In May, 200-plus-truck flatbed fleet Smokey Point Distributing announced a base salary compensation structure for its over-the-road company drivers. The fleet, part of the larger Daseke Inc. group, started the program June 1, paying solo OTR drivers with flatbed hauling experience an annual salary of $65,000 and each qualified and experienced member of a driving team $75,000.
The move was among the most recent in an accelerating turn toward minimum guarantees for drivers. North Charleston, South Carolina-based Bulldog Hiway Express, also part of the Daseke group, last November guaranteed flatbed haulers a minimum $1,000 a week in its Salary Plus program. Monroeville, Alabama-based Hornady Transportation followed suit with a similar plan. Around the same time, Sioux City, Iowa-based K&B Transportation committed to drivers 2,500 paid miles per week, or a $1,125 per week minimum.
The trend responds to a chief challenge in OTR trucking — how to fairly compensate drivers subject to unpredictable income due to piece-pay structures such as per-mile and percentage of revenue. Lacking any minimum-pay backstop, most OTR drivers can suffer serious pay shortfalls due to detention, weather and other factors beyond their control.
The largest share of Overdrive’s naturally entrepreneurial owner-operator readers continue to prefer percentage pay for the opportunity it affords to use load-choice latitude to maximize profitability on the fewest miles. But for company drivers, fleets large and small are pitching guaranteed pay, recognizing that “stability needs to be added to the pay package,” says compensation analyst Mark Murrell.
Overdrive’s recent 2018 compensation survey looked in part at the prevalence of minimum guarantees in pay packages offered to company and leased drivers. Of the mostly company drivers responding to this question, 17 percent noted the presence of a guarantee. About a third of those respondents said the guarantee was put in place within the last five years.
For owner-operators, truckload carriers “haven’t figured that one out yet,” but Murrell speculates that “in theory they could pay [owner-operators] a monthly retainer” of sorts that might function as a minimum. The idea also was floated in recent history by a party among the new crop of technology-enabled brokerages as a time-based contract for dedicated hauling service from independents.
With more company-driver minimums in place, however, owner-operators looking for a parachute of employee-based stability when the next downturn comes might not have far to look.
Murrell is cofounder of CarriersEdge, which administers the Truckload Carriers Association’s annual “Best Fleets to Drive For” recognition program. Of the top 20 in last year’s program, eight carriers had a minimum guarantee in their pay programs.
Looking further into the top 20 and including fleets with part-time/temporary or dedicated-type guarantees that aren’t available to all haulers, only four of the top 20 “don’t have any kind of guarantee,” Murrell adds, “and two of them are all-owner-operator fleets.” The finalists are companies with the kind of workplace environment in which “drivers will raise their hands” to nominate the fleet, Murrell says, which is not “a representative sample of the industry.”
Likewise, the 40 percent of those top fleets with guaranteed pay is far from the industry at large, based on Overdrive’s compensation survey. It shows that 17 percent of company and leased drivers reported hauling for a company with a guarantee system in place. Most of the packages were structured with a weekly guarantee that amounts to less than $60,000 annually.
https://www.overdriveonline.com/guaranteed-pay-making-waves-in-driver-compensation/
Still wouldn’t want to go back on the road.
We were making 8-900 a week, take home pay, 11yrs ago and $1100 a week now with food being so much more expensive and traffic triple what it was then?
Nope!
I was taking home just as much in the mod 90’s as mid 2000’s.
Younger generation is getting ran through the coals.
I only work 10 weeks a year, I have no car, wife kids or house, only pay for 35 a week for insurance and eat well. I do way more than 1100.00 a week. Some weeks over 2 grand. Plus I drive a new fast truck, work for a cool boss. Not bad pay for a Chicago based over the road company driver. A lot of detention pay, and extra stop pay which is extra pay.
I also have expensive truck specific GPS systems in my truck, rerouting me around slow downs and backups. Also doing big time preventive maintenance, keeping track of tire wear so I’m not stuck on the side of the road for hours waiting on some bullshit maintenance vehicle.
We get paid weekly, all depends on how many trips you can make in a week, and whether or not you have an open truck, not governed to some bullshit speed limit, I can pass these slow moving time wasters doing a measly 64 miles per hour.
Took me a lot of years to get here though.
Meant to say WORK TEN MONTHS – NOT TEN WEEKS ….LMAO
If it was for only 10 weeks out of the year I might would go back to driving if I could pick the weeks. LOL
It must be boring going forward all the time.
I drive a terminal tractor. I back up trailers 12 times an hour. At least that takes skill.
yes, it does. I drove a truck in NYC for a while, and had to back up a trailer everyday into a driveway while avoiding the steel columns in the street that were holding up an elevated subway track above me. Tricky business.
Getting out of bed takes skill, I,m backing all day long. The skill is keeping your job, keeping out of trouble and not killing anybody, I guarantee you I’m backing all day, made even worse because it’s an unfamiliar area, unlike you where you see the same spots all day long.
What, you think over the road drivers never back? We have to do it in traffic, unfamiliar locations, unlike you were it’s the same spots everyday, with terminal trucks that are 3 times more maneuverable, that can turn on a dime, because they have too, we can’t, we have to sweat the sleeper cab bullshit.
Our trucks are nowhere near as manueverable as your terminal truck.
I drive Boston, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Portland, Houston, Minneapolis and every other goddamned city in this nation, I have to back into buildings off the street, turn inside and dock without damage. I’ve driven into caves in Kentucky and Misssouri had to dock underground, zero room for error.
Trying backing off the street in Baltimore,Maryland into a underground dock with a 75 foot rig, made even worse because it’s a sleeper, an extended platform even longer than normal. Pressure out the ass because the traffic is impatient and pissed off because they,re waiting on your ass, trying to get to work.
Try doing that in a snow storm with blowing wind, zero traction…LMAO
Ever drive 150 miles in a snow blizzard with 45- 60 mile an hour cross winds?
Skill? Or just plain nuts….
This industry has a 94 percent turnover rate, most get fired before they take their first on the job dump.
Believe it or not, women make the best drivers, companies clammer to get them, they’re the safest and most efficient.
Mark Schumacher in LV:
I feel for you. I was loosing my patience it had changed so much since starting in mid-90’s.
Went to Hunts Point twice and told them not to send us back there or to the east coast. Hunts point brothers were a bunch of crooks.
I think it was G.W. bridge, hitting some of the bumps in the road would bounce the trailer enough it would scrape the top and the crazies trying to jump on your truck wanting to lump…..
Chicago, Houston, New York city, and L.A. got to turning my stomach.
Not to mention in those places they would often have a dock meant for a straight truck and you would have to stick a rig into that dock.