Before my [compulsory] military service, I was a crane operator during the day and a taxi driver at night. I went back to being a crane operator for a while after I left the army. Then I drove a Keelung city bus for a bit. My next job was driving a long-distance passenger bus for a private company. I started to drive for a dump truck company about eight years ago. I'm going to be forty soon, and it seems like I've spent half my life behind a steering wheel.
There are basically two kinds of dump trucks. Those you see on the freeway are long-distance dump trucks. We call it a north-south dump truck. They truck sand or gravel from quarries to construction sites. We, on the other hand, only run short distances. We truck waste soil or bricks from construction sites to designated dumpsites. The main reason I chose to drive this kind of dump truck was that I could work near Keelung and get to go home every day. They're not going to ask me to drive the length of the island to dump a bit of waste soil.
Our income is pretty good compared with other professional drivers. Passenger bus drivers get about NT$50,000 [US$1,850] a month. It's difficult to make even NT$40,000 [US$1,480] driving a cab, since there are more and more taxi drivers, and urban traffic is getting worse and worse. But when I was hired by the dump truck company, I found I could make NT$45,000 [US$1,660] a month. Because I wanted to earn more, three years ago I paid NT$2.6 million [US$96,300] for my own dump truck. Insurance, fuel tax, and the annual license tax together cost me more than NT$10,000 [US$370] a month. Fuel costs over NT$1,000 [US$37] and can sometimes reach NT$2,000 [US$74] a day for uphill jobs. Diesel is now NT$11.9 [44 cents] per liter, so we spend a lot on fuel. But I can still earn more compared to driving buses or working for dump truck companies. I make roughly NT$70,000 [US$2,590] a month. But although I was the one who paid for this truck, it isn't registered in my name. We can't have our own licenses like taxi drivers do, you know. We have to belong to a company. The company only handles a few insurance things and some paperwork for us, but we still have to pay NT$2,000 a month. Once they tried to organize a union for dump truck drivers—I don't know the details—but that failed. The north-south dump truck drivers have their own union. I think a union can provide help in many ways and I'll be willing to join when there is one.
This is considered one of the more dangerous professions. We usually drive on mountain paths or construction sites where road conditions aren't very good, so it's more dangerous than driving other types of heavy-duty vehicles. Sometimes the hill is so steep that a backhoe has to pull us up. But the time when we really have to be careful is when we're dumping things. A loaded dump truck weighs forty to fifty tons. If the soil at the dump site is too soft, the whole truck may sink into it. You also have to be careful when you back up. I once saw a dump truck roll all the way down to the bottom of a valley. Then when you're tilting your truck bed, you've got to be sure to unhook the tailgate. If not [uses his hands to demonstrate], the weight will carry you all the way down to the bottom of the valley, too. So before you can become a dump truck driver, you have to spend time learning from senior drivers.
Since our pay depends on how many trips we run and the distance involved, the longer we work the more we earn. We usually work ten to twelve hours and sometimes twenty-four hours a day. There aren't any weekends or holidays. We work over three hundred hours a month. If you calculate eight hours as a work day, we work forty days a month. But the good thing is that since I work around Keelung, I get to go home almost every day.
Our business changes with the state of the economy. If the economy is good, people have money, construction companies are active, and we have a lot of work. Now the real-estate market is down, fewer construction companies want to build, so we don't get as much work. Our income is only about half what it used to be several years ago, when the real-estate market was at its peak. The newspapers say that the government is trying to stimulate the real-estate market in several ways. I hope it works. Anyway, business was at its best about three years ago, when the Ministry of Transportation and Communications cut the size of acceptable dump truck loads from about twenty cubic meters to seven. There were just as many things to be dumped, but the load for each truck shrank to one-third what it was before, so each truck had to run more trips. A lot of people came into this business at that time, and competition heated up.
Irrespective of the construction market, we get more work in the summer because there's less rain then and the daylight lasts longer, which lets us start at six in the morning and work till seven in the evening. But in winter we usually start at eight and call it a day at five. I guess I'm pretty used to the hours and the work environment. The cabs have air-conditioning, but it's still hot in summer. Construction sites get awfully dusty. The environment isn't as comfortable as that of long-distance bus drivers, but I have to think of the money, you know. My friend asked if I wanted to drive a garbage truck for the city's environmental bureau. The monthly pay was only a little over NT$30,000 [US$1,110] and the working hours were no shorter, so I turned him down. I've also thought of starting up a small business. But it's not that easy. You've got to have some talent to become a good businessman. I don't think I have that kind of talent. I plan to buy a secondhand taxi so that I can make some extra bucks on days I don't have jobs to do. I didn't need to do this in the past, because I could manage to support my family. But something happened. [Hesitates.] I don't think I want to talk about it. Anyway, my financial situation isn't as good as before. I need some extra money now, but I can't afford to buy a secondhand taxi. So if anyone wants to pay me NT$100,000 [US$3,700] a month to do some new job, I'm willing to give it a try—of course, it has to be legitimate and within my abilities.
[Lights a cigarette.] We get traffic tickets almost every day, sometimes three or four in one day. A ticket for leaking water costs NT$1,200 [US$44], and a dirty license plate means NT$300 [US$11]. [Takes out three traffic tickets from his pocket.] I got three in the last four days. Two for NT$1,200, and one for NT$300. We have to pay the fines ourselves, within fifteen days. Our employers reimburse us when they hand over our pay, which we get some two months later. We're quite used to getting traffic tickets. But what we're most afraid of is overloading tickets, because they mean two points on your license. If you get six points within six months, your license is suspended for a month. You lose it forever if you notch up twelve points in a single year. Employers want us to carry as much as possible each load, so that we make fewer trips. But we don't want to overload our trucks, since we're paid by how many trips we run, not by how many tons we carry.
