Truckers Demand Feds End Rampant Wage Theft
Truckers took to the streets of D.C. last week to call on lawmakers to end the unfair practices in their industry that locks drivers into poverty and debt, leading to a manufactured trucker shortage.
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This isn’t like past trucker protests, where drivers slowed down traffic, got flipped off by D.C. drivers and wanted to arrest police officers for forcing them to pissed themselves. These drivers were with Truckers Movement for Justice, and they took to the streets (on their feet, not their big rigs) on May 1 to list their grievances of wage theft in the form of unpaid wait times and lack of overtime pay, the Guardian reports:
The group said they met with senior officials from the DoT in 2021 as part of Joe Biden’s trucking action plan, a set of initiatives meant to increase the supply of truck drivers by creating new pathways into the profession, but that they have yet to see any movement on their three core demands.
“We’ve lost our patience. This has been going for years and has only gotten worse with the lack of federal action. We don’t need taskforces and studies,” said Fernandez, who also serves as deputy secretary for Truckers Movement for Justice.
Pay for truck drivers has dwindled in recent decades even as the industry has consistently complained it can not find enough drivers. When adjusted for inflation, the average pay for a truck driver in the US in 1980 was about $110,000 annually, compared with about $48,000 today. More than 2 million Americans work as truck drivers in the US today.
Ray Randall, a truck driver for over 20 years who has worked across the US said he had spent hours in line at ports, unpaid.
“Drivers should be paid detention time,” said Randall. “We believe all drivers should be paid for all hours worked, because once you come on duty, you’re working. If you come to a shipper and have to wait, I’m working. Also, after 40 hours, companies pay employees overtime but drivers don’t get any overtime and we can put in 70-plus hours a week. We can be on duty 12 hours a day and we’re not getting paid for those 12 hours.”
Dang. According to the Guardian, real take-home pay for truckers has fallen by more than half since 1980. That’s for a dangerous job that is hard on your body, mind and family. The trucking industry reminds me a great deal of another industry which is currently running its most important workers ragged in the name of profits and to the disadvantage of safety.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: The trucker shortage is bullshit. Just like all every other industry that insisted after the COVID-19 lockdowns that “no one wants to work anymore,” there is no trucker shortage without a pay shortage. That’s despite the trucking lobbyist releasing increasingly dire warnings about a trucker shortage. The American Trucking Associations released a press release declaring America would be short 80,000 drivers without much challenge from certain news outlets.
