‘It’s included in the rate.’ Truck drivers get that response all too often when asking why they aren’t paid for certain required on-duty tasks.

Air Canada’s flight attendants are now fighting a similar battle. In a very public move, their union has threatened strike action if the airline refuses to address the unpaid labor issue.

Maybe it’s time trucking addressed the issue too.

I have a couple of points to make before I dig into this. Truck driver pay schemes are among the most complex of any labor sector in the country. Making matters worse, pay schemes are anything but identical across various industry sectors. It must be said that many sectors do pay drivers for all the work they do. They punch-in at the beginning of a shift and punch-out at the end. They are compensated for everything that happens in between.

Some drivers are paid a combination of mileage pay when driving and hourly pay for on-duty, non-driving activities. Others are paid a percentage of the revenue the truck earns on a run.

Still others are paid straight mileage, with maybe a stipend thrown in for border crossing or loading/unloading after two hours. These pay schemes vary widely from company to company.

While trying not to generalize, it’s safe to say that the over-the-road truckload sector is the worst for compensating drivers for all on-duty, not-driving time.  

A recent National Post story about the flight attendants’ plight included a couple of quotes from leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre — the new hero of the working class.

According to the Post, in a letter, he called on Patty Hajdu, minister of jobs and families and minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario, to amend the Canada Labour Code, “to require that federally regulated (my emphasis) airlines pay flight attendants for all hours they are on duty, not just time spent [in] the air.”

To which he added, “No other federally regulated worker would accept being on the job without being paid.”

No wonder he lost the election.

Piecework = Unpaid labor

Unpaid labor is a real and well-documented issue in trucking, and in some cases it’s strikingly similar to the issue flight attendants are raising.

In North America, many longhaul truck drivers are paid “piecework” or by the mile. Some are paid by the trip or by the load. Many aren’t compensated specifically for all legally required “on-duty” time.

Common unpaid on-duty activities include: loading/unloading and waiting; breakdowns/repairs on the road; paperwork; inspections; fueling; border crossing delays; and significantly, traffic delays when pay is purely per-mile, not hourly.

Under U.S. DOT and Canadian hours-of-service rules, all those activities are defined as as ‘on-duty, not-driving’ time. Many driver pay systems don’t break out those activities distinctly, even though the ELD duly records all that time.  

In other words, under a piece-rate pay system, carriers only pay for the “productive” part (driving) of the workload, not the waiting or prep time — the unpredictable costs that can’t be easily baked into the rate.

Industry custom and practice has treated unpaid on-duty time as “part of the job” ever since deregulation occurred back in the mid-1980s. It’s similar to the airlines’ “block time” reasoning, but it’s not articulated in any formal arrangement. 

While flight attendants and interprovincial truck drivers are both federally regulated, trucking’s unpaid time appears to be a byproduct of piece-rate pay rather than an officially recognized “start pay when the door closes” rule. The effect, however, is the same — large chunks of required work time go unpaid.

Block time = Unpaid labor

According to the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the union representing Air Canada’s flight attendants, workers are paid under a scheme called “block time.” This has been the norm in the airline industry for decades. Many pilots are paid the same way.

Block time basically means the clock starts when the doors close, and it stops when the doors open at destination. Air Canada’s flight attendants (and those of many other airlines), are not paid specifically for boarding and deplaning passengers, pre-flight safety and security checks, safety briefings, assisting passengers before departure and after arrival, along with post-flight reports and cleanup.

A statement from the union, as reported in the National Post concludes: “Flight attendants are not paid for a significant portion of their time on the job,” noting that safety-related duties — mandated by Transport Canada — are not optional.

Such a pay scheme would have a huge impact on crews working shorthaul flights with several turnarounds in a shift — Toronto to Montreal, for example. On such a trip they would spend about an hour prepping and boarding the flight, an hour in the air, and 30 minutes post flight. That’s about 90 unpaid minutes and 60 paid minutes on a 2.5-hour block.

Crews on longhaul flights, overseas for example, would have it better. They spend much more time in the air over the course of a work week, and thus much less time on unpaid tasks.  

A survey of CUPE’s flight attendants revealed they spend close to 35 hours each month performing unpaid work.

Data on truck drivers’ unpaid time are harder to come by, but some estimates — surveys from the U.S. Owner-Operator and Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) and the Owner-Operator Business Association of Canada (OBAC), BusinessInsider.com, U.S. DOT Office of Inspector General, and various Reddit channels — put the number at about 10-20 hours per week, depending on the routes they are on and the type of work they do.

