Uncharted Territory

Cerno Research embarked into uncharted territory when it decided to explore how Canada’s trucking industry rewards its workers.

“You have companies in this huge and vital part of the economy in a dogfight for skilled workers, but with no useful benchmarks to indicate whether what they’re offering is even competitive,” says Cerno Research special projects manager Stephen Harrington. “I’m not just talking about how much people are paid, but how compensation is structured within different job titles, across geographic boundaries, and across different sectors of the industry.”

The Toronto-based company has conducted a similar compensation study for the Alliance of Manufacturers and Exporters since 1995, and Cerno managers believed they could adapt the template used for the manufacturing survey to trucking. Perhaps more importantly, they knew the company’s previous work with the Alliance would allow meaningful comparisons between how manufacturing operations and truck fleets compensate their employees.

“You need to put compensation into context. A person who is qualified to be a warehouse manager or a controller or a truck driver doesn’t have to go to work at a trucking company if he wants to pursue those career paths,” Harrington says. “If you’re responsible for hiring and retention and want to keep the people you have-and attract new people as you grow-you need an accurate picture of the entire marketplace.”

Working with the Ontario Trucking Association, Cerno Research launched its trucking survey last fall. Response came from 159 firms representing 25,249 workers (two-thirds of which are truck drivers). The general report, called Trucking Operations: Compensation & Benefits, covers 67 different job descriptions, from top-level sales executives to forklift operators.

All of the reporting is anonymous-you won’t learn who pays what, but the study does show compensation figures by percentile in a chart (like the example to the left) so you can see whether your company pays high or low relative to other carriers. It also tackles complex compensation structures-it provides pay information about six different types of driving jobs, for example.

The report details how companies structure benefits packages, including pension plans, accidental death policies, and group Registered Retirement Saving Plans. Another section is devoted to employment policies: overtime pay, callback pay for off-duty employees, holiday pay, even wages paid during jury duty.

The report’s strengths are the level of detail and the way it groups the data so that it’s easy to make comparisons to companies that are similar to your own-for-hire trucking companies, private carriers, and logistics operations, or ones with similar annual revenues or numbers of employees.

“You have to be able to compare apples to apples,” Harrington says. “That’s the danger in just phoning a buddy in the industry and asking what he pays his safety manager. His operation or his compensation structures may be very different from your own in ways that you’re not even aware of.”

Harrington says Cerno Research will begin to produce a follow-up survey for 2001 this fall, and it will be national in scope (given the OTA’s involvement, most of the response in 2000 was from Ontario). To participate in 2001, or for more information about buying the 2000 report (available in book form and on CD-ROM), phone (toll free) 1-877-28-CERNO or 416/531-5450. For information about Cerno, go online to www.cernoresearch.com.