TORONTO -- The current per-mile system of paying truck drivers is outmoded and has to go -- or at least change drastically.

That’s the word from Ontario Trucking Association Chairman and Kriska Transportation President Mark Seymour, who made the remarks as a guest speaker at a TransCore Link Logistics industry event this week.

Seymour, always candid, was suggesting to the assembly that as truckers climb out of the recession, they must focus on profitability and include all their costs into their prices. And the looming staffing shortage will mean that truckers must find ways to compensate their staffs appropriately.

"Pay and benefits need to be consistent with time and effort," he said. "Paying by the mile is something that’s going to have to change.

“Every time you see a driver in gridlock, the only thing that he or she is thinking is ‘how am I going to make this [time] up?’

“If a person loses an hour or two a day, it really is going to weigh heavy on them when they lay their head down at night.” 

The industry's drivers have been a
standstill for quite some time: Seymour

Seymour says the average driver at Kriska makes about $58,000 a year, and, he added, that’s not enough. And a three or four-percent increase is not enough.

And now’s the time to do it.

Truckers, he said, must limit their capacity in the coming years if they want to create a sustainable model for years go come, and he appealed to the 3PL members of the audience to "align yourselves with people you feel will be there longer."

To that end, fleets must get a realistic sense of their costs and extend those costs into their prices.

“When we take stock at the end of the day,” he says, “profitability is going to allow us to so sustain what we can do.

"So many of our employees and contractors have been a standstill for quite some time and in many cases we’ve had to retract those costs.”

It’s time, he said, to “be responsible for our internal investments.”