According to an article on our site, trucker wages are 26 percent of what they should be if they had kept pace with inflation since a 1977 magazine cited that truckers earn $500 per week.
During that 36-year time frame, truckers have earned about the same number of actual dollars while losing 74 percent of their buying power.
I have never heard of a “cost of living increase” or “cost of living adjustment” (COLA) for truckers, have you?
Is there any other industry or profession in the USA (or maybe Canada) where wages have failed to keep up with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) this badly?
There is probably some resource online somewhere that has this kind of information but I don’t know what or where it is right now.
If you know this information, please comment on this article below.
I knew that trucker pay wasn’t what it was supposed to be.
Until I entered the numbers and ran the calculator, I didn’t know just how bad truckers’ wages were in light of history.
Now that I have a number from the past to go on, it’s shocking.
The questions are:
- What are truckers going to do about this 26 percent rip-off?
- What are trucking companies going to do to raise trucker pay such that the so-called driver shortage vanishes?
Update
Using the BLS’s CPI Inflation Calculator, I rechecked the buying power of $500 in May 1977.
$500 then has the same buying power as $2,093.19 in September 2018.
$500 / $2,093.19 = 23.88% (even worse than the 26 percent cited on this page).
Please share your comments.
Note: This article — which was originally written and published on January 30, 2014, by Vicki Simons — was updated slightly in 2018.
Return from 26 Percent to our Budgeting page or our Truck Drivers Money Saving Tips home page.
