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Trucking regulation piggybacked on rail regulation during the Roosevelt administration's "First New Deal". The Minneapolis Teamsters strike of 1934, which won recognition for the union, was fresh in the minds of legislators. This whole arrangement began to break down in the 1980s, so that today...
The yearly turnover rate among long-haul truckers is 94 percent.
Until 1980, long-haul truckers were generally employed by regulated companies whose routes and rates had to pass muster with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Under the terms of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act, the ICC kept potential lowball, low-wage competitors out of the market. Drivers were also highly unionized, under a Master Freight Agreement between the Teamsters and close to 1,000 trucking firms. For which reasons, truck driving was a pretty damn good blue-collar job, with decent pay, livable hours, and ample benefits.
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 changed all that, scrapping the rules of the 1935 act so that startups, charging far less than the pre-1980 rates and paying their drivers far less as well, flooded the market. Facing that competition, established companies dropped their rates and pay scales, too. By 1998, drivers were making between 30 percent and 40 percent less than their pre-1980 predecessors had made. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, following the steep decline in wages in the decades after the 1980 deregulation, trucker income has flatlined for the past 20 years. The median income of long-haul truckers who are employees was roughly $53,000 in 2018; for contractors, it was $45,000—though drivers in both groups had to put in many more than 40 hours per week to reach these totals.
With wages plummeting throughout the industry, the thousand companies that had been party to the Master Freight Agreement with the Teamsters in 1980 had dwindled to a bare five by 2008. Fully 57 percent of truckers were unionized in 1980 (nearly all with the Teamsters). A threadbare 10 percent were union members at the turn of the millennium.