At Joe’s Travel Plaza, a neon-lit rest stop on California’s main interstate highway, truckers can get a brief respite from life on the road. There’s a TV lounge, a laundry room and a free shower if you buy at least 75 gallons of fuel. There’s even a pair of massage chairs in the corner.
But drivers here are worried about the future. The supply chain crisis roiling the US has inevitably drawn them in, with a shortage of drivers being blamed for containers idling in ports and packages being delayed for months.
The trucking industry’s main trade body has said America is short about 80,000 drivers, a figure that’s made headlines around the country.
Truckers say the problem isn’t a shortage of qualified drivers; there’s plenty of people who have been through the training programs and hold a commercial driver’s license. The rot, they say, is far more systemic: low pay, long hours and an industry that treats drivers like “cannon fodder”, churning out new recruits who inevitably quit because the job is so grueling.
“There is no driver shortage; there’s a retention problem,” said Mike Doncaster, a 30-year veteran and driver trainer who parked his big rig at Joe’s Travel Plaza for the night, before heading up to Canada with another load of vegetables.
He said of the five drivers he’s trained in recent years, only one stuck with the industry. “It’s not a job; it’s a lifestyle – and new recruits don’t receive enough pay for the lifestyle.”
This month, the American trucking association said the nation will need to recruit nearly 1 million more drivers in the next decade to keep up with demands.
Bob Costello, the chief economist for the American trucking association, says in a statement that the reasons behind the latest shortage are myriad – an increasing demand for freight, pandemic-related challenges, early retirements and driving school and DMV closures, to name a few. “There has been tremendous pressure on the driver pool,” as a result, he says.
But labor economists, trucking experts and the drivers themselves describe an industry where deregulation and constant pressure to deliver goods at ever-cheaper prices has resulted in working conditions so poor and pay rates so low that they amount to “indentured servitude”. As a result, companies that train and recruit new drivers often have turnover rates as high as 100% in a year, they say.
Rise of the “owner-operator” scheme
Trucking used to be a high-paying, blue-collar job, but since the industry was deregulated in 1980, pay rates have dropped dramatically, said economics professor Michael Belzer, who authored the book Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation.
One of the biggest problems is that most…
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