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.)
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...)
I should've also clarified that when I said "criminal" it wasn't in the specific legal sense, and more along the lines of "evil".
Everyone understands how it works, and the system works...
Yeah, but this doesn't mean the workings are either right or acceptable.
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.
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)
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.
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.