Are you willing to drive while sleepy, break regs when the customer is demanding you drive longer to deliver their products (due to traffic delaying you or similar)? Its a really screwed up industry.
No, trucking was a decent living 'till deregulation in the 90s.
"How Trucking Went From One of the Best Jobs in America to One of the Worst" http://time.com/money/4325164/trucking-worst-job/
This is one of the reasons there is a shortage alot of those drivers that used to "cheat the books" (which is a whole other thing) stopped making as much money, and can not pull the same number of loads anymore
Bonus, if you are caught the company doesn't care, they will hire someone else, but it sticks with your record.
Which is why the company is also fined in many places (like the EU). The problem is the company most of the time.
Screwed up would be forbidding people from making this personal choice through regulation.
It was an interesting observation that he contrasted to this myth of the independent truck guy working for himself... when really most are just as tied to company whims and rules that they have nothing to do with, and arguably have less freedom than most workers.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35025680-the-long-haul
Here's an HN discussion of the book:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310849
A passage from the introduction on the hierarchy of truckers that probably has some relevance here:
To the casual observer all trucks probably look similar, and I suppose people figure all truckers do pretty much the same job. Neither is true. There’s a strict hierarchy of drivers, depending on what they haul and how they’re paid. The most common are the freighthaulers. They’re the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are the car haulers (parking lot attendants), flatbedders (skateboarders), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers), chemical haulers (thermos bottle holders), and hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys). Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truckstop coffee counter or in the driver’s lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters, when there is one, mainly because I don’t have time to waste, but also because I don’t buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse. I don’t wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots, or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a three-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks, and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.
I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.
Yet the headline talks about 80 kUSD/year.