Drivers Vs. Time – A Battle 80 Years in the Making

Let’s take a moment to think about your daily needs: food, water, physical items such as a bed to sleep on, blankets for warmth, a TV to watch your programs, a phone, computers & gaming consoles, books, and your car. For many, this is something that they cannot live without, while others can forego the more material items. Can you think of any other necessities in your life that you need, that without, your daily life would be interrupted?

Now, imagine if none of those items were available to you.

Stores are low-in-stock for grocery items, beds are first come first serve, and the only cars available for sale are junkers or “works like new” 2003 Honda Civics. How could this be? And why? Have we run out of the necessary resources in the world to create them? Is the world ending?

It’s none of those things – your items are just not being transported to you. A lot of times, we don’t consider that our items would just not be there for us to buy whenever we want and need them. The reality is that without the 2m truck drivers on the road, the majority of our products in stores would not be there based on our needs, or even exist.

Another piece of this reality that we are blind to, is that truck drivers have become frustrated and feel unappreciated. When they arrive for their pick-ups or drop-offs, drivers are subjected to detention time to allow the warehouse time to unload or load their truck. The industry standard to have this done is 2 hours; those 2 hours are unpaid to the driver, who must wait. Just because it is an industry-standard, does not mean this will hold true across all warehouses. A DAT survey shows that out of 257 drivers, 63% had detention time of 3 hours or more and only 3% of those drivers received detention pay – i.e. only 5 of those drivers received detention pay.

On average, detention pay could be $25-$100 an hour. If we evened that number out at $60 for each hour after the initial 2 ”free” hours, the other 157 lost out on almost $10,000 of detention pay combined.

Drivers do not have the asset of time on their side, because (depending on their contract) they are paid by the mile and with the expectation that they are delivering their load on time. The HOS regulations state that a driver may not drive more than 11 hours in a 14-hour shift. 3PL Magazine indicates “that the current HOS driving utilization is 6.26 hours a day. Since the time a driver is in the cab waiting to be loaded or unloaded also counts towards the 11-hour maximum, this statistic indicates that, for drivers whose compensation is based on mileage, four hours are uncompensated.”

I, myself, have gone through this 10 years ago when I hopped a ride with one of our drivers who was transporting a load from Chicago to the East Coast. We arrived at 3 AM and were told to wait until our appointment time at 4 AM. It wasn’t until after 7 AM that we were allowed to dock. The entire experience was frustrating, as we were met with rudeness, vague responses, and unclear directions when arriving. An example of this was that I had to catch a flight back to Chicago at 10 AM and we were directed to break down the 12 pallets to 24 but were not told that we could use a lumper to break down our pallets and needed $175 cash for it, which we would have picked up during our detention time.

DAT conducted another survey, asking for reader feedback on their experiences with detention time. One reader sent in, “Seldom does a shipper or receiver want to sign a trucker’s in and out times, but we can also document the arrival and departure time with other methods. There may be one good thing about e-logs after all.”

There is hope for truck drivers, as it is becoming an industry standard that all truck drivers must use ELD (electronic logging devices) to log their time including when they arrive at a warehouse and when they leave. Shippers do not like to pay detention times, but with true data backing up a drivers’ detention time at their facility, it could be a difficult battle for the shipper to fight. Paper logs have shown to be unreliable, as have some warehouses, who can white-out arrival and departure times or, as mentioned, not write in/out times at all, in order to avoid detention fees. ELDs, along with geofencing, are growing tools to track driver’s time in and out of truck yards.

While some of these tools may help, it does not in turn speed up the loading/unloading practices of warehouses. It’s clear that shippers and receivers do not want to pay detention fees – whether it is because of lack of staff, bottlenecks in the truck yard, not enough dock doors or unwillingness to pay detention fees altogether, there is a deep disconnect between drivers and the warehouses. The effect of this, from an OIG audit, states, “…we estimated that detention is associated with reductions in annual earnings of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion for for-hire commercial motor vehicle drivers in the truckload sector. For motor carriers in that sector, we estimated that detention reduces net income by $250.6 million to $302.9 million annually.” It may appear that the only true way to solve this is to put in place a standard that will instruct warehouses to pay all detention fees after the 2 hours. If that were to be enforced, would truck drivers be in and out within the 2 hours without any issues?

I would like to recall that without truck and CMV drivers, none of us would have access to the objects and material things we use every day. We owe a debt of gratitude to our drivers, who spend over 20% of their time every week waiting to be loaded or unloaded, who are treated unfairly by shippers and receivers, don’t get paid their proper wages and are met with unkindness. If our jobs depended on how many words or pages we typed, or how many calls we made a day and for every hour we didn’t that we wouldn’t get paid, would you feel that was unfair? Do you think only then, that we would finally become empathetic to our 2 million drivers?

References:

DAT Driver Detention Pay Survey: https://www.truckersedge.net/trucking-blog/post/Driver-Detention-How-Do-We-Fix-It

3PL Magazine HOS Hours Article: https://3plmagazine.tianet.org/2019/09/06/the-new-paradigm-for-capacity-buying-drivers-hours/

DAT Reader Feedback Survey: https://www.dat.com/blog/post/readers-sound-off-on-detention

OIG Audit Article: https://www.oig.dot.gov/library-item/36237