I’ve met a lot of truckers working as a doctor. It’s a pretty hard life, especially the long-haul international stuff. It’s stressful to be in traffic all the time, way most people drive. It’s not my place to say what people should be paid, and this isn’t the thread where I am going to do that. I admire their work ethic, and it is an underappreciated and important job. To make the money claimed they must be working around the clock…
It’s more about the accuracy of the article (below). Can this really be true?
That’s pay and benefits. I noticed the author of the article “neglected” to mention what those benefits are.
Top that with the usual rant of how the common worker is overpaid with no mention of how grossly overpaid the CEO, Board of Directors and top level executives are.
The article says “salary and benefits.” That includes vacation, insurance, 40lK, and anything else the employer can class as a benefit (I’ve seen employers claim their share of Social Security as a “benefit” rather than a tax.)
…it’s an opinion piece. It says that right there at the top of the page. If you want to test the accuracy then you should really be reading articles that aren’t opinions.
From here:
Bolding mine. A top rate of $42 an hour. New hires would be half that. Plus benefits.
The $170,000 figure was based on a claim by UPS CEO Carol Tomé made on an earnings call.
Facts are facts. In my experience, articles claiming salaries tend to refer to the most highly paid small group, not necessarily what most people make. They tend to ignore expenses and include benefits or things that others might not include. They are not above exaggeration nor having a separate agenda. So this seemed suspect. It’s not an issue I care personally about. Hardworking people should be compensated. It just set off my BS detector.
The comments on the article include:
Poorly written article. That figure ($170K) is not the salary paid to drivers. That amount includes all their benefits as well, like health care, pension, dental, etc. In the US, those benefits are a substantial amount. I would say that the drivers make just under $100K, which is still a pretty good wage. If I were a younger man living in rural America, that would be the job I’d want.
this articles clarifies….that high rate is for 60hrs/week, in the last year of the contract and includes value of the benefits…the spokesperson says the 170K number is “misleading”
Even for describing a compensation package it’s misleading by not including an usually high hours per week that the wages are based on. I also suspect that drivers couldn’t work 60 hours a week regularly even if they wanted to.
According to the union website linked in a post above, the new average top rate is $49/hour. It’s not hard to see how someone working significantly more than a 40-hour week – as so many of us do – could pull in nearly $3000 a week. Even assuming two weeks of unpaid vacation every year, that adds up to $150,000 a year. Not hard to see how someone making more than the top-tier average could pull in as much $170K. It’s a more reasonable number if that includes benefits, but even as a net earning, it’s not completely out of whack with the facts even if it assumes stressfully long weeks. I know a doctor who has a busy commitment to hospital rounds AND a busy practice with long days, and regularly works Saturdays, who I’m sure is way over the 60-hours-per-week line.
From your perspective as a Canadian, I guess this helps explain why UPS charges a $40 “brokerage” fee on a $10 T-shirt shipped to Canada from a US vendor. This is no joke. UPS is notorious for their extortionate brokerage fees, to the point that both buyers and sellers who are aware of the scam avoid UPS like the plague.
The union article cites the improved compensation for 340,000 rank-and-file UPS workers. Not to defend exorbitant CEO compensation, because it really is shamelessly exorbitant, but in fairness, how many CEOs and top executives does UPS have?
Which is maybe the total earnings of 200 rank-and-file employees. Also, actual salary was $1.5 million, and most of the rest was stock related. Still shameful, but potentially worth it if a CEO is a really great leader. The biggest problem is that so few of them are, and far too many rake in millions while being literally worse than useless.
I cannot say if my information is current. But I remember back-in-the-day, when UPS drivers had brown canvas covered wagons, policy was to hire part-time, and to keep people on part-time as long as possible.
Why? Part-time gets none of the benefits or the protections of full time. No sick leave, no vacation, no holidays, no 401K, no steady pay increases, no seniority, no job security, etc etc.
I have to give a shrug to the claims of UPS drivers “making all that money.”
PT UPSer here. The union has gotten the part timers benefits, paid vacation and holidays, pension(inferior to ft pension, but still)and sick pay. It can take 8-10 years to get a full time position.
This is the problem. I assume that UPS has a monopoly on the delivery of letters, which is a rapidly declining market. Delivery of parcels is a competitive business, and the Union may discover, as many have before, that they have priced their members out of the market.
No, I could be wrong but I think that will be the wage in 2028 in the terminal year of the contract, when it will be worth a bit less less than $49/hr in 2023. It’s not an awesome contract IMHO, insomuch it is a series of flat increases instead of being a COLA-adjusted percentage that can swing with the economic times. Extrapolating back from the verbiage it appears current top wages are in the range of $42.50/hr.
The thing is adding in benefits is deceptive. Projecting max income based on overtime is even more so and always pisses me off in these discussions. The thing is people are working those backbreaking (literally for some UPS workers, my step-brother used to swing boxes for them and once got knocked out cold by a box of machine parts) extra hours and it is often cheaper for the company to do so. The alternative to employers paying overtime is to a.) hire more workers and pay them benefits, b.) do what UPS does and hire part timers at literally half the wages and reduced benefits.
They should, in my bleeding-barely-capitalist-heart do option a. Hire more people, give them decent wages and benefits, reduce overtime. But our backwards medical system (in the US at least) pushes part of medical costs on to the employer, so benefits package per head costs more than paying OT. So instead of two people getting decent money + benefits, you either get one full-time guy and one part-time guy getting widely disproportionate incomes OR one full-time guy working 60 hour weeks, making more money but degrading their quality of life and the quality of the work. And since labor cost saving are the end-all be-all in many cases, you frequently get a situation where the job calls for two people working 40-hr weeks for a total of 80 man hours, but instead you get one person working 60 or two people (one part-time) working 60. Which results in a sub-par, but “good enough” result. I see this all the time in local government. And then people have the gall to bitch about that one garbage man they saw in the paper making “too much” money for their position by working night and day when the problem lies ENTIRELY with the cheap-ass employers, not the employee trying to get by.
People also bitch simultaneously about the service they get as well as the high taxes they pay. Look, good service cost money. You can have poor service + low taxes. Or great service + high taxes. Or, what you usually get in city governments, some intermediate level of taxation + mediocre service. What you cannot have in low taxes + great service, the world doesn’t work that way. An underpaid, understaffed work force cannot perform miracles.
Unions matter. UPS employees used to belong to the Teamsters union, I don’t know if they still do. Shutting down UPS for even a few days greatly impacts many other business’ like Amazon. Any mail-order or internet business needs UPS. Having been in charge of shipping at a former job, Fed-Ex is just a poor substitute, they would prefer to let UPS delivery packages and FedX delivering letters and light packages. And USPS or the US postal service is just a joke, they may make the final delivery for FedX or UPS but that is mostly it. They are not even a factor.
There are many non-college jobs that pay very well. My wife sits in a control booth watching machines and a monitor wrap toilet paper for the Koch brothers and makes over 100k per year, and has almost a million dollars in her 401k with 10 years left to go. My local bartender who makes $18 per hour on paper at the local restaurant/bar recently confided in me that she actually makes $6000 per month.
Why are people surprised and even offended that working class jobs can be living wage jobs?
My brother is a retired UPS driver. The $170k number includes benefits, including health care, which is significant. That $170k was put out by corporate America to spark anti-union sentiment. If the US had universal health care like in the developed world, that number would be lower.