Michael H. Belzer

Michael H. Belzer is an American academic and former truck driver, known as an internationally recognized expert on the trucking industry, especially the institutional and economic impact of deregulation. He is a professor in the economics department at Wayne State University. He is the author of Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation (Oxford University Press, 2000). Along with Gregory M. Saltzman, he coauthored Truck Driver Occupational Safety and Health: 2003 Conference Report and Selective Literature Review, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2007. He has written many peer-reviewed articles on trucking industry economics, labor, occupational safety and health, infrastructure, and operational issues.

Background

For ten years, he was a long-haul tank truck driver, one of the leaders of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. These experiences had a direct impact on his research, writing and career.

Belzer received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1993. His thesis, "Collective Bargaining in the Trucking Industry: The Effects of Institutional and Economic Restructuring," focused on the transformational dynamic of changed regulation and institutional structure on industrial relations in the trucking industry.

Research Belzer studies the industrial and labor relations of the trucking industry, including motor carrier safety, driver safety and health, and intermodal freight and logistics. He is a proponent of “safe rates” and believes that driver working conditions and compensation is a major determinant of motor vehicle driver safety and health.

His book Sweatshops on Wheels was critically well received. Low pay, bad working conditions and unsafe conditions have been a direct result of deregulation. "[This book] argues that trucking embodies the dark side of the new economy." "Conditions are so poor and the pay system so unfair that long-haul companies compete with the fast-food industry for workers. Most long-haul carriers experience 100% annual driver turnover." As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote: "The cabs of 18-wheelers have become the sweatshops of the new millennium, with some truckers toiling up to 95 hours per week for what amounts to barely more than the minimum wage. [This book] is eye-opening in its appraisal of what the trucking industry has become."