I Am a Twenty Year Truck Driver, Part 2: How Truckers Are Paid | Hacker News Reader

I Am a Twenty Year Truck Driver, Part 2: How Truckers Are Paid

medium.com

140 pointsGeekette109 comments

> This industry literally won’t even pay for chassis they desperately need (and chassis are really cheap compared to trucks), doesn’t want to pay its workers, but they are supposedly going to pay for millions of robot trucks

Interesting perspective on autonomous freight. Even if self-driving trucks become technologically viable in the coming years, their economic viability may still significantly trail that of personal autonomous vehicles.

If the terminal unit economics convincingly work, capital will happily fund someone ready to burn cash to establish market power.

Exactly. It'll be someone like Amazon just bypassing the shipping/trucking companies entirely.

Or imagine robotic trucks full of sweet crude cruising down from Alberta.

> Or imagine robotic trucks full of sweet crude cruising down from Alberta.

It's unlikely that robotic trucks can compete with Buffet's railroads. (According to industry definitions, Albert's crude is not "sweet".)

Then again, railroads can't compete with pipelines when it comes to transporting oil.

Good thing we stopped that.

That's a good point,

The thing is, self-driving trucks seem more plausible as something technologically viable compared to self-driving passenger cars. I've heard proposals to have loading docks directly off major highways, so the only driving the things would need to do would on highways (and even in special lanes). At the same time, I wonder what the advantage of this over just trains would be.

The part of truck driving that can be automated is the part of truck driving that is not a problem. (The article discuses this). Those parts are the easy parts

It is all the other little hassles and problem solving that you need the driver for.

Proper pay for everybody is the obvious solution. Are markets going to get us there? If so, why not now?

The article mentioned something about the company being liable for anything that happens if there is no driver. At first that didn't sound quite right to me, aren't they already liable to that degree? Then I remembered contractors etc.

I do think, having a human in the loop who's life is on the line in any accident, will tend to be more creative in avoiding one than software would be.

Training an AI to avoid simulated accidents is not a complete solution. For one thing, there will always be novel situations not trained for, and for another, the AI has no visceral fear of its own death.

But that’s kind of like saying a calculator can never be as creative at solving math problems, because it will never have the visceral fear of failing an exam.

Well… yeah, I guess, but it’s not really relevant. We don’t need creativity in avoiding accidents; the solution space is small: accelerate, brake, and/or steer.

The machine knows the velocity vectors, accelerations, and sizes of all other objects on the road. That alone is a huge advantage over a human, which don’t look in all directions at once. You can probably drop the AI part altogether and have an always-running routine that takes over when collision is imminent based on relatively simple vector projection.

Avoiding collision isn’t the hard part here, adhering to the myriad rules (spoken and unspoken) we’ve set up is. I think that’s probably why we all cringe at the Tesla videos of it doing crazy stuff, but somehow it’s not hitting stuff very often.

> [Tesla's]...not hitting stuff very often

That is the problem. 99% of the time not hitting stuff is 100% useless

To be clear, what I mean is that there is much less evidence of Tesla hitting stuff than we would expect from the videos of it doing “scary-looking” things. We may need to recognize that safe driving for a computer can look different than safe driving for a human, because of reaction time and awareness differences. It’s important we define safety properly for regulatory purposes.

99% is certainly not enough. But at some point Tesla, or another company, will get enough 9’s to surpass humans. It will happen.

> You can probably drop the AI part altogether and have an always-running routine that takes over when collision is imminent based on relatively simple vector projection.

Umm, yeah…

Last week the collision avoidance on the truck decided a traffic sign was enough to sound the alarm and hit the brakes while going around a curve on a wet road in sub-freezing weather. Let’s just say that the pucker factor on that one was off the scale.

Actually, the truck was fairly intent on killing me for that leg of the trip since there were a few winding downhill sections, I was at maximum weight and the stupid robo-transmission would randomly downshift instead of just easing down the hills without using the brakes — or randomly upshift into redline which will cause all the important bits inside the engine to come flying through the hood if you don’t catch it immediately.

