Nickel and Overtimed
A Bill in Congress seeks to rectify an 84 year old pay disparity; almost no one cares, despite the overwhelming good this bill would accomplish.
This past week Micah Meadowcroft over at The American Conservative hosted my second published piece on a Bill in Congress that very few people know about.
The Bill in question is called The Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act (Or GOT Act, for short - perhaps if the acronym was Guaranteeing Overtime for Drivers Act, more people may have paid attention.) and it seeks to do exactly what it says - make it the law of the land that Truckers must receive overtime pay, just like nearly every other worker in this country must be paid overtime after putting in a 40 hour week. The GOT Act is pretty straightforward - it contains but one line, which is to remove the exemption in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that created this most unfair pay disparity.
I also wrote on this a couple of months ago over at Newsweek. Many thanks to Batya Ungar-Sargon for having me and doing the editing. She is lovely, and has published 4 other pieces there for me, all on The Freedom Convoy. More on that another time.
If you read both pieces you will get the gist of the bill, and a basic understanding of my argument that the Bill is righteous, necessary, will cost the taxpayer nothing, and do quite a bit to improve many things.
We are here at Substack to expand on what will be improved, and why You, and every representative in Congress, should support this bill.
Before we get into the benefits, I do want to acknowledge the costs. There are some, and I wouldn’t dare to pretend otherwise; however, they can be diffused across the economy so as not to hit any one actor within it too hard. More importantly, the threat of those costs can be used to avoid the costs, if that makes sense; and the best strategies to avoid the costs are a Win-Win-Win-Win for everyone in the supply chain, and the wider economy as a whole.
So what, exactly, are the costs?
Most truckers in America, Canada, and basically the rest of the world, work far more hours than other workers. Usually somewhere between 60 and 70 hours a week, to the average worker’s 40. That’s a lot of extra hours, which mostly reflect time on the road, sometimes covering vast distances, but mostly covering the incredible overhead involved with owning and operating trucks. These 18 wheeled pieces of capital equipment are not cheap, and unfortunately the driver is likewise looked at as a machine, to be employed as long as possible in maximizing the returns necessary to pay for it.
A very small minority of trucking companies are nice to their employed drivers, and pay them overtime. A very, very, very small minority. In my working life of nearly 30 years earning a wage, 25 of them behind the wheel, and across at least a dozen different trucking operations, only one of those operations paid me overtime. One out of twelve is less than 10 percent - I’d venture to guess that my experience is probably at the higher end of the spectrum, as it is difficult to track and compare which trucking companies pay overtime and which do not. If someone does have such published statistics handy, send them my way. For now, I will also factor in that only about 5% of North American truckers are unionized, where they would most likely be paid overtime; let us generously assume then, going forward, that 10% of North American truckers receive overtime pay.
We can infer from my anecdotes that at minimum, 90% of truckers are not receiving overtime pay, and assuming a 60 hour week, that overtime would amount to a 50% increase in pay on a third (20) of the hours they put in. Not an insignificant number.
Before we move forward with shunting these costs on down the line, I need to address a most ridiculous criticism, more often than not leveled at me by my fellow truckers.
”How do they know what to pay us if we are paid by the mile?”
Comrades! My dear, dear Comrades, who are harassed on the daily by the state and it’s mandated, High-Tech Palantir hithchikers, or are harassed by dispatch and management through their own tracking and communications devices, I have to ask you a question.
If THEY can afford armies of harridans and pencilnecks to monitor the devices which harass you like this, and cubicle farms full of accountants to calculate fuel mileage taxes and every other bit of our blood the state extracts from us, WHY is it that YOU assume these folks can’t ALSO use a calculator to do a little proration?
Are we really that beaten down that our own Mass Formation results in Stockholm Syndrome of the Steering Wheel, and we collectively can’t ever imagine something better, something positive for ourselves?
Back to the cost.
Yes, if those paying the freight are faced with drivers receiving overtime added to their wages, freight rates must necessarily increase, especially in a business where profits are pretty marginal. No question, no getting around it. How will shippers and their customers deal with this? Obviously they will have to pass this cost down the line in various ways, and I’m sure this scares the crap out of econ nerds, who hate the thought of Line Go Up being applied to the people whose work help everyone else’s lines go up.
There is, however, a way to avoid this.
One of the not-so-secret problems with the trucking business, and if you know a trucker, you definitely know about this problem, is detention. It is rampant, it happens to nearly everyone in the freight and refrigerated sectors constantly, and there have been numerous articles written about the issue, for years.
First sample here, with a sobering paragraph -
DAT surveyed 257 carriers and owner-operators, and 63% of them said that the average amount of time they spend waiting for a shipper to get them loaded or unloaded is more than 3 hours. In the same survey, only 3% of drivers said they receive detention pay for at least 90% of their claims to the shippers.
Another from my friend Rachel Premack, over at her former employer, Business Insider.
A new study from the American Transportation Research Institute found that detention has become more frequent and lengthier. From 2014 to 2018, the number of truckers who said they were detained more than 71% of the time increased by nearly 40%.
And of truckers who were detained at warehouses, 9.3% said they waited a whopping six hours or more in 2018. That was 2 percentage points more than in 2014.
Those of us in the business understand why this happens - there is no cost placed on drivers time, trucking companies in the freight sector are often loathe to try and charge for it, shippers and brokers make it nearly impossible to claim, and as a result, we just don’t get paid. Over and above the pay issue, this has tremendous repercussions for the entire supply chain, as a very large number of trucks are not in circulation, moving red and white blood cells throughout the arteries of our economy. You can imagine where the analogy takes us if clogged arteries remain clogged too long - though jumper cables and defibrillator paddles are somewhat similar devices, in a way.
