Bipartisan invoice would grant extra time pay to truckers

A bipartisan invoice launched yesterday in each homes of Congress that might elevate pay for truckers is pitting two of the freight sector’s strongest business teams towards one another.

The Guaranteeing Extra time for Truckers Act (GOT Truckers Act) was launched by Sens. Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) within the Senate and Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) and Mark Takano (D-CA) to make sure truckers obtain extra time pay. 

In keeping with its sponsors, the laws would be sure that truckers are compensated pretty for the hours that they’re on the clock, together with extra time. It might obtain that by repealing the motor provider provision of the Truthful Labor Requirements Act of 1938, which excludes many truckers from extra time protections loved by different employees. Whereas that exemption was initially designed to stop truckers from working too many hours, it now prevents truckers from being pretty compensated for all of the hours they work, the invoice’s supporters say.

Accordingly, the invoice addresses a advice in the U.S. Division of Transportation’s 2022 “Freight and Logistics Provide Chain Evaluation,” which highlighted excessive turnover charges and compensation points as high challenges within the trucking business.

The invoice rapidly got here underneath criticism from the American Trucking Associations (ATA), a trucking business commerce group which represents fleet house owners. In an announcement, ATA President and CEO Chris Spear mentioned the proposal would really scale back drivers’ paychecks and lose trucking jobs by upending the present pay mannequin. “To help this misguided laws is a vote for provide chain chaos and the inflationary penalties for customers. Relatively than plaintiffs’ bar bailouts, lawmakers occupied with really supporting drivers might start by fixing the nationwide truck parking scarcity that prices drivers on common $5,500 in misplaced earnings yearly,” Spear mentioned.

Nevertheless, help for the invoice got here from quite a lot of voices together with the Worldwide Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Proprietor-Operator Impartial Drivers Affiliation (OOIDA), the Truck Security Coalition, and the Institute for Safer Trucking.

“Unbelievably, trucking is likely one of the solely professions in America that’s denied assured extra time pay,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer mentioned in a launch. “We’re well past due as a nation in valuing the sacrifices that truckers make each single day. This begins with merely paying truckers for all the time they work. With this low cost on a trucker’s time, ‘massive trucking’ has led a race to the underside for wages that treats truckers as expendable parts relatively than the professionals they’re.”

Teamsters Common President Sean O’Brien echoed these sentiments, saying that “Truck drivers have been denied extra time protections for practically 100 years. The Guaranteeing Extra time for Truckers Act rights this unsuitable, and would finish this inexcusable abuse to lots of of 1000’s of drivers throughout the nation.”