Tons of trucking jobs ... that nobody wants

[Egalitarian Thug]

29. And the pay figures used are massaged to hell.

A relatively inexperienced driver is going to get about $.31 p/mi. DOT allows a company to demand the driver work up to 14 consecutive hours then be off for 10 until you get 70 hours within an 8 day period at which point it all resets. Anybody with a calculator can easily figure out many of the scams used to rip off their drivers. No overtime pay, no waiting time, no expenses. It all comes out of the driver's pocket.

In the end it comes down to the driver grossing about $200 in a full day, but $0 for any waiting time, so it's common to pick up a load deliver it at the destination and then have to sit wherever you dropped for days, living in your truck or paying for a motel, until you can pick up the next load.

On average, if you work for a good company (I've heard many rumors that they do exist) and are working as much as possible and are properly scheduled, a driver will max out his legal earnings at ~$2400 gross every two weeks. Keep in mind that this is for about 120 hours under optimal conditions. Needless to say this doesn't happen and then you have to look at the requirements to falsify logs, drive dangerous equipment, unpaid loading and unloading, bankrupt states looking for every scrap of revenue they can extort, and so on.

Truck driving was once an actual profession where a person could make a decent living, but that was before.