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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

Truck drivers are treated like dog shit, seemingly anywhere. I saw some documentaries about them here in Germany, and it's an ungrateful soulsucking job. Sleep in a truck, get barely any showers, and shit in toilets that would make porta potties seem luxurious. Most of those left now seem to be eastern Europeans.

People express concerns that those jobs could get automated away, but I don't necessarily share those worries. Most of those people working those jobs are near retirement age, and we'll have a real problem filling up those positions in the coming years, at least in this region. Barely any young people want to work such jobs.

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I have worked with a lot of freight drivers. They have to do some seriously stressful tasks:

- unloading pallets, some over 1.5k lbs in weight. When they’re stuck, the truck driver is responsible for getting them out, and that’s that. Not every small biz has a forklift lol.

- you drop off your load in a warehouse and nobody is there to receive it/unclear directions/your pickup directions suck. You spend the next hour walking around a warehouse searching for someone to sign for you.

- backing up to a dock and interrupting traffic = outraged commuters who get ridiculously upset

- unloading broken pallet loads by hand.

I couldn’t and wouldn’t do it.

>When they’re stuck, the truck driver is responsible for getting them out, and that’s that

Not to say that it doesn’t suck being a truck driver, but most of my experience has been that if the load cannot be unloaded by the receiver, the shipment is taken back and the driver is still paid for the attempt.

I think it depends on the type of delivery/carrier. I've had full size lift gate trucks deliver pallets to my house and they were responsible for getting 1000lb oversized pallets out and down from the truck in one piece. They weren't always successful.

I'm genuinely curious what you're having delivered by the half-ton to your home? The only things I can think of would be a safe, or maybe gym equipment.

My father in law had a massive smoker delivered by LTL truck with “inside delivery”. It took 6 of us to roll that thing up his driveway.

Ag supplies are heavy and can come on pallets.... mulch, animal feed, fertilizer, etc.

Tiles and hardwood

I'm building an airplane. Also have a small machine shop in the garage so stock and occasionally tooling.

Oh nice, the only thing keeping me from building an RV or something is space.

Doesn't take too much space, people have done them in apartments, otoh the machine shop (unrelated to the rv build) definitely does :)

Go find a builder class, you'll learn a lot and have a good time, even if you decide not to go forward with it.

The trucker has to sign to say that the company loaded the truck correctly before departing. So if the load cannot be unloaded it's the truck drivers fault!!!

Not always. When I worked at Target as a receiver, C&S drivers got to choose their routes, but they didn't get to refuse bad loads; we (the driver and the store) just had to deal with pallets falling over.

I think this would very much be a contractual thing.

I've been seeing news about Walmart raising their in-house trucker pay to $110k. Not sure how many truckers they have though.

https://tucson.com/news/national/walmart-boosts-trucker-pay-...

They're trying to recruit existing employees for these truck driver positions.

that is misleading. $110k isn’t salary, it’s money paid to owner-drivers

$95k for salaried drivers doesn't sound bad though

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