As was originally mentioned, this is a world-wide issue. It isn't just the trucking industry. Merchant mariners, freight train engineers, cargo plane pilots - all of them have tons of regulation, long hours, and lower pay than they should.
It gets back, however, to entrepreneurialship. In the US, the average base annual pay for a truck driver is around $45,000. For an owner-operator, the average is around 3x that.
Likewise - merchant mariner salaries depend upon what certifications you are willing to obtain a well as the type of vessel you work on.
Freight train engineers in the US start around $37000/year and at the 8 year point, it isn't even double that.
While the pay for jet cargo pilots at the big carriers is good, you gotta get there first - so pilots are behind the 8-ball salary-wise as they build hours and obtain certs and ratings.
Really, the issue is that freight haulers are in the service industry, so they aren't given the pay they deserve for doing work that isn't front-and-center until they stop doing it, resulting in bare shelves at stores and empty tanks at petrol stations. In the US, it doesn't help that unions are still nothing more than piggy-banks for organized crime (first the mafia, then realty, politics, insurance and banking - and it's worse now when it's all legal-like).
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