The thing that really gets my goat is the truck has the ability to be put into manual shift mode (specifically so it doesn’t do something stupid and kills a bus full of kids) but the company has it disabled for fuel economy reasons.

I mean, “move fast and break things” doesn’t really work so well when you’re taking 80,000lbs down an 8% grade and this freightliner is a buggy POS on the best of days.

Also, "when a person isn’t on board, the company is on the hook for everything that goes on in that truck." Having a driver is a way of offloading risk.

A long time ago when I was in high school (late 1970's), I knew some kids whose father was a truck driver. They were better off financially than my family (my dad was a high school teacher/councilor). I asked one of them about it and learned that his dad earned twice as much as mine. (My father had a Masters degree and 35 years of tenure.)

Times have certainly changed since then. The trucking industry is now rife with exploitation.

I believe this is a consequence of deregulation in the 80s, and everyone focusing on price.

Trucking is far more regulated now than it used to be.

The trucking industry was massively deregulated in 1980, opening up pricing competition and making entry into the industry easier. While this was likely as net positive for society (lower prices), trucking wages have been on the decline ever since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Carrier_Act_of_1980

By "deregulated", this doesn't mean safety standards were eleminated, which i think is how many would interpret this.

Instead, it ended price controls, competition barriers, vendor cartels and so forth. The Carter administration also did this to the airline industry which made flying affordable to the average person.

Tickets today are cheaper than they were in 1970.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...

Would they? Deregulation in the Reagan era was largely about competition. AT&T, airlines, trucking, etc.

I highly recommend https://www.overtheroad.fm/ a fascinating podcast about trucking in the U.S.

Never forget - labor shortages are actually always wage shortages. Especially in the tech industry. Start paying programmers a more reasonable share of the millions in profits we generate and your hiring problems will magically disappear.

I think this is true regarding truckers, as there seems to be many people who can drive trucks but choose not to. If they got paid more, they would drive (the author suggests, and I agree).

But is it true for programmers? Are there many people who can code but choose not to, but would if the pay was higher? That seems less likely.

Reliable sign that there is a labor shortage: employers are willing to take people off the street and train them at their (the employers') own expense.

If I don't see this happening, I don't see a labor shortage.

According to brief internet research, these trucking companies offer CDL training with a job upon completion of their program. Most of the major carriers are on this list.

CRST Trucking School

C.R. England CDL School

Knight Transportation

Prime Trucking School and Prime

Trucking Company

KLLM Trucking School and Company

FFE Trucking

Roehl Transport

Schneider Trucking School and Company

Swift Transportation

Stevens Driving School (Stevens Transport)

Wilson Logistics Training

Millis Transfer

USA Truck

Carter Express

Pam Transport

Estes

XPO Logistics

Maverick Transportation

Werner Enterprises

This is true, but look into the terms and conditions. For many/most, it's basically indentured servitude until you've paid off your debt to the company. Which may not be entirely unreasonable, given the economics and how it's structured. It may be a decent alternative to the military for some.

But it's not at all the same as being hired and trained on the job as a part of your work, as many jobs used to be and a few somewhat still are.

I listen to local radio stations during my travels and have been hearing a bunch of companies advertising about paid on-the-job CDL training.

No.

You cannot magic up good programmers by paying more money.

It is a complete system, starting when education starts. It does require proper pay (the missing piece of the truck driver problem) but computing (and other creative technical professions) require aptitude and training!

That requires long term planning and educating the population.

The “No” is a terrible way to converse. Condescending about a nuanced topic, also not great. Their logic is that when you raise wages, you will attract more workers. This is probably true. Seeing high wages, workers may choose that field earlier on, etc.

Ummm, sorry sweaty, but he already said no, which means definitively the OP was wrong and that he knows better. Haven't you ever used twitter?

But seriously, especially in the US, high-wage jobs create whole educational industries in 3rd/2nd world countries, where their students train specifically to get a job in the US in such a high-paying industry. Taiwan does it with electrical engineers, India does it with aerospace engineers, and Vietnam/Indonesia have come a long way in tech/programming industries in the past decade for the same reason.

