Don't Stop When You Are Tired!

This is a strong case for doing away with the mileage pay system. Instead, a lower base salary with bonuses in mileage pay. Sure this rewards steering wheel holders but if it makes things safer, I am all for it.

If you were to put OTR Drivers on Hourly pay, Store shelves would be empty in a week and they couldn't build enough Truck Stops to warehouse all of the Drivers!

If you were to put OTR Drivers on Hourly pay, Store shelves would be empty in a week and they couldn't build enough Truck Stops to warehouse all of the Drivers!

Hourly pay would be bad!!!! I agree with that. That's why I suggest a base salary of 32K to 35K. Rewards for hard work get paid out in bonuses based on mileage pay. Bottom line is that there is no perfect pay system for truck driving. At this point, as the motoring population increases, we need a safer system.

a lower base salary with bonuses in mileage pay

You're still incentivizing high mileage producers so it wouldn't solve anything.

Two great things about mileage pay:

1) Everyone makes money the same way - by keeping those wheels turning. The drivers, the dispatchers, load planners, mechanics, and management - everyone makes money when the wheels are turnin, no one makes money when they're not. That's what you want. You want everyone on the same page pulling for the same thing.

2) The better you perform the more money you make. Again, that's what you want if you're the ambitious type, which is the type that really belong in trucking. If you're looking to make as much as possible doing as little as possible then you're certainly not going to be a fan of a performance-based system. But for those who want to get out there and put in the extra effort to make more money it's the perfect system.

That's why I suggest a base salary of 32K to 35K

I think setting a base salary is pointless. The only 'good' that could come from it is the bottom performers make more than they would have on mileage pay.

You get paid for the work you get done. Plain and simple. I like that idea.

Oh, and the idea that hourly pay would be safer is hogwash. You're still going to have a certain percentage of people wanting to put in all the hours they can for those bigger paychecks. That wouldn't change anything. You already have limits on how long you can drive. The method of pay isn't going to determine whether someone is a safe driver or not. A true pro is always going to focus on safety regardless of anything else.

Matt wrote:

This is a strong case for doing away with the mileage pay system. Instead, a lower base salary with bonuses in mileage pay. Sure this rewards steering wheel holders but if it makes things safer, I am all for it.

How so Matt? Your suggestion ultimately influences the same behavior; to run so all the bonuses kick in. For the most part, long haul Trucking is about covering the greatest number of miles in the least amount of time. That's it...

Basic common sense and experience will determine when to stop and what to do when fatigue sets in. Not how we are paid.

The Facebook post was clearly a mistake, a rather embarrassing one. Changing the pay system is a disproportionate solution to a one-off event that is not corporately supported.

This is a strong case for doing away with the mileage pay system. Instead, a lower base salary with bonuses in mileage pay. Sure this rewards steering wheel holders but if it makes things safer, I am all for it.

May Trucking offers a $135 dollar per day option for pay. If you drive a mile, you get 135 dollars. If you drive 650 miles, you get 135 dollars.

TMC offers shared profits as an option for pay.

So, there are other ways to get paid out there, but I like being paid by miles, and I have a minimum goal of 10,000 miles per month. Of course I've only been solo in the truck for four months now...

I'm also a Stevens Transport driver. This post made me face-palm so hard. I know that the entire safety department probably had a collective heart attack when they saw this.

And now watch as Stevens trucks get red-lighted into every scalehouse in creation to have their logs gone over with a fine tooth comb. Oy vey.

What does a driver produce for the company? OTR drivers produce miles. A city driver doesn't usually work for miles, but he/she may with produce pickups & deliveries each day.

You know many OTR drivers like to get upwards of 650 miles/day for several days because that shows up in their paycheck. They don't mess around, once they get a load, they hit the road. (I'm not a poet.)

If the same go-getters were paid hourly, I know they would take 8 hours from St Louis to Memphis. 7 hours from LA to Vegas. Maybe more time.

Hours do not measure what a driver produces, miles on the dispatch do. Miles set by the office, not hub miles for the same reason. Going from Chicago to Denver? "I always go through Kansas City." Uh-huh.

For OTR, set miles makes everybody happy.