Driver pay needs to change? It already has—here’s how

I recently exchanged ideas with someone whose outlook on the industry I respect and admire, and who brings a great deal of energy and passion to finding solutions to the perennial and persistent challenges fleets face.

Knowing me and being familiar with the work we do at The National Transportation Institute (NTI), the conversation naturally centered on drivers and their paychecks, as well as drivers’ satisfaction with their career and their employers.

They pitched an idea I think they saw as a revolutionary or ground-breaking concept for the industry: a “fixed pay” or weekly pay, with guaranteed minimums that could reduce variability in paychecks and be a pillar toward reducing turnover, improving driver satisfaction, and modernizing drivers’ paychecks to support better stability and work-life balance.

Guaranteed pay is no longer a new idea—it’s a growing standard

Does that sound familiar? It should, because more than 40% of the for-hire fleets we survey in our National Survey of Driver Wages report providing a guaranteed pay program already, and that number has continued to climb steadily over the past 10 years. For example, in 2017, just 14% of fleets in our survey said they offered guaranteed pay. Obviously, the dollar amounts for those programs continue to climb as well.

Guaranteed pay is something we field questions about regularly from fleets of all types, and it’s a topic we’ve explored at length over the past few years throughout the freight downturn. In our one-on-one discussions with fleet leaders and in our published resources, we examine how to understand whether guaranteed pay is something that makes sense from a recruiting and retention standpoint, a bottom-line revenue and fixed expenses analysis, driver and fleet productivity outlook, and administrative perspective.

All of these are considerations that need to be made at the individual fleet level. During NTI's 30 years of proprietary research, they are considerations we’ve dived into at length, performing pay structure analyses and surveys.

Recognizing the progress we’ve made in driver pay and support

However, my main takeaway from this email conversation wasn’t the discussion about guaranteed pay. Instead, I was wondering if this person, who’s so connected to the industry and passionate about drivers and recruiting and retention success, is unaware of how common this pay structure option is, what else are we turning a blind eye to? What other major strides have we made in compensation and benefits, policies and programs, and communication and engagement that have been washed over by slogging through this tough freight crisis?

I want to highlight some of the strides our industry has made over the past decade thanks to the hard work, ideas, and initiatives of so many professionals across our industry, from the ground level to leadership in the C-Suite. They’re worth our attention, recognition, and celebration in their own right but also as building blocks to where we can go from here:

We’ve built in more consistency and clarity around pay from the recruiting process and through drivers’ tenure with us. That includes efforts such as guaranteed pay programs as well as retention incentive programs, greater safety and productivity bonuses, hourly pay supplements to offset any mileage or productivity setbacks beyond the drivers’ control, a greater emphasis on location-based pay models, and hiring that focuses on a total annual earnings target rather than growing application volumes with cent-per-mile and sign-on bonus marketing. Some of these shifts are happening faster than others, but fleets have invested heavily in these areas and continue to do so.
Along with the aforementioned, we’ve amplified drivers’ pay in recent years to better reflect their value to our organizations, our supply chains, and our economy as a whole. Over the past five years, base wages on average have risen about 20%, and in some instances more, depending on location and job type. Annual pay has climbed just as much, with drivers at for-hire over-the-road fleets now earning an average of nearly $72,000 a year, and the top 25% of earners taking home upwards of $83,000. At private and dedicated fleets, those numbers are about 20% higher.
We’ve found better, more effective ways to connect with drivers and have focused on communicating with them. This has added much more transparency as to what’s happening within our organizations, how critical their work is, and what their expectations are within the job.
We’ve grown our empathy and understanding for what drivers do and the sacrifices they make for their job so that they not only feel less taken advantage of but also feel more connected to the company and the work they do.
We’ve invested in evaluating and implementing technologies that keep drivers safer, more connected, and that make their work more efficient and effective.

Keeping perspective and pushing forward through uncertainty

Yes, much work remains to stabilize driver compensation, promote driver satisfaction, achieve better retention outcomes, and advance the career of our professional truck drivers. Maybe the past few years of what feels like trudging through the muddy bottom of a lake have clouded the waters of what has been accomplished to make the driving job a more lucrative and desirable career.

Although it may seem as if this period of uncertainty will never end, it’s important that every day we come to work that we keep putting one foot in front of the other. We don’t want to get so caught up in the sludge that we forget to drown out the noise that tells us we’re not accomplishing big things, that drivers' needs aren’t important, and that our teams don’t still need encouragement and pep talks on what we have done and what we continue to do, while also remaining engaged in conversations about how we grow and evolve from these strides.