As soon as people get word that a certain industry is paying a premium, you get a slew of parents pushing their kids into that industry.

Calling someone "sweaty" is not great either. Or did you mean "Sweetie"?

If the demand for labor exceeds the population there will be a labor shortage that is not a wage shortage...

There is not a lack of population or even a lack of population capable of trucking, there is a lack of population willing to do it for the current wages being offered

I was an OTR truck driver for a year for a big company called Prime. This was like a decade ago.

I made around 44 grand in a year for around 60 to 80 hours a week of work.

You get paid 'per mile' but you spend many hours at docks unloading. There were constantly times I would wait in a dock all day to unload and since the truck wasn't moving, that was considered my 'time off'. Then they would finally unload you and you would have been considered to have rested 8 hours and have to drive 10 more hours even though you didn't sleep because you were waiting for your name to be called to unload.

On the upside, got to see a lot of cool stuff around the country and driving those big trucks was badass.

I was on bad terms with my dispatcher because if I got someplace early I would spend that extra time sightseeing instead of delivering the load early.

After a while, being away from home sucked massively because you have such little time off in those big companies.

I think that was a 'paying your dues' type job and if I stuck at it there are better trucking jobs out there.

Tech hasn't been a walk in the park but it at least pays really well.

> The trucking industry would quickly find out the same thing Uber found out about their self-driving cars, which is that when a person isn’t on board, the company is on the hook for everything that goes on in that truck.

Drivers do a lot more than just get the vehicle from Point A to Point B, whether the cargo is alive or not.

It seems to me that forcing reasonable labor practices on the industry might improve efficiency. For example, if freight companies don’t pay their truckers for loading and unloading time, then they have very limited incentive to reduce loading and unloading time. If this time started costing the industry even an extra $15/hr, that might give a substantial incentive to optimize.

If truckers don't get paid for loading and unloading time, they have lots of incentive to reduce it.

But the truckers don't have the power to reduce it.

First, I think trucks are a super important chain in our economy. Second, after reading this why do this? The only reason businesses can get truckers is that there are willing truckers to do it. Why not just quit? He clearly laid out that $25/hr is about the max you can get / $20 after costs is more realistic (pretax wtf?) - and there is no overtime. If I was in this situation, I would wake up, think of ways to not do this the entire day. I had shit jobs. The most important part of a shit job is know you are in a shit job - and to escape. At those rates I could just serve tables at AppleBees, crush $25/hr and get free food - also leave my car Turo'ed in the lot.

Because poverty and lack of economic options. There’s a reason trucking turned into a race to the bottom after the decline of unionization and deregulation of the industry.

Sure, but this isn't 1956. I could walk into an AppleBees TODAY and walk out with a job - easily crush $25 an hour -- and my car will be Turo'ed at work.

Applebees and renting your car on Turo is the bar? Peak HN. Go talk to more people living paycheck to paycheck. The struggle is shared and legitimate.

I don’t know anyone living paycheck to paycheck but it appears you do. Care to share what they would say?

I can share detailed portraits of the people I’ve spoken with, I will make time to put something together. In the interim:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820753

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/20/intergenera...

https://archive.ph/bNEAc

The above story is not an outlier.

Appreciated. Which RSS feed / newsletter do I subscribe to to ensure that I get your story once it’s done.

Also thanks for the link.

I will email you directly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHDkALRz5Rk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f78ZVLVdO0A

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/59...

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/16/941292021/paycheck-to-paychec...

(replied instead of emailing to keep the knowledge graph intact)

I finally got around to reading this. Must the poor people in these stories always be cast so unsympathetically? I found it sadly depressing because, despite my means, I can’t imagine supplying anything that could unspiral these people.

It’s perhaps a big lesson in avoidance. And how cheap it is for society to prevent bad outcomes relative to undoing them.

> It’s perhaps a big lesson in avoidance. And how cheap it is for society to prevent bad outcomes relative to undoing them.

I could not agree more, and this is where the largest gains at the least cost are to be found imho.

The actual machinery of this bothers me, though.

