For the past thirty years, the industry has studied the turnover rate among truck drivers and the problems associated with motor carriers retaining drivers. For a span of at least three decades, the nation’s second-largest industry has been unable to figure out the reasons why seasoned and veteran truck drivers are abandoning the vocation.
Today, the problem has worsened as more professional CDL drivers are quitting and never looking back. The industry likes to refer to this as a truck driver shortage, just as they have in the past. In reality, the most common complaints from drivers today are still the most common of the last few decades:
- Low wages
- Unpaid for work performed
- Lack of time at home
- Excessive regulations
Low wages for truck drivers have been a major problem for years that began to creep into the business after industry deregulation. Over time, it has become the main reason why all categories of drivers choose to leave the profession. The median annual salary of $ 34,000 is simply not considered enough to counter all the demands of the trucking race on the road.
Unpaid for work performed, such as detention time and various other alleged duties, has led many drivers to finally hang up their business license and move to another position outside of professional truck driving. When, for example, a driver waits seven hours to be loaded or unloaded and is never paid $ 15 per hour of detention, $ 105 is a lot to lose. If you do this several times in a month, you can see that the industry considers driver time to be meaningless.
Lack of time at home is quite a difficult reason to quit smoking, but it is nonetheless one of the top four reasons given by drivers. The very term, long-distance transportation, means that time at home will be minimal. Since this job requires being out for weeks and months at a time, the problem for the driver has more to do with downtime on the road than anything else. If the carrier is going to make the driver sit for three or four days without getting paid, they can at least make him sit at home. Failure by the carrier to comply with the driver’s request for home time is the main reason drivers list it as the cause for hanging their CDLs.
Regulations throughout the industry continue to make life difficult for the professional trucker, further reducing their ability to earn a living wage. For example, there are millions of truck drivers in the United States and they are all different in their backgrounds, yet they are all expected to operate under the same rules of hours of service – when they can drive, when they can sleep, etc. A single rule does not fit all parties involved and due to this and other regulatory factors like the CSA, the industry is losing seasoned veteran drivers and therefore losing a significant level of professionalism and safety.
