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America has a truck driver shortage

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#31

Post by ams6110 »

inglor wrote: post #18
adrianN wrote: post #9

Becoming a truck driver currently doesn't seem a wise choice when self-driving trucks are on the horizon.

This, not a single word about automation and self-driving trucks in the article but every person I talked to that considered this career path* has mentioned automation as a reason staying out of a field. A lot of people value job security really high. I agree with the comments saying that if the pay was higher then there wouldn't be such a shortage and the fact that is generally true. That doesn't mean the market alw…

TFA did touch on this, the comment was that self-driving trucks are a long way off. And I happen to agree that they are a lot farther off than people think. That last 10% of functionality needed to be safe on the road in non-normal situations such as construction zones, traffic accidents, ice, heavy rain or wind, is going to take a long time to achieve

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#32

Post by 5DFractalTetris »

I think I would enjoy trucking, but as a person born in the 1990s, I grew up in an area supplied entirely by trucks with no substantial agricultural land. One of the retail airstrips with the movie theater and a mall and a supermarket. Our community was connected by automobile transit, internet, and telephone.

I wouldn't want anyone still living like this to go hungry--we don't make the choice to enter the world we find ourselves in, as far as I know--but I can't stomach that lifestyle for myself or my children, or the kin of anyone I've known or met. When I was young it was thrilling, with engines and freeways and drive-thrus. My friends bought cheap sports cars and motorbikes, and there was 100 years of movies to watch.

Now I am older, and I find it inhumane.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#34

Post by rgbrenner »

scarface74 wrote: post #22
yasp wrote: post #2

I am so sick of this perpetual fallacy about labor shortages. If you can't find enough workers it means you need to raise the price you're offering. (But yasp the article cited one particular firm has already increased prices 15% this year.) Doesn't matter. There is a certain price at which the market will clear. If the market isn't clearing it's because the price being offered is too low. Keep trying.

That doesn't always work as is the case for farm work once you make immigration harder. How many Americans if given a choice would rather make $40K a year doing nice and comfortable office work than make $120K a year (yes I'm making up a number to make a point) to do back breaking manual labor in the hot sun? Not quite to that extreme, but I'm giving up money now by choosing not to go into management and stay a senio…

Why is 120k the right number? Have you taken some implicit biases of your own, and decided that's the worth of farm work?

The correct price of farm labor is whatever it costs to obtain it. There is no cap. It's whatever it costs to persuade people to move from their comfy office to the farm.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#36

Post by HarryHirsch »

StudentStuff wrote: post #26
lotsofpulp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make sense, you don’t need “infinite” amount of money. Pay a driver $200k a year. Or give them an 8 hour workday, and week off week on schedules so they can see their family. There’s many solutions, all of them involve incentivizing people to become drivers. If people want their Amazon orders so bad, they’ll end up paying. And if they don’t, then they have to re-prioritize what they want.

Part of the problem is with BNSF, UP & the other major long haul rail lines, there is no good aggregator for those looking to ship a few pallets of goods from California to Seattle, and the railroad is happy to set high minimums which make long distance trucking viable. Its ultimately quite silly, I really do think an Uber for Railroad shipping which partnered with the local railroads (that are desperate for revenue…

Uber for railroad shipping? LCL (Less-than-container-load) freight forwarding has been an industry since God-knows-when, and you'd think this includes intermodal. You learn all this when you've done a few international moves.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#37

Post by Karishma1234 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #6
yasp wrote: post #2

I am so sick of this perpetual fallacy about labor shortages. If you can't find enough workers it means you need to raise the price you're offering. (But yasp the article cited one particular firm has already increased prices 15% this year.) Doesn't matter. There is a certain price at which the market will clear. If the market isn't clearing it's because the price being offered is too low. Keep trying.

Our economy has split into areas where in some areas "talent" can get almost infinite amounts of money and in other areas it's simply not conceivable to pay people more. I wonder how free market people explain this. Based on the market theories I have heard it doesn't make sense.

Free market people understand these things pretty easily. I do not see why you are finding it hard. One obvious fallacy in your statement is that someone getting paid infinite money for talent. I have not seen any such examples so far beside Pentagon who get paid more and more irrespective of their incompetence.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#38

Post by always_good »

joering2 wrote: post #16

Why we haven't gotten a feasible working heavy weight capatul that would slingshot heavy cargo from spot to spot across states like jumping frog, I don't get where the problem is. I'm not saying catapult eggs, but majority of goods could withstand 1000Gs. We need Trevor Milton to stop working on electric truck and get into electric catapults.

I'm sure a bunch of children also wonder the same thing. The same way they wonder why we can't just cool off Texas with a big fan when it becomes too hot. After all, look how easy it was to come up with the idea (the hard part).

By the way, the reason is because you'd use a trebuchet, not the inferior catapult.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#39

Post by 52-6F-62 »

rgbrenner wrote: post #4

If you're an employer and you cant find employees, the answer is virtually always to increase total compensation. Theres no reason $80k is the top end of the pay range for any job. The economy does not price jobs based on prestige, education level, or some other signal... that's a judgement made by certain people about what they think a job is worth.. not the market. The opinions of people about the worth of a job ar…

This is definitely a major problem in large corporations with HR rules baked into the fabric of the thing over decades.

Many positions get assigned a grade based upon the nature of the work. A series of qualifiers fix that kind of position to a grade. You can earn anything inside of that grade, but not distinctly above it.

Considering yearly cost of living increases are usually fixed at about 2%, it can take one some many years before they even approach the cap. And then there is the yearly culling of the herd with no standard qualifier.

Somebody wants more money? You find a better job.

One of my favourite [read that with sarcasm] lines I'd heard in a yearly review was, "your salary here is like running a marathon..."

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#40

Post by throwaway2048 »

Karishma1234 wrote: post #20
yasp wrote: post #2

I am so sick of this perpetual fallacy about labor shortages. If you can't find enough workers it means you need to raise the price you're offering. (But yasp the article cited one particular firm has already increased prices 15% this year.) Doesn't matter. There is a certain price at which the market will clear. If the market isn't clearing it's because the price being offered is too low. Keep trying.

By your logic entire concept of labour shortage is outrageous because any shortage will clear with high enough price. But for any job such as that of Truck drive the market value of that job is only X. Paying more than X would mean you should look for alternatives and get out of that business. As the truck diver salaries go up cost of everything that relies on transportation also goes up marginally. Suddenly the stru…

businesses are not entitled to cheap labour just so they can have cheaper products, sorry.
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