The straightforward stuff we can all agree about: (or perhaps not, and I’ll change my mind gladly with evidence)

- Build dense homes in poor places adjacent to places of economic activity so that private transport is cheap and public transport makes sense for the state

- Provide baseline medical care at cost from the state

But there is so much stuff that is trade-offs. Here’s some stuff I would want which others won’t:

- Baseline medical care should be MD-free and be purely NPs. Rationale: the state can boost NP production as needed / it has no control over MD production

- Leverage access should be limited but it should be possible to lie on the forms and face the music in the downside case. Folks like me should have access, but folks like this guy in the story shouldn’t. He’s going to spiral but I’ve weathered six figure losses with equanimity

- I want to control addictive substances but clearly prohibition doesn’t work and clearly many incapable people use them whereas also many capable use them. Ideally, people like me (smart, easy de-addiction) should have access and the remainder should furnish some sort of bond before they are permitted but that’s impossible

Also, I looked into the homelessness situation a while back when the COVID pandemic was in full swing and it is full of people who are not outcomes-oriented Gish Galloping their way to nonsense interventions.

The GiveWell.org of American poverty interventions would be nice, I think.

> my car will be Turo'ed at work.

I'm curious - what does it mean to "Turo" a car?

I'm assuming it means "parked in the parking lot" but I've never heard the expression before.

Turo is a service that lets you rent out your car when you aren't using it, so it could provide a 2ndary income stream while you are at work

to be clear, it's kind of absurd to suggest that renting out the car you need to get home for the duration of your shift is a reasonable thing to do.

Curios why? If someone wants it for an extra 3 days/nights, shoulder shrug take uber home = more money. Someone cancels, drive to work. Someone has it? Uber = more money. Someone cancels during work, drive home like normal. Not following why this is absurd. I think it would be absurd to just sit it in the lot for 10 hours (2 extra hours since I am sucking up those sweet tips) - or take buses home and have a 2 hour commute?

$20/hr is still more than many other jobs pay, especially those not requiring much education.

It isn’t $20/hr. That’s just the claimed rate. The actual hourly rate is often well below federal minimum wage. The article goes into this in detail.

It turns out that $20/hr is really good for blue collar work in most of the US. It beats e.g. serving at Applebee's (except the bartender) by probably about a factor of 2, especially if you're not young and charismatic.

If you're in a big city, you might be able to demand a bit more than this. Most truck drivers aren't, and don't want to be.

Truckers largely give up their ability to be firmly located in any one place. If you're willing to do this it stands to reason you might be willing to move to a high growth area somewhere like Cincinnati where the cost of living is low and the floor wage for simple warehouse work is legitimately 25/hour. Businesses in Ohio are begging for workers.

Turn around. No homes left.

"Businesses in Ohio are begging for workers."

If the pay is so great and the cost of living so low, why aren't more people flocking to work there?

Presumably the pay is great if you already live there, but not good enough to convince people to move there?

Personally, it would take a 50%-100% raise before I would even consider consider uprooting my family and leaving my current city. But I’d switch jobs locally for half that.

It's a circle:

1. People flock there

2. Those people need services

3. More jobs needed to provide those services

4. Return to 1.

Aside from this, Ohio is a convenient place for logistics and commerce owing to a centralized location in the US, strong infrastructure, and a business-friendly regulatory climate. Hence, warehouses and factories serving the rest of the US which means the economy isn't self-dependent and this raises the minimum wage floor for everyone.

But, to answer your question directly, I imagine not everyone is eager to uproot their current lives and move to a suburb of an exurb of a suburb in Ohio.

Have you ever been to Ohio? Cincinnati is arguably the most interesting of Ohio's cities and is still kind of boring (I say this having lived in the 4 largest cities within Ohio). It is logistically important and is undergoing an Amazon boom (plus some UPS/Fedex locally, UPS Worldport is ~100 miles away in Louisville) with multiple new 1MM+ sqft warehouses being opened each year for the last ~5 years. Cincinnati's airport also has multiple daily direct cargo flights to various Chinese cities to shuttle inventory.

