drivers $5,500 annually is because carriers refuse to compensate them for the time and miles lost finding a place to park.

Yet Chris and the big-trucking honchos will look you in the eye and whine, supposedly on behalf of the poor drivers. Good Lord, what cojones.

Another point he made: The GOT Truckers Act is “a thinly veiled attempt to boost trial attorneys’ fees.”

This one’s a doozy. What the hell is Chris talking about? Paying drivers overtime will make lawyers rich? There’s only one way that ending the truck driver exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act could cause litigation, and that’s if Chris’ monster-carrier members decided to fight a new law in the courts.

OK, now that we’re done with ridiculous bombast, let’s talk about the GOT Truckers Act. The full name of the bill is the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act, HR6359 in the House of Representatives and S3273 in the Senate. Both would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to remove the overtime exemption for truck drivers.

Of course, it would more fairly compensate truck drivers – many of whom work up to 70 hours in a week – but it would do more than that. Today, too many drivers spend long hours waiting to be loaded or unloaded by shippers and receivers who have no incentive to improve efficiency. Unpaid detention time is a major drag on national productivity, amounting to billions of dollars a year.

If truck drivers were paid for their time, you can bet carriers would seriously pressure shippers to improve. They would be more selective about which shippers they worked with and what loads they accepted. That would leave bad shippers with bad carriers and bad service, a surefire incentive to improve their systems and facilities.

Most importantly, overtime would improve highway safety. Drivers absorb the costs of detention and all manner of delays that cost carriers next to nothing. That encourages drivers paid by the mile to jam as many miles as possible into their legally available driving time, which encourages speeding. Even big-carrier drivers constrained by speed limiters on the interstates are tempted to speed on other state, county and local roads. It happens all the time.

That would not be the case with drivers paid by the hour, and the result would be safer highways for everyone.

Finally, overtime pay could ease frustrations and make the job of driving better. That would encourage drivers to stay in the industry and would help reduce the outrageous truck driver turnover.

Sadly, the chances of the GOT Truckers Act becoming law are slim at best. That’s not because D.C. lawmakers will be swayed by Chris’ statement, which seems to assume they’re idiots. The real pressure will be at the state and local levels, where senators and representatives win or lose their jobs.

State trucking associations and locally domiciled carriers that oppose the bill will have an impact far beyond that of the many, many individuals who stand to benefit from it.

Only a groundswell of support by voters can possibly change that. LL

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