What seems more likely, actually, is that you will get Akerlof's classic lemon market - due to the information asymmetry of paying by the mile.
The employer knows how much value the driver's gonna contribute for the money they pay, but the potential drivers aren't at all sure how much income they'll get paid for their time/effort. They basically only have hearsay from other drivers/ex-drivers to go on. Furthermore, some are getting burned and leaving the industry (I know personally of one; and there's another in this very thread), and telling others about their experiences.
The number of confounding variables and risks (including but not limited to loading/unloading) are simply too high for them to be able to make an accurate judgment about their potential income.
The natural effect of a lemon market is that the market dries up because the buyers/sellers simply stop transacting when the problems caused by the information asymmetry are too much.
That actually seems to be exactly the situation we're getting here. The wages don't seem to be that bad actually, but the risk is all piled on to the driver, so new recruits are very reluctant to enter the industry after hearing a few horror stories.
Lots of startups have gone down for similar reasons - pricing that is too complex makes potential customers go 'fuck it' and go with the devil they know.
The market for lemons doesn't really apply here, because a lemon market requires a supply that is heavily weighted toward worthless goods, to drag the average down to 0 as the "best" opportunities are withdrawn from market.
Assume labor is the currency and the good is cash. If a majority of trucking employers give employees a mediocre or poor deal, then the supply of trucking jobs in the aggregate delivers poor value for the required labor input, in comparison to other lines of employment. Good firms either go out of business (due to being undercut) or retain their drivers, such that there are few openings at good firms.
In an ideal world good firms would increase their market share, but doing that requires satisfying trucking consumers and they want their goods shipped as cheaply and quickly as possible. So the interests of consumers and suppliers (of trucking services, ie drivers) are not very well aligned. I don't know what can be done about this; as a consumer I have absolutely no clue which hauling companies handle the goods I purchase, nor do I have any clue how much of a good's price consists of shipping costs. So I can't really vote with my dollars to let store owners know that I'm willing to pay a little more to support trucking companies that treat their employees well.
Nope. It just requires information asymmetry, which IS the case here. Trucking companies know more about what income their potential workers will make than the potential workers will themselves.
Experienced truckers will have less information asymmetry, but experienced truckers need to be replenished as they retire. Apparently that's not happening.
In the perfect world of the auto-correcting market.
In real life, in the case of coal miners and their "dead work" (necessary work that wasn't getting paid), it took bloody strikes and fights to get those rises, the amounts paid weren't automatically upgraded.
The "money required to attract X workers" only plays a role when those X workers are not destitute and starving to begin with. If they are, and the company can pay them less and still have a huge profit from their work, it'll do that.
> If drivers spend much time loading and unloading, and not getting paid, the amount paid per mile required to attract drivers will rise.
Actually, logic would indicate that it has already happened. Every industry pays people the least amount that it can reliably obtain labor and/or reliably profit from their employment. Trucking is no different.
That has not been the case, historically. Time spent "on duty, not driving" has been a major complaint for decades and is one of the reasons duty schedules are ridiculous.
Paying by the mile is even worse. How much incentive does the company have to make unloading and loading more efficient when they get it for free?