The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association represents 150,000 professional truck drivers across the country. We fight to make trucking a safer, more sustainable career.
The policies we promote benefit countless more men and women in our state who drive truck. This includes eliminating a 1930s federal exemption that treats truckers differently from other blue-collar occupations by denying them guaranteed overtime pay. Under federal law, most employees get overtime after 40 hours of work per week. Despite working 60 to 70 hours weekly, truckers are denied this compensation because Congress hasn’t changed the law. Failing to compensate truckers for all this time has contributed to high driver turnover rates, with some large motor carriers exceeding 100% turnover annually – meaning new and inexperienced drivers hit the roads every day!
We have struggled to find Republicans to support our legislation to eliminate this outdated exemption. Few want to upset corporate motor carriers who contribute generously to their reelection campaigns.
Corporate carriers have discovered keeping labor costs as low as possible helps maximize profits. They lobby elected officials to keep the exemption in place because it’s good for the bottom lines of their shareholders and executives. Republicans have largely sided with these large carriers over their drivers in the fight for fair pay.
In November 2022, the Washington Post published a piece written by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., about the need for the Republican Party to prioritize blue collar workers, explaining, “It must offer good jobs and good lives, not just higher stock prices for Wall Street. And it must place working Americans at its heart and take them as they are, rather than treating them as resources to be exploited or engineered away.” At that point, we set to work trying to convince our Senator to help us eliminate the federal government’s unfair overtime exemption. To us, the proposal seemed right up his alley, but we struggled to get his commitment.
In September 2023, when Sen. Hawley joined striking UAW members on their picket line in Wentzville, he said, “America made these huge corporations what they are. Now they owe some loyalty – and basic fairness – to American workers.” Sounds exactly like trucking, we thought. We redoubled our efforts to get him to support our legislation. Afterall, the UAW strike involved negotiations between two private entities, with no direct connection to federal policy and no clear role for a federal legislator like Sen. Hawley.
Unfortunately, after nearly two years of advocacy, Sen. Hawley remains non-committal. In fact, we haven’t received any substantive response from the Senator about why he won’t step up to the plate.
Maybe it’s easier to support workers when there is no direct role for you to play in improving their lives. Maybe it’s more appealing to stand by their side when the media is watching. We simply don’t know, because we can’t get a straight answer.
Adding to our confusion, in March 2024, Sen. Hawley joined a Teamsters picket line in St. Louis and said of those on strike, “All they want is a fair wage and equal treatment. They deserve it.”
Sen. Hawley, our state’s truck drivers deserve it too. It’s time to turn the rhetoric into actual effort! LL
Todd Spencer has served as President of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association since 2018. He began his career in trucking as an employee-driver in 1974.
Editor’s note: This article originally was published in the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader.
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