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by jhayward 2720 days ago
Truck driver earnings today are roughly the same, in nominal dollars, as they were in 1975. So over the past 40 years they've taken a 70% pay cut.

They are getting squeezed so tightly a lot of them don't even make minimum wage.
1 comments
adventured 2720 days ago
They have seen a serious pay cut since the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, however 70% is a big exaggeration. That would imply the typical trucker was earning the equivalent of $135,000 per year in 1975 based on today's BLS numbers. And if it were accurate, I'm not sure how anyone could think that would be sustainable across a field flooded with 1.7 million drivers. With the pay decrease, there are dramatically more drivers today than in 1975 after adjusting for population growth. It's now providing a lot more jobs at a lower pay. The reason wages dropped was due to increased competition and deregulation, the value of their services declined. The reason wages were so high before was due to artificial labor scarcity and price controls via a cartel system (which Jimmy Carter fixed when he signed the MCA bill), ie it was fake.

Business Insider covered this extensively, they found the typical trucker has seen a 21% pay cut since 1980 in real terms -

"Business Insider compared freight wages, adjusted for inflation, from the BLS 1980 area wage survey and location-specific wage estimates from the BLS' Occupational Employment Statistics. For the five cities in which comparable data existed in both surveys, wages decreased by 21%, on average."

https://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-shortage-eld-mandat...

https://www.businessinsider.com/truck-driver-salary-decrease...

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paulie_a 2720 days ago
While a 135k sounds great, now consider they have to pay for their fuel, they are independent contractors generally. Then taxes on top of that. when truck drivers attempted to get a loan at a previous employer the conversation of "but I make a 100k a year" happened several times. No you really make 50k.
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jhayward 2719 days ago
I used a 'typical' driver earning $75,000/year in 1975. $75,000 today, after expenses, is considered well-payed. New drivers earn $20,000 to $30,000/year.

According to the BLS CPI inflation calculator[1], $75,000 in 1975 would be equivalent to $362,000 today.

Business Insider has, shall we say, a very Capital-oriented view of the trucking industry, constantly shilling for low driver pay. Drivers who read it are always amazed that they never seem to mention that there would be way more drivers than needed if they could earn what they used to.

[1] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=75000&year1=19...

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