That’s about twice as much unpaid work as Air Canada’s flight attendants report.

Regardless of how many unpaid hours separate truck drivers and flight attendants, the latter crowd has managed to generate a great deal of public support for their case against the airline.

‘The way it’s always been’

In this instance, Air Canada defends its position saying, the practice of block time is a historical precedent.

“This model had also been used in previous contracts dating back many years. Air Canada’s approach to flight attendant compensation, including for ground time, is consistent with that at most global carriers. In fact, CUPE reached a new contract with a large Canadian carrier in 2024 that uses this same approach,” the company said in a statement issued to the National Post.

Historical precedence, maybe, but is that sufficient justification for robbing them of a week’s pay every month?

Safety-related duties

As the CUPE spokesperson noted, safety-related duties — mandated by Transport Canada — are not optional. Those duties are not optional in trucking either.

Canada’s hours-of-service rules contain an exhaustive list of duties that are considered officially ‘on-duty, not-driving’ time. The list begins with a definition of on-duty time:

On-duty time means the period that begins when a driver begins work or is required by the motor carrier to be available to work, except if the driver is waiting to be assigned to work, and that ends when the driver stops work or is relieved of responsibility by the motor carrier.

The list of duties includes, but isn’t limited to time spent:

• Inspecting, servicing, repairing, conditioning, fueling or starting a commercial vehicle;
• Participating in the loading or unloading of a commercial vehicle;
• Inspecting or checking the load of a commercial vehicle;
• Waiting before and while a commercial vehicle is serviced, loaded, unloaded or dispatched;
• Waiting at an en-route point because of an accident or other unplanned occurrence or situation;
• Performing any work for any motor carrier;
• And performing yard moves of a commercial vehicle within a terminal, depot or port and that is not on a public road.

As many drivers will tell you, not only are many of these responsibilities unpaid, the ELD continues unwinding inexorably to the 14-hour cut-off time. If drivers are required to log the time, why are employers not required to pay for that time? 

Lengthy delays not only rob drivers of legitimate earnings, they can also compromise their available driving time which results in a loss of earning potential. A double whammy.   

A 2018 study from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General estimated that detention at loading docks is associated with reductions in annual earnings of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion (all figures USD) for for-hire commercial motor vehicle drivers in the truckload sector.

The report also notes detention time reduces motor carrier net income by $250.6 million to $302.9 million annually.

But more significantly, researchers estimated that a 15-minute increase in average dwell time increases the average expected crash rate by 6.2%.

I’d love to see that math that went into that conclusion, but I get it. Delays and time spent unpaid on various tasks create pressure to make the losses up on the road, which can incentivize unsafe driving speeds and short cuts on safety.

My last driving job (1994-1997) was with a private carrier, Air Products & Chemicals in Nanticoke, Ont. We were paid a combination of mileage and hourly. Everything we did was compensated, and we got overtime after 44 hours.

I worked four 16 hour shifts each week, and carted home more than $70,000 in my last year at the company. That was about $15,000 more than I earned at my previous company driver job hauling chemical tanks.

Drivers there were well paid to begin with, but knowing all my efforts were compensated made a huge difference in my outlook toward the job. We were never pressured to do anything risky or non-compliant to get a load delivered. The company was emphatic about HoS compliance.

To be honest, it took me several months to get used to trucking like that.  

The impact of unpaid labor

Unpaid work is a major driver of dissatisfaction and high turnover in the industry. The way some carriers pay drivers also shocks industry newcomers, many of whom come from hourly paid jobs. Exit interviews with rookie drivers on their way out of the industry put poor and confusing pay high on their list of reasons for leaving.

To be fair, lots of carriers do pay for all the time drivers spend on the job, but that’s still uncommon in the truckload, over-the-road sector. Which, not surprisingly, is where most of the industry’s recruitment and retentions problems persist.

Maybe there’s a connection there?

Given the unstable nature of driver pay schemes, and the frustration arising from not getting paid for work they’re legally required to do, it’s not difficult to imagine why some drivers would be attracted to the Driver Inc. model. It promises higher take-home pay. To a hungry driver trying to make ends meet, it probably looks pretty good.

It may look good on paper, at first blush, but it never works out that way.

I can’t help wondering if some of trucking’s driver woes could have been prevented years ago, when there was actually a good supply of drivers willing to work, if they had just been paid more fairly.

I can remember a time when truckers and airline pilots lived on the same street. You don’t see that anymore — unless the driver is married to a pilot.