What I've found is that with near certainty, these individuals suffer from a kind of economic myopia. They view every aspect of their work as something though should be charged for and they complain about every little bit they aren't paid for separately. They are almost never open to the idea that it doesn't matter how much they get paid for each action; what matters is their total income. They view anything they don't charge for as money that rightfully belongs to them.
Note that this is not about education level either. Easily, the single most vocal group about piece work payments are the medical doctors I've talked to. I've met multiple doctors who think they should be able to bill for each question asked during a visit that concerns a different medical topic, and some go so far as to demand the patient leave and book a subsequent 15 minute appointment before they will discuss it.
Edit: I'm not saying anything about how much truckers, or any other profession, should be paid. Instead, piece work professions would be better served (and would avoid potentially disastrous financial outcomes) by evaluating their business in terms of overall profitability. For example, drivers might negotiate a higher price per mile, but if one of the aspects the parent mentioned changes significantly (load/unload time, traffic conditions in a geograph), they should turn down the work or start transitioning to a new occupation.
To be fair, there are unusual incentives in place here -- depending on the specific circumstances, each individual task or procedure a doctor performs may end up being coded differently for insurance reimbursement purposes. The focus of doctors on piece work is incentivized by the way insurance works.
(1) It's immutable, and squeezes them between their dispatchers (who schedule them for 11 hour drives) and remaining legal. If you're running a day load (far better quality of life), then if you hit traffic you're spending the night on the road in your truck, parked wherever you happened to hit the time limit. There's no individual flexibility in terms of "I'll drive less tomorrow to make up for it."
(2) Removal of individual agency. Imagine if someone showed up at your desk and told you that you couldn't write any more code because you'd already been coding X hours. Doesn't matter you were on a roll. Doesn't matter that the past 4 hours were lightweight commenting and code formatting. Doesn't matter you were in the middle of writing a solution that finally occurred to you. Just is. Oh, and here's a $500 DOT ticket for trying to jot down some code notes to yourself to salvage your work.
I hear and agree that some people feel entitled to bill counter to market. But IMHO the combination of a per-mile-rate, dispatcher-driven scheduling, and absolute regulation is pretty sadistic to truckers.
There's a lot more friendly ways the legislation could have been written: work hour cap per week, different classes of CDL / experience levels mean different caps, etc.
If there were a decent moment-to-moment shot of somebody dying because I was coding tired (rather than a future chance with a barrier of code reviews), it would be totally reasonable to put a really sharp barrier on reducing that risk.
Which is completely unregulated with anything like the same strictness.
I can only speak to the day trip side, not long-haul multi-day freight. But based on annectdotes, I would say there's (on average) at least one incident per month per driver where the truck has to be driven off the road to avoid a collision with physics-ignorant non-trucking traffic.
A friend of a friend was involved in an older lady's death after she pulled out right in front of him (as in, "even the brakes can't slow a truck down that fast" close). Of course he survived in the larger vehicle, but now he has that on his conscience.
I don't dispute that freight trucks are dangerous vehicles. But generally speaking, their drivers are far more experienced than you or I - they should be, they do it every day.
11% is not nothing, but it's also not the 89% chunk.
Long stretches of boredom punctuated by split-second reaction moments also describes my driving... and I can do that in anything 5 tons or under without any sort of regulation (except a passed driver's license test some number of years ago).
The regulation exists because of the unacceptable collision rate that truckers were having on public roads. Citizens compel the government to act when their relatives die due to a few irresponsible truckers who fall asleep behind the wheel.
The truckers in your family are probably responsible and know their limits. Brand new truckers ---or those who don't have the leverage to push back to an employer who expects them to drive dangerously long hours--- might not be responsible.
Their freedom is restricted because given the choice of pissing off the boss and putting people at risk, drivers and companies often choose the later.
My brother almost got hit by a semi at a weigh station when it took too long too stop -- because only one brake was functioning. He stopped a Chinatown bus venting exhaust into the cabin, also brakes were on fire. Another time they caught a guy who drove straight through from San Diego to Syracuse on amphetemine.
The regulations are there to protect the driving public. Violators are actively policed, and companies who break the rules get shut down.
To your specific points, the company and drivers' interests usually aren't in lockstep.
Unfortunately, the company usually has the power. Correct me if I'm wrong on some of the details here.
But when a driver's in another city and picks up a trailer that's been overloaded, or one with bad tires or faulty brakes, if they choose to pull it then they're the one that gets nailed with the DOT ticket. Correct?
I know some trucking companies have reimbursement policies, but that seems like a really perverse incentive structure. Why not find out who the driver is contracted to for the load & fine the hell out of them? It's their trailer after all!
My problem isn't that there's regulation. It's that some pieces (like the above, and the absolute cutoff times for logbooks) seems like it was designed by someone who wasn't overly burdened with imagination, empathy, or an inkling of game theory.
(And on the driver-vs-company fines, I'm basing my guess on most of them accruing against the driver by the fact that trucking companies generally seem to be pushing drivers to make the shady choices)
The driver shares responsibility. If a trailer is overloaded and has bald tires and brakes, he shouldn't pick it up. The driver has a strong incentive to tow the line as his CDL is his livelihood, and serious violations can affect that. (In addition to his life.)
The problem is that the carrier may or may not care and most drivers have little leverage. My uncle was a teamster driver. If he showed up to pick up a load and it was overloaded or unsafe, he'd go to the dock master, tell him to get the overload off the trailer and refuse to pick up. If you work for JimBob Trucking from Alabama, you may be on your own.
As for the inflexibility -- you need to be inflexible sometimes. You don't need game theory to state that trucks must have brakes, or that drivers must sleep. The fact is that a human's performance of occupational tasks diminishes as you stay awake. If someone is up for 17 hours, they will perform as if they are drunk.
