Recruiters dangle fat pay increases and sign-on bonuses, but a big rig driver still gets little respect. It's a 'gold prison,' says one.
Mere weeks after a group of port truck drivers voted to unionize, they opened their mailboxes to find termination notices from their employer. That letter was a violation of federal labor law, a judge ruled Tuesday.
“They need to quit treating us like second-class citizens. We’re sick of it,” said Joyce Brenny, founder and chief executive of Minnesota-based Brenny Transportation, which has a fleet of 100 trucks. Economists and recruiters say the actual average increase since the pandemic has probably been closer to 30% when taking into account the hundreds of thousands of independent drivers, whose ranks have swelled in the last 18 months. The number of trucking firms and individualThe comparable figure for California was up 44% to nearly 43,903.
Nadeem hates the wasted time at warehouses. At one stop in Arizona last month, he had to wait seven hours, which meant he didn’t get rolling until 8 p.m. and had to drive through the night. Between that and having to deal with brokers — “they control us,” he says — Nadeem finds his work lucrative, but also constraining.
Truck driving schools are now running near capacity, said Rob Hatchett, president of Fleet Intel, which collects driver pay and other trucking data. And with earnings having risen 30% in many cases, he says, more people are jumping in or returning to trucking. “We’ve made it where it’s an attractive industry.”in September, about double the average of the previous four years. Many are in trucking.
Mark Dolson, who’s been driving for 33 years, the last eight at Prime, said he regularly visits the building’s spa and salon, spending $100 for a 90-minute massage from a licensed therapist. “My body isn’t as young as it used to be,” said the 59-year-old native of Portland, Ore., who leases a truck from Prime, partly because he’s not sure how long he can keep driving.
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