Housing is moderately cheaper, but the $20-25/hr jobs aren't really the types that people are willing to relocate for-- they're physically demanding with super high turnover because they are probably a bad deal relative to the wear put on your body. Mostly there have just been more bus routes to transport people from exurbs to work these jobs. Nobody really chooses to live in Ohio if given other options (besides even worse states like the Dakotas or Mississippi), they're just born there or familial obligations cause them to move there.

Not only that but anyone who’s actually worked blue collar or front line jobs knows that the ability not to be in the same room as your boss and/or customers all day is a huge selling point.

The problem is that it isn’t really $20/hr. That’s the claimed rate but they don’t pay you for the many hours a day spent waiting or unloading or doing anything other than moving.

Right and you're not at home every night sleeping in your own bed. So you're effectively working 24 hour shifts. Your hobbies are limited, you can't really exercise, your diet is shit, you have to shower at a truck stop... You can't really even take your truck and go exploring the area you're in. No place to take a shit, pissing in bottles.

He clearly laid out that $25/hr is about the max you can get

He clearly laid out a lie. That's your answer. Go from driving box trucks to chemicals to driving your own rig and it can get to 200/year.

Gross or Net?

I don't think he lied about anything, I think you just brought up some edge cases he didn't address. His argument holds true for the majority of drivers.

Not discounting the author's experience, but it doesn't mirror my own. It's probably highly, highly dependent upon the company you work for. My father drove OTR for a certain brown courier service, and made about 150k a year. This was about 15 years ago. You did have to be gone for a whole week at a time, so certainly not easy or for everyone, but the pay was quite nice.

OTR pays way, way more. I'd be all over it in my younger days. Once you have a family, as you said, it can be a bit more difficult.

To the author, if you're reading, OTR drivers are in very, very high demand. Get that bread.

> To the author, if you're reading, OTR drivers are in very, very high demand. Get that bread.

The article talks about the authors experience with OTR and why it has a 90% attrition rate yearly compared to 12% for local. They already got that bread. The bread was moldy.

UPS is union. Teamsters. The author is non-union.

> Second, after reading this why do this? The only reason businesses can get truckers is that there are willing truckers to do it. Why not just quit?

Part of it is because a lot of truckers are owner-operators that have a lot of money in their trucks. They are effectively employees, not real contractors, and all the pricing power goes to the company that hires them but if they quit it means bankruptcy.

At those rates I could just serve tables at AppleBees

I've worked in a restaurant and worked in construction, (didn't drive a truck, but I rode along with the truckers to haul equipment).

If I had to choose between working at Applebees or driving a truck, I'd definitely pick the truck.

Why? Trapped sitting in a truck, anxious about traffic? Restaurant work isn’t isn’t or fun, but at least you get to go home to your own bed.

The 1-5% (I hope it's this low) of customers that are the only ones you can't forget because they make life hell.

This is literally why I quit teaching university and never went back to academia. Every class has one student who is a complete shit and 95% of your stress revolves around this one person. Work that doesn't require much human contact is so much better.

Traffic doesn't make me anxious, even when I'm driving a large vehicle, and not every truck driver is a long haul trucker.

Tomorrow I have to sleep until noon, drive over to Yuma, AZ and take a nap while I get loaded, bomb into LA before the morning traffic starts up, drop the loaded trailer then go back to sleep until I get a reload probably at the same place I’m dropping the loaded trailer.

Zero stress, zero hassle (well, I hope…) and I’ll get paid a ‘measly’ $200 to listen to the radio all night.

I think it is a bit unfair to be blaming the issues on truckers for not quitting. Our other industries get legal protections that ensure fair wage practices, we should extend those protections to truck driver.

We, as a nation, need these drivers. We have an obligation to extend them same wage protections we have. Even if some truck driver can and do make quite good money, that doesn't mean that the industry as a whole isn't rife with abusive labor practices.

"Our other industries get legal protections that ensure fair wage practices, we should extend those protections to truck driver."

Don't truckers have unions?

There are unions in other sectors also, that isn't a substitute for fair wage regulations.