The number of tickets we get shows up the dark side of this business. To operate a construction site, you have to do "public relations" with the right people or you'll find yourself in deep trouble. You must have heard of such things. I don't need to tell you again. It's been like this for a very long time. I don't know. Maybe they don't get much profit from taxi drivers. Sometimes they focus on dump trucks from certain construction sites. All the others get away with it, but trucks from those sites are stopped. They make it clear to us that they're deliberately making things difficult for those particular sites. They see a little mud on your tire and give you a ticket. It's usually because the people in charge of those sites didn't "negotiate" well with the authorities. Once I was stopped by a police officer who asked me directly which construction site I was from, where I was going, and who my boss was. He didn't even want to see my license and truck registration. He told me to tell my boss to "visit and talk" with him at a certain police station. You don't have to be very smart to realize what he was up to.
In fact, there's a market price for such things. Everything will be okay if both parties agree on the price. But it's usually not small change. If it's only short-term work or the profit is thin, contractors can't afford the "negotiations" so they trust to luck and hope to get away with it. But the police aren't the only ones to stop us. People have higher environmental awareness now. Many of them don't want heavy vehicles like our trucks going through their communities, because we're dirty and noisy. There are a lot of protests nowadays. Demonstrators stand in front of our trucks and won't let us through. All we can do is hang in there and wait for our boss to deal with them. It's a big waste of time. Time is money when you're paid by the trip.
For us truck drivers, the biggest worry isn't traffic tickets or community residents. Our employers take care of those things. We worry about not getting paid. When a construction company lands a contract it parcels out jobs to subcontractors. Subcontractors find sub-subcontractors. The lowest level of contractors are our employers. When we've agreed on a price, we start work. We're paid by the trip. The lowest pay I've ever got is NT$200 [US$7.40] per trip. The distance involved was only five hundred meters. The highest I got was NT$1,600 [US$59], from Keelung to Taipei. Usually we bill the employer once a month, or just before the construction is due to finish. They wait about two weeks, then they write us a forty-five day [postdated] check. There are very few cases, maybe one or two in a hundred, where we get paid in cash. That happens because either the pay is lower than average, or the dump site is not that legal. I take these jobs sometimes, because I need cash for fuel or to pay traffic fines. I've been taken to the police station several dozen times for dumping at illegal locations. But it's not right to put the blame on us. We don't even know if the site's in a conservation area. Our job is to dump the material wherever the boss says. It's the people who hire us who should be responsible for finding proper dumping sites. I guess the police and the judges understand this situation, so they don't bother us too much. They let us go once we've made a statement. But I have a friend whose truck was kept by the police for six months. I don't know why they did that to him. After six months, the grass in the truck bed was growing higher than the cab.
If everything goes well, I get to see the cash two to three months after the day I do the job. But the chain breaks if some thing happens to one of the [intermediate] contractors and the check bounces. This happens quite often. I recently got a bounced check from a government construction project. It's not the government that didn't pay, but one of the sub-, sub-sub-, or sub-sub-subcontractors ran away with the money. But there's nothing we can do, even if we can find the guy. Sue him? It might take years. Beat him up? It wouldn't get you your money back, even if you killed him. To try and make sure we get paid, we take a look at the reputation of whoever wants to hire us. But reputation doesn't guarantee everything. If any of his upper level contractors runs away he can't get his money, and naturally he doesn't have the money to pay us. The best we can do is try to spread the risk. We work at this site for a few days, then work somewhere else for a few days. You know what they say: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
We drivers get along well, but we don't have much chance to socialize during working hours. We use the truck radios to talk. Taxi drivers can chat with passengers, but we're working all day long with nobody to talk to, so we chat a little on the air. Sometimes, if the road is too narrow for two trucks to pass, we have to prearrange that.
There are still cliques among drivers. You can't avoid it. Younger drivers like to work together, and middle-aged drivers like me stick together too. When we don't have work, I'll get together with my buddy drivers and have a few drinks. Or I might stay home with my family and watch TV. I have two children, a sixteen-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. They're doing quite well at school—much better than I did. The elder one has music lessons at a local high school. She studies piano and viola after class. It's expensive—NT$1,800 [US$67] for one hour's piano lesson and NT$1,200 [US$44] for viola. The viola is unbelievably expensive. I spent nearly NT$100,000 [US$3,700] to buy her one. It's the cheapest type. Some of them are worth more than a million—I could buy half my truck with that kind of money. Anyway, one hour of this and one hour of that a week works out to NT$12,000 [US$444] a month. It takes roughly NT$20,000 [US$740] a month to support one high-school music student. I don't know how much more it's going to cost me when she enters college. My son's just started to learn the violin. Beginners' class. That's another NT$800 [US$30] an hour. But they've got pressures, too. Sometimes my daughter gets home even later than I do.
Anyway, I guess I'm stuck with this business, now that I've got my own truck. I can't sell it, because prices are low. It's only worth NT$900,000 [US$33,333] now. I can still drive it for another two years. Then I'll sell it for about NT$600,000 [US$22,222]. At present, my financial situation doesn't allow me to think too much about changing jobs. In fact, I kind of like this job. People may feel a little surprised that we have a sense of achievement driving dump trucks. I do, anyway. You know, when we start on a site it's usually just a mess. But sometimes when I drive by later I'll see a high-rise there, finished. Then I tell myself I helped lay the building's groundwork. It feels good.