Are Better Paid Drivers Safer Drivers?

Being a trucker today is akin to working in the sweatshops of the 1800s, asserts Michael Belzer, a truck driver turned professor and author of a book called Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation (January 2000, Oxford University Press). What’s worse, he argues, these conditions are affecting highway safety.

After surveying 575 truck drivers at truck stops in the U.S. Midwest, Belzer and colleagues Kristen Monaco and Daniel Rodriguez from the University of Michigan determined that the average driver makes $32,521 a year-but works an average of 11.2 hours a day (63.2 hours a week) and turns 110,000 miles a year to earn it.

The trio, which presented findings of this and several related surveys at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C., in January, blames low pay on post-deregulation competition which has caused trucking companies to cut rates, take on ancillary tasks with little or no compensation, and accept long waiting times at loading docks. Shippers used to pay for this time. Now, typically, they don’t. One consequence is that few drivers are paid for waiting, so they have to work long hours to make up for unpaid time.

Belzer says the effect is detrimental to highway safety. Fellow professor Rodriguez obtained 11,000 driver records from J.B. Hunt-including details on the driver, the rate of pay and things like the number of accidents-from September 1995 to March 1998. After March 1997, when J.B. Hunt raised basic pay rates from about 32.6 cents per mile to 38.2 cents per mile, serious truck crashes dropped from about four per million miles of travel in 1995 to about two in 1998.

Belzer and his compatriots are cautious about drawing conclusions from this analysis. For one thing, the analysis is not complete. For another, a detailed analysis of why one truck driver differs from another is a complex subject. But, their preliminary observation is that the increase in pay rates allowed J.B. Hunt to attract better drivers-older, more likely to be married, more qualified, and safer.