> The industry is willfully blind to the situation. It wants people to work massive hours for virtually no pay, blames the workers if they don’t work for free, and then threatens the workers with having no job at all if they don’t submit to these conditions. Then it wonders why people won’t go to school to get a job the industry itself says won’t be around in five years. Again, self-inflicted. This industry literally won’t even pay for chassis they desperately need (and chassis are really cheap compared to trucks), doesn’t want to pay its workers, but they are supposedly going to pay for millions of robot trucks in an amount to drive freight rates down to nothing for everybody.

Why personify “The industry” and make odd statements about it? Why is there no recognition for the actual systemic economic reasons for the issues?

For a comparison from New Zealand, my friend quit professional work to become a truck driver. It took a short amount of training to get the drivers licence. She got an entry level job that pays a little over minimum wage, but it is hourly and she gets paid for her hours. Minimum wage soon becomes NZD21 (≈ USD15/hour). However the cost of many things is much higher in New Zealand so the hourly rates are not comparable (a Big Mac Combo meal is ≈USD9 in NZ, a Big Mac Meal is ≈USD6 in the US?). The standard of living is fairly good in NZ.

For a great and geek-humourous take on the benefits of truck driving, I love this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQXVgniI-hw although he explains why he quit mid 2021 due to similar reasons as the OP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8AnMzhZZE

"However the cost of many things is much higher in New Zealand so the hourly rates are not comparable (a Big Mac Combo meal is ≈USD9 in NZ, a Big Mac Meal is ≈USD6 in the US?). The standard of living is fairly good in NZ."

Not sure McDonald's is a good way to compare. Crappy food is very cheap in the US but good food can be quite expensive. When I visit family in Germany I often feel it's the other way there. Good, but basic food is quite cheap but stuff like Mcdonalds costs more.

As someone that have lived in both Boston (USA) and Berlin (Germany), I don’t agree. What places in Germany are you comparing to US Macdonalds?

I guess I wasn’t so much about restaurants but general shopping. For example I can get good bread in Germany for a decent price where in the US most cheap bread is full of sugar and other stuff and only very expensive ones are better. I find the same is true for a lot of staple foods.

Good bread is both available and cheaper in the US than Germany. I think Germany is a better place to live, but essentially everything is more expensive there.

Germany is a world of its own where bread is concerned. I'm not sure an American in the flyover suburbs can get what Germans would consider "very good bread" at any price.

McDonalds is merely a canonical concrete example due to [1]. You are implying that good food is not expensive in NZ? The cost of living is slightly higher here [2], although like everywhere, ones standard of living really really depends on ones location and wealth.

Of course, part of the reason for high costs in NZ could be due to minimum wages being high (higher than the truck driver mentioned in article I think). The US minimum wage in plenty of states is half the minimum wage in NZ. No US state exceeds our minimum wage[3], even though we are a poorer country per capita.

Oh, and healthcare is free in NZ (although the system is far from perfect), and after retirement (currently 65 years) every single person in NZ gets ≈USD$1300 per month (I couldn’t find the US comparison but elderly poverty could be worse over there?[4]).

[1] https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index

[2] https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php

[3] https://www.laborlawcenter.com/state-minimum-wage-rates

[4] https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/03/03/does-social-secur...

> part of the reason for high costs in NZ could be due to minimum wages being high

Ouch! The minimum wage in Aotearoa was much lower not that long ago.

The main problem for living costs in New Zealand is that the economic climate is tuned to be good for investors and not labour.

Even a Labour government has continued this trend. We have forgotten that the purpose of the economy is to serve the people not to serve business.

The shortage of labour is making things better, slowly...

> the economic climate is tuned to be good for investors and not labour

LOL - have you have tried being a business investor in NZ?

If you are talking about property investment, then perhaps, but that problem is a Gordian knot and we don’t have our Alexander.

> have you have tried being a business investor in NZ?

Yes.

Wages are artificially low. Employments rights low, often not enforced. The state has made it its business to keep it that way.

For example a computer programmer working in the games industry, and all workers in the feature film industry, has no employment rights, at all.

The lack of any capital gains tax is a particularly galling blow to labour as opposed to investors.

