McCaskill: Paying By The Hour May Increase Truck Safety

Anyone who has driven on Missouri's I-70 knows how heavily trafficked interstates can be with trucks moving goods and services across the country. Today, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill questioned representatives from trucking and truck safety organizations at a Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee hearing about how the pay structure for drivers can incentivize unsafe driving. McCaskill highlighted that because truck drivers are only paid for miles driven, they often spend many unpaid hours waiting for their trucks to be loaded or unloaded and then rush to drive as many miles as possible in a shortened period of time.

"If the only way you get paid is to drive more miles, then we are incentivizing the system to drive as many miles as possible as opposed to compensating them for the time they're spending working at their job," McCaskill said. She later added: "It seems to me like we could avoid a lot of problems here, because what we're doing is incentivizing unsafe conduct."

Todd Spencer, Executive Vice President of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, echoed McCaskill's concerns, noting that drivers can lose as many as 30-40 unpaid hours a week while their trucks are being loaded or unloaded.

"We talk about safety. We talk about why do we have these people who work too long, who drive too hard, who drive too fast? Well, how do we pay them? We only pay them for miles that they drive," he said.

In response to the concern that data does not exist to verify these claims, McCaskill suggested to Dave Oseicki, a Senior Vice President at the American Trucking Association, that a study was needed to see if there would be measurable increases in safety if drivers were paid for hours worked instead of miles driven.

"I would certainly encourage someone to do that study because that would also contribute to less turnover, because [what] grinds these folks down is that you only get paid by how far you go and how quickly you go because the faster you go the more miles you can drive within a set period of time."

McCaskill is also a co-sponsor of a bill which would establish more broadly applicable national standards for length and weight of trucks. Such standards currently exist on the 44,000-mile Interstate Highway System, but the bill would extend them to the much bigger 160,000-mile National Highway System (53-foot length maximum and 80,000-pound weight maximum).

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