If they're tracked electronically anyway and cannot fudge route-logs, it's criminal to make the driver pay for their own truck-fuel. (It would be shitty even without the electronic tracking, but now it's inexcusable.)
This is like a company making you pay for the electricity you consume while working in their offices.
(This is right up there in with paying waiters ~$2 an hour because they can make up the rest in tips.)
I don't think you're exactly understanding the economics. This is not someone getting paid $500/week and having to buy a truckload of deisel fuel out of that sum...
Most OTR contracts are paid a set amount per mile as a gross number. Drivers (privateers) are independent businesses and they take that gross amount and buy everything they need to fulfill the contract (including fuel) as a business expense.
It's no more criminal than the fact that an independent software developers need to pay for the electricity they consume in their offices.
There are employee-drivers as well, and in those cases, the fuel may or may not come out of the drivers' pockets. (And if it doesn't, they obviously get paid far less per mile, because someone is picking up the $0.55 per mile in fuel costs.) To my mind, having the person with the most ability to influence fuel efficiency be economically incented to be efficient isn't a bad thing at all.
It's a matter of contract terms between consenting independent actors. Hardly something I'd call "criminal". (Same thing with waitstaff in the US. Everyone understands how it works, and the system works...)
Not sure what the comparison is with waiters. A lot of waiters are in their teens or early twenties and it's already one of the highest paying jobs for that group without requiring any real qualifications. Restaurants, on the other hand, are not the most profitable business around as it is, and you want them to triple their payroll expenses to pay minimum wage?
It only works because its been around long enough that there is a culture of tipping for service, to the point it's practically an invisible tax on each meal (granted, with the option to avoid it if you really want/have to, but is considered negative socially)
Elsewhere in the world, there is much less of a tipping custom, and wages for service staff tend to reflect that.
Isn't there some kind of US law that requires restaurants to pay the difference between wage+tips & minimum wage if the tips share is low enough?
(OTOH, I recall reading somewhere about people paying huge sums (order of $10's of K) for high-profile service jobs like Maître d' at a prestigious hotel, or head waiter in a high-class restaurant, due to the quantity earned in tips)
Isn't there some kind of US law that requires restaurants to pay the difference between wage+tips & minimum wage if the tips share is low enough?
There is but that doesn't mean restaurants necessarily follow said law. A lot of servers don't really have any means of actually properly enforcing it without just straight up losing their job in the best case so, in practice, you find people just staying silent as they get shafted.
You're correct. If a waiter does not meet minimum wage with tips, the employer is required to pay the difference. I am not sure how often this is actually used though. It would seem easy to brush off and ignore.
A lot of these arguments have the 'tipping culture' as the basis.
My position is that the way this is set up in the USA is plain wrong - tips should be a voluntary gratuity from the customer to thank the waiter for a job well done.
Once that is the case, then establishment's only responsibility is to pay the employee a minimum living wage, making no assumptions about tips. This is pretty much the way it works in a large swathe of the world, and seems to be working pretty well.
the fact that you think being a waiter has "no real qualifications" underlines the fact that you probably haven't been one.
also, there is an immense range of compensation for servers, depending on the restaurant in question. any restaurant that you go to where the servers make a decent amount of money definitely requires skill.
I have been a waiter actually, in college. I had no qualifications. I also wasn't very good at it. I did work at a 'Chili's'-type restaurant, not a nice place where the waiters would be more experienced obviously. I do realize that it's a demanding job and is difficult to really be good at. That doesn't change the fact that it pays very well for the class of jobs that a 17-year old high school student can get.
This is like a company making you pay for the electricity you consume while working in their offices.
(This is right up there in with paying waiters ~$2 an hour because they can make up the rest in tips.)