Alaskan Truckers

Lynden Transport hires new cdl school grads.
www.lynden.com

 

I assumed the same a few years ago and looked into working up there. The pay was no better and in some cases worse .
There is dirt work in the summer that is supposed to pay well but I could not find it

 

Trucking wages in Alaska are not higher than anywhere else in the U.S. Cost of living here isn't the highest in the country, but it's pretty high. It is an extremely small state population wise, so that makes getting into good paying jobs a "who you know" proposition in many cases. Freight is controlled primarily by large shipping companies and they have their own trucks. These companies are pretty much exclusively headquartered in Anchorage. Owner ops exist, but there aren't very many and most of them succeed by leasing onto the bigger outfits. We really have no factories or industry, so an independent guy looking for loads is going to starve. Almost every O/O in the state moves gravel for construction in the summer, but breaking into that is hard as well. There's your standard fuel hauling and propane delivery jobs, but zero farm work. Haul Road work to the North Slope is a specialized gig and breaking into that is not impossible, especially with some of the major haulers that hire drivers for their company trucks. You better have some serious foul weather skills and chain up skills to apply, though. The problem there is that a bunch of it is seasonal.

 

There's a couple adds looking for drivers right now in Anchorage.. one is hauling mail $28 to $31 an hour 47.5 hours a week. Home nightly. Must be licensed for doubles. Has pretty good benefits and a $4/hr towards health/dental.

Other one listed is for a temp. Doubles and winter driving experience or don't bother to call.

Everything else is ads to go to work in the lower 48.

 

Thanks for that rundown, makes a lot of sense and fills in some of the blanks for me.
Sure would be nice to spend a summer up there still ...


That mail hauling gig is the same in the states. Weird job where your pay actually goes down after 40 hrs. Instead of time and a half it goes down to like 19 bucks an hour