Agreed that drivers have responsibility for a load they pick up, but my understanding is that with the new eLog systems there's less opportunity for "flex time". So if you arrive at a yard and need to get a container swapped to a new trailer or have them pull a different trailer then you're still on the clock. Which gets dicey when the yard knows this and says "Sure, we'll get you a new trailer. It'll just take a couple hours. We're really busy right now..."
The ideal would be the unionized situation you outlined, where there's a strong, independent driver's advocate to mediate disputes.
And agreed that there's a hard cliff where no one should be allowed to drive. But if it's 11 hours in the seat max, then what if you sat in traffic at a port for 5 of those? Is that driver as tired as someone doing 11 hours of interstate miles?
Paper logs afforded both drivers and regulators a judge-like discretion that I think lubricated the wheels with reasonableness while still dissuading repeated patterns of risky behavior.
eLog (assuming they fix all the loopholes in the terribly implemented first gen systems) doesn't provide that flexibility.
Which, in general, is a problem I think we're going to have to deal with more and more. You can't take partially enforced laws that worked, implement technical measures to absolutely enforce them, and expect everything to be the same as it was before. (E.g. if police departments started sueing for Google Maps tracking data and handing out tickets whenever a speed limit was exceeded)
Here's a link: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-on-sleep-deprivation-20... There's a lot of public military research as well, but without the pretty charts.
Only these do not solve the issue. The issue is that working longer shifts puts people's lives in danger. You could legislate in some worker protections for the driver, making it more likely these things do not happen. But they wouldn't make the laws any less necessary.
This essentially taught me two things: 1) performance pay really works and 2) always wash your vegetables.
I do think the mileage incentive makes sense because it forces you to be clever about your route. But not getting paid while a truck is loaded seems like total bullshit and basically another example of companies building their business off the backs of workers.
But why ? why not dump the risk of delays at the weak party in this transaction ?
We know a route from X to Y is $miles . Detours happen, but Google is getting to the point of calculating realtime incidents. But time could be fairly compensated, as could the miles on a vehicle.
If you took a way longer route, it's on you. But if you're traffic jammed, it's not your fault, and should fairly be compensated.
You know, that's what Unions are for.
Then Reagan de-regulated and lots of companies from right to work states moved in and killed the market. The union shops like Yellow Freight mostly operate in blue states and are profitable.
Plus, the way it was regulated makes modern regulatory capture look consumer friendly. If you wanted to start a trucking company, you had to submit a business plan with a list of committed customers and already set in stone pricing. The Feds would literally hand your plan to everyone with a route in the region, give them a few months to review it and then your potential competitors got to vote on whether you should be allowed to operate that route. Predictably, it was basically just outsourced sales for the exiting companies.
Same here. If the truck driver was free to go home, or whatever, sure dont pay them. But traffic jams are in transit between places they are told to go. It doesn't have to be the "fault" of the employer. But the employee is captive, and working, and absolutely should be paid with regards to time.
I think you have to reason about the other side of the equation, where someone has to pay you.
It rains. I have to walk to work I the rain. I should get compensated. But is my employer on the hook, to give me the happiness I would've had if it hadn't been raining?
The consequence to an employee getting stuffed is that the driver has less time to sleep or jerk around in the back of the truck.
Guess what the company doesn't give a shit about?
Economics doesn't care about the morale of the workers in this context as it contributes nothing to the bottom line.
Would you prefer if management cared more about that, instead of the bottom line?
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure if they could make that happen, they would!
Otherwise there are teamsters, which are very heavily unionized.
And they don't want idle trucks any more than the driver does because if the truck is idle they aren't making money either.
You could also phrase it this way. Maybe drivers wouldn't jump if they got treated better,
The real reason is that it pushes off risk. Why would a trucking company pay a guy to sit in traffic? WTF is the guy going to do anyway... he's sleeping in the truck behind a gas station somewhere in Armpit, PA.
Some major carriers will ask drivers to fudge this, although the rules are actually pretty strict about this. Notably, Wal-Mart has come under a lot of criticism in the past for asking drivers to mark time waiting for a truck to be loaded/unloaded as "off duty" instead of "on duty, not driving."
There are too many companies that ask drivers to fudge the books. My dad has worked for a handful of them and finally found a nice place where he doesn't have to worry about that kind of request. I think it is more common than people think.
The meters only charge for time when the cab isn't moving, or is moving slowly... This enabled a passenger to run in to a convenience store, and it would be worthwhile for the driver to wait for the passenger to buy their beer (or whatever). Sometimes my passengers would ask me to stop the meter so it wouldn't run up on them ("sure"), others expected it and were fine with the arrangement.
It looks like the gorilla rideshare company slashed their per-minute rate in Phoenix since I last checked - used to be $0.25/min, now is $0.09/min. This makes it not worthwhile for the "ride share" driver to wait for their passenger to run into a store... In theory, since the "rides" show up instantaneously it's more efficient to get a new ride rather than make stops.
Since the "ridesharing" apps charge for both time & distance, the posted price-per-mile makes it seem like you're getting a better deal than you are. 3-4 minutes/mile adds $0.27-$0.36 to the cost for every mile of travel, at $0.09/min.
It typically took me 7 minutes to get to a pickup address, which included a minute to plug the address into my navigation software (the taxi company I used to drive for now has a phone app that automagically directs the driver to the pickup address, just like the upstarts' system). The mother of a friend of mine has taken to using "Lifts" when she needs to go someplace where she'd rather not have to park. I explained that the driver she was getting might not actually be just around the corner.