We said before that the so-called “truck shortage” is complete bullshitand a new report from Business Insider confirms that there are drivers – they just don’t care about being paid peanuts by the big transportation companies.
The American Trucking Association has been beating this drum for decades. Most recently, it claimed that America was short of a ridiculous 80,000 drivers. This number, and similar dire warnings from previous years, are often reported not much of a challenge from certain journalists. But the ATA is an industry lobby, and such shocking numbers are in favor of creating less regulation for large corporations. Business Insider Call that tactic: complete bullshit.
Jason Miller, an associate professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, told Insider that there’s no shortage of truckers, just a shift in where they’re working.
They don’t want to drive for the big carriers anymore,” he said.
“Instead of a shortfall, we see what economists call a redistribution of incentives,” says Miller. As of January 2022, about 1.53 million Americans work in the trucking industry, up 0.9 percent from two years ago, according to BLS data compiled by Miller and viewed by Insider.
Miller said many drivers have become operating owners or started working for smaller carriers. He shared BLS data with Insider, showing that the average size of trucking facilities in the US plummeted from 10.6 employees at the end of 2019 to 9.4 employees in the third quarter of 2021.
Some truckers say they are treated badly by major carriers those who want to “pay the driver peanuts” and not include the time they might have to wait at the shipper and receiver. “You are not a name, you are a number,” says Gary Otterson, a 20-year trucking veteran from Alabama. “They want to reduce the driver to a usable resource.”
The answer to this alleged shortfall, according to the giants participating in the ATA, is to allow teenagers to drive large rigs across state roads. Just as someone in their 30s dating a 19-year-old doesn’t make the teen mature, it makes them easy to take advantage of, so the idea that teens have long distance transport capacity. Car accidents are still the number one cause of death for teenagers. Putting them behind the wheel of a multi-ton vehicle under a strict timetable and sleep restrictions was to blame, but ATA’s dire warnings about major driver shortages prompted Congress approved the pilot program earlier this year.
What this program misses is much easier solutions like improving our facilities and paying the experienced drivers we already have. Such steps will go a long way to filling any supposed gaps. One expert told Congress that simply eliminating 18 minutes of waiting hours around trucks suffered at ports and pickup points would be the equivalent of 80,000 new drivers on the road.
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Experts told BI that the massive rise in inflation can’t be tied to trucking either (another scare tactic by massive trucking companies.)
“People are seeing record ocean freight prices, record air freight prices, record truck transportation prices, and they want to blame that for the inflationary effects we’re seeing, and that’s just not what’s going on,” Miller said. He added that changes in commodity prices were largely behind current inflation.
The entire report is well worth your time and can be found here.