Still the investors and business class whinge (as we see on Hacker News) constantly that the workers are given too many rights.

Yes and: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2...

“The scale of it is enormous. We're talking a trillion dollars of wealth in less than two years landed in the hands of people who were already wealthy. At the same time as the government last Christmas refused to increase the benefits by $50 because they were worried that it would increase the government debt.”

Depends where in the US; a Big Mac Meal in LA will run you close to $9 USD as well

bleak. why are there minimum wage laws that don't apply to everyone?

Having a universal law would soon hit into some huge structural problems. Maybe rail actually is more efficient? Maybe cheap prison labour isn’t the best way to do things? Maybe massive too management wages while the bottom tier get less than a living wage is bad?

There are millions of jobs that minimum wage laws do not apply to in the US.

* Tip workers

* Gig workers

* Undocumented workers

Tip workers absolute have the same minimum wage laws. The minimum wage is lower ($2.13) and they are guaranteed to make at least the regular minimum wage if by their tips are not high enough

You just confused two things, tips are not wages, if you get a tip that's a gratuity from a customer. The customer isn't paying to relieve the owners of paying [minimum] wages, they're giving a gift to the people who served them. The level of tip (your last sentence) has nothing to do with a person's wages, they either get a minimum _wage_ or they don't. Reducing their wage because they got a tip would be not paying minimum wage; it would also be callously transferring a tip from a worker to an owner.

If the owner wants to be richer stealing the tips is not the way, it's immoral for one. An owner should put up sales prices or have a separate 'jar' for "tips for the owner".

You’re literally arguing against the FLSA.

Any dollar a customer tips counts as “tip credit” that an employer can deduct from that employee’s minimum wage.

See https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/tip-credits...

Employers can legally do all sorts of immoral things.

Which country is FLSA in, presumably USA?

This depends on the state. In California, there isn't a separate "tipped minimum wage". Waiters in San Francisco thus make at least $16.32/hr ($16.99 starting in July) plus tips.

Some restaurants are trying to replace tips with service charges or higher prices, because the back of the house (cooks, dishwashers, etc.) do not receive tips [1]. The current pay at a decent but not high end restaurant like Zuni is upwards of $70k/yr (the $35/hr mentioned in the article).

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Legendary-Zuni-Cafe...

Minimum wage laws do apply to tipped workers in the US.

"Truck drivers, farm workers, and restaurant staff are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)."

Not the bleakest [1], but yeah, bleak. Long, lonely, boring, life-sucking, thankless hours. Essential, yet at the Bottom of the 'skilled' totem-pole. Mostly these people are heros, and our lives are dependent on their sacrifices. (Many heavy-equipment drivers are 'skilled' enough to make much more - but working conditions are similar).

FLSA created in 1938 (end of Depression) by US Congress. Same body that has left minimum wage at $7.25 for 13 years. The best in the OECD (Australia) is US$12.9 (much more in line with purchasing power.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

Oddly the truckers who are paid a salary are Armed forces. I would be interested in knowing how the economics of army logistics compares to commercial - and if the comparisons take this article into account?

Are you talking about actually military MOS truck drivers, or the contractors? If actual MOS-it will depend where it located, but generally military work is 24\7 work without any side income. Spend week in the field with no shower? Work a year in a war zone? Driver fuel if the middle of nowhere and freeze your ass while waiting for special tow truck because no adequate heating in the cab? If you like those-you welcome to join.

Well, I was a truck driver during the last Iraq invasion hauling fuel for the 3rd ID.

Got like 9 hours of sleep the first week of the war. Every single truck in the company had “red line” issues but if would run we ran it, we had one where the whole electrical harness caught on fire that couldn’t be shut down and we ran that too. Had to “reallocate” parts from other units who were stupid enough to leave their equipment unguarded. And random firefights, shit blowing up, bases getting overrun around us all the time.

Forgot what an E-5 made in ‘03, a lot less than my civilian truck driver job at the time.

This sounds like a really interesting story.

So would you say this quote is true?

"All militaries suck, the one that sucks the least wins."

I miss outline

Reply on news.ycombinator.com