The tight US labor market has not spared the trucking industry, where “help wanted” pleas are plentiful, wages are on the rise, and drivers have recently scored signing bonuses of up to US$20,000.
In an economy that hauls more than US$12 trillion in freight annually, the problems facing trucking have drawn the attention of US President Joe Biden, who is seeking to restore his political fortunes as US faces the highest inflation in nearly 40 years.
Biden’s administration has convened a task force to examine the supply chain snarls partly blamed for the price increases and shortages, including in shipping and trucking.
Photo: AFP
However, debate is raging in the largely non-union trucking industry over whether the challenges are exceptional in a competitive pandemic labor market, and what policy changes would have the biggest effect.
The American Trucking Associations (ATA), where large hauling companies are influential, has said that the combination of aging drivers and rising demand from e-commerce suggest the shortage is likely to be long-lasting and could reach crisis proportions within a decade.
However, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) has said that remarkably high turnover in some trucking segments points to a “flaw” in working conditions, and has called for steps to resolve driver frustrations such as unpaid waiting time.
A key point of contention between the two sides of the debate is a proposal to drop the national minimum driving age on interstate trucking to 18 from 21.
ATA backs the shift as a way to recruit younger drivers, but OOIDA said the measure would threaten safety and only worsen turnover problems.
Government data from before the COVID-19 pandemic showed that the size of the trucking workforce was increasing, but also growing older.
A 2019 US Census Bureau analysis said the number of truckers was at an “all-time high” after a big decline following the 2008 recession, but the median age, 46, was five years older than the overall US workforce.
Veteran drivers express passion for a difficult profession, but also point to frustrations.
“It’s been the freedom to move around the country and see the country,” said Danny Smith, who drives for about six days each week, traveling from his Florida home to other southern states. Sixty-three-year-old Smith, who in 2016 hit a milestone of 3 million safe miles (4.83 million kilometers) at his Tennessee-based company Big G Express, said he was especially frustrated with detention time — waiting to load or unload — which eats up to 20 hours of his week, much of it unpaid.
“It’s frustrating the amount of time I give away for free and I’m away from home,” Smith said.
Smith said the problem has worsened in the past few months as big-box stores, in an effort to build inventories due to problems elsewhere in the supply chain, commissioned more trucks than they could handle efficiently.
Lamar Buckwalter, a third-generation trucker, who regularly drives to Texas from his Pennsylvania home, said the issues are caused by high demand.
“There’s not a driver shortage, but the truck shortage is created by the customers because they don’t want to pay,” he said.
The industry’s problems are most severe in the long-distance market, where turnover rates regularly top 90 percent, ATA data showed, meaning almost all drivers are replaced in a year.
However, a March 2019 study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the long-distance market, which employs less than one-quarter of all drivers, is burdened by “unattractive” working conditions, and that was before the pandemic created widespread labor shortages.
Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has written extensively on trucking, said many problems would be solved if trucking companies paid drivers for detention time.
“More and more of the cost of inefficiency has been put onto the driver, whose time is not valued,” said Viscelli, who called dropping the driving age a “terrible idea.”
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