Are truck drivers underpaid?

Abstract

There is an emerging debate over whether truck drivers are ‘underpaid’ given their human capital and working conditions. Using data from the 2000 Current Population Survey, the pay differentials between truck drivers and other blue collar occupations are investigated. While truck drivers appear to receive a small premium in their hourly wage compared to workers with similar skill requirements, they receive substantial premium in their weekly wage. This weekly wage differential is primarily the result of a substantially longer work week.

Notes

 Research on deregulation's impact on the trucking labour market includes Belzer (1995), Rose (1987), Hirsch (1988, 1993), Hirsch and Macpherson (1998), and Belman and Monaco (2001).

 All figures are calculated in 2000 dollars using data from the Current Population Survey. Data from the May Survey is used in 1979 and from the Outgoing Rotation Groups files after 1979.

 An alternative would be to incorporate measures of working conditions into a conventional human capital model of wages. Although the numeric ratings for occupational characteristics are available from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles or from ONET, the incorporation of these measures into wage regressions has been problematic. Because of all these issues, few articles in the compensating differentials literature incorporate direct controls for occupational characteristics.

 Further explanation and an example of this approach is provided in Belman et al. (2002).

 Hourly earnings are calculated as the ratio of average weekly earnings to actual hours last week. Actual rather than average hours was used because employees who work irregular schedules report a value of ‘variable hours’ for average hours and this precludes calculating an hourly wage. As many truck drivers work irregular schedules, use of average hours would exclude large numbers of truck drivers. Although actual hours is a noisy representation of average weekly hours for an individual, the estimates of the hourly wage should be reasonably accurate given the size of the sample used in this study.

 A driver sales worker is typically a truck driver who delivers and positions goods. Soft drink and bakery drivers, who unload their trucks and place the goods on store shelves are driver sales workers.