If these abusive shippers are told by carriers “Hey guys, we can no longer afford to have our trucks sitting, because Uncle Sam woke up and realized a mistake from 80 years ago, rectification of which throws our numbers out of whack” and said shippers now scramble for a way to reduce those rates … the first place they can look is their own docks.
And for the Climate Alarmists amongst my readership (hopefully you have self selected out of here after reading enough of my Twitter posts) there is yet another benefit.
All of those thousands of trucks, often enough with drivers told to sit in them, because not very many warehouses or distribution centers allow drivers access to lounge or lunch facilities (and many don’t even let us use their restrooms!) adds up to a lot of engine idle time, either keeping the heat on in northern winter, or the air conditioning going in the summer. I wish I had numbers for this, and I’m sure there’s a study out there somewhere (again, feel free to send it my way) but my anecdotal experience tells me that literally Millions of gallons of diesel fuel is wasted keeping drivers comfortable while they are sitting, unpaid, at the mercy of a logistics system that attaches no cost to their time, and has enough desk jockeys involved in the planning of such that theres an infinite feedback loop of Spidermans pointing to someone else as the guilty party.
If those paying the freight have to pay more to account for our time, and can no longer legally dodge it, the accountants might start sending emails to their logistics departments asking why these trucks are all sitting. Are bean counters not the first to have the ear of the people in charge? They seem to matter far more than we do, and where the dollar is not hitting the road because of their own internal inefficiencies, it only follows that sooner or later they will have to figure this out.
THE CLIMATE DEPENDS ON IT! seems like it will catch the ear of certain eggheads more than any appeals to making the supply chain more efficient. And then we have the identity politics hustlers, who do not appear to give a shit about truckers, even when it is shown that there are human trafficking rings operating in the open who exist to bring indentured servants from India to work as truck drivers in Canada. I’m sure such things happen elsewhere.
On a side note - that article was written in 2019, and in the 3 years since this human trafficking scam was revealed, Prime Minister BlackFace has done exactly Nothing! about it.
While we are discussing costs and benefits, I would like to address another criticism I have faced from fellow truckers, regarding how this effects the self employed owner-operator, to whom the removing of this exemption is seen to do nothing, given that the self employed are not covered by the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.
I hate to use a cliché, but this one applies - “The rising tide lifts all boats.”
If major freight carriers are now compelled to pay their drivers overtime, and then that is reflected in general freight rates, the rate floor increase will then permeate throughout the rest of the industry. No amount of opportunistic rate cutting on the part of independent Owner Operators, cutting off their nose to spite their face, can account for the hundreds of thousands of trucks owned by medium to large companies and driven by employees. Not a chance, and you know it. Some may try, but as with all rate cutting of this sort, sooner or later the same sword used to slash is also what they impale themselves on. Proceed accordingly.
My old man brought up a similar argument to me last night, after more than a few alcoholic beverages, about companies using a similar tactic - slashing the cents per mile or hourly rates they pay their drivers.
To that I say, good luck. If the market for solid and experienced drivers is as tight as it is nearly always claimed, any trucking company pulling this stunt will soon find their drivers heading for greener pastures. And any company who does slash pay rates in an effort to undermine overtime requirements - I say to hell with you, and hopefully you get hit in the back of the head with a bullbar more than once on your way there.
To wrap all of this up, as I’ve kept your eyeballs here for far too long -
1. The Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act contains but one line - the removal of the overtime pay exception for truckers from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
There is no pork, no new regulation, no taxes required. Nothing.
This bill should act as an example of what other Bills should look like, and a counter to those full of pork, bloat, and opportunities for rent seekers. Passing the GOT Act on this principle alone is a great precedent to set.
2. The marginal costs to the economy, specifically to big shippers, will have to be defrayed down the line. Yes, our economy is on shaky ground right now, no question. That doesn’t mean that the one time that one politician did the right thing, that we should ignore this opportunity to right this pay disparity. And as I have explained, those faced with these increased costs have it within their own organizations to reduce them, as more often than not, those costs are incurred by their own inefficiencies, not truckers or the trucking industry itself.
3. When faced with these cost increases, shippers will naturally do what they can to get trucks moving out of their facilities faster. This will have an effect of making the supply chain work better, as less truck capacity is wasted sitting. As truckers detention time is reduced, they have more hours available to drive, and thus move more freight.
4. As mentioned in my essay at The American Conservative, ‘trucker’ is the number one occupation in 29 states, most of them in rural America, where the costs of the last 40 years of our material economy being gutted have been felt the most. This Bill is one small step in rectifying that, and as I mentioned at Newsweek, it behooves ‘America First’ Republicans to put their votes where their mouths are, and look after constituents instead of donors for once. It is fantastic politics, and will cost you nothing. Pass the Bill!
5. It is a moral and ethical imperative to look after the millions of people our Tech Utopian Overlords seek to make redundant. If Autonomous Trucks are coming at some point in the future, and if truckers are to be treated like robots and surveilled as criminals for the last decade(s) they are with us, the least we can do is pay them appropriately for their troubles. Truckers kept America and the world going during Covid lockdowns, when the laptop, Email Job Caste hid at home in their pajamas. After the last 2 and half years of this glaring example of one group of people keeping the lights on for everyone else, it behooves us to make sure that those doing this work are not denied the overtime pay which many others receive for sitting on their goddamn couches.
As always, thank you for reading. Feel free to comment, pass this article around, and tell your friends - the more subscribers I have, the better, and the more likely that a drivers perspective is shown to those who may have a position to help improve our lot.