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America has a truck driver shortage

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#71

Post by scarface74 »

rgbrenner wrote: post #34
scarface74 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At a certain point, the marginal value of a dollar to anyone isn't worth the work it would take to make that dollar. That value is different for different people based on the opportunity but it does add up in aggregate.

If someone can choose to make $30K a year and adjust thier lifestyle accordingly instead of making $90K a year doing a job that they don't want to do, many people will choose the former.

I would go so far as to say the vast majority of public school teachers make the choice between less pay and being able to do a job that they enjoy as opposed to doing a job that they don't enjoy.

Anecdotally, every person I know that decided to work in the school system (including my mom and my wife) chose to do it because of stability, being off for the summer, and being able to work with kids when they both could have made more money doing something else. I doubt you could offer them 10x the amount of money to be willing to work in the fields.

But more to the point of the article, many people would not take the trade off of the dangers and long hours away from thier families, for any amount of money.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#72

Post by furgooswft13 »

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…

> Truck driving as an occupation would be pretty much extinct in next 20 years as self driving trucks

I doubt it. Once off the highway trucks, given their size and ungainliness, have to perform maneuvers and general rule breaking to get around that I doubt any computer would be able to manage safely in 50 years at the very least.

I've said before that self driving vehicles will be a great boon to truck drivers in the immediate future. It will allow them to relax, relatively, on the most tedious and mind numbing part of the job. Navigating small roads and loading/unloading cargo will still be a human job for awhile to come.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#73

Post by skookumchuck »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #47
skookumchuck wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just put the truck on the railroad flatcar.

There is an enormous existing market for this. It's called intermodal transport. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_freight_transport

Given the interstates are clogged with long haul trucks, it obviously isn't nearly enormous enough.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#74

Post by bryanrasmussen »

chrisseaton wrote: post #64
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.

I wouldn't re-train as a truck driver for $200k a year? Would you? And you can't just say 'there's lots of people for whom $200k would be a lot of money' because there's a lot of people who whom $50k is a lot of money and those jobs aren't filled either. Short of literally offering a million dollars a year, it's got to be more complicated than how much you offer.

well I wouldn't but I make pretty good money already. but really the main reason I wouldn't retrain as a truck driver is if I retrain for something it's a job I envision lasting another decade at least.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#75

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

I, for one, would enjoy a physically challenging job spending time outdoors, learning about specialized equipment, hueristics for the business, if I felt like I was very well-paid and valued. Most such jobs seem to be marketed to push down salaries above all else, target the work at low-skilled candidates, generally have low-status perceptions in society, and hiring companies seem focused on finding ways to mitigate labor shortage without raising wages.

The quote, “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” comes to mind. Companies will not pay competitively. They’ll suffer in any other way, but they won’t pay people.

The same effect happens at many price points. For example, the huge push of hype into data science is often a way to push down wages in machine learning / stats. Jobs go unfilled for months, but the company will not offer competitive pay or benefits. I’ve seen this both as a candidate and as a hiring manager frustrated by HR & leadership teams vetoing rare, qualified candidates because they ask for $30k above the budget, or they want sponsored travel to academic conferences, or they want us to match their existing severance benefits at their current company.

Even when we have indisputable business needs for detailed experience in a domain specialty, they think: can’t you just hire a kid out of school with a cardigan & a macbook for $130K? When we show them a qualified candidate earning $200k, it’s just an unconditional no, without any thought as to why that wage gap is there, and why we have a “talent shortage.”

Just totally clueless yet extremely price sensitive.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#76

Post by ams6110 »

jbob2000 wrote: post #19
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.

They are increasing compensation, but the job is so shit, and so demanding on time, that it's still not worth it . I'd want to see $500,000 a year before I put long-haul trucking demands on my body. The industry has labour problems that aren't related to pay. Nobody wants to sit outside a business for 6-8 hours, earning 0 dollars. Solution: Fine deliverees by the minute. Over-policing of truckers. Solution: Lower fin…

Yes but there are people who don't have the same point of view as you. There are people who like spending a lot of time by themselves, for which trucking has an appeal. I know people in the trades who say things like "you couldn't pay me enough money to work in an office."

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#77

Post by ryanmarsh »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #10
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

In 1935 Congress passed the Motor Carrier Act of 1935. With it the ICC restricted new entry into the trucking business and approved specific routes. It also required motor carriers to file tariffs with the ICC 30 days in advance, and allowed protest from other common carriers of proposed tariffs, and required that carriers’ rates be reasonable “as to both minimum and maximum.” The underlying rationale of the 1935 Act was that the motor carrier sector was economically unstable and that cut-throat competition might destroy the fledgling industry.

Driving a truck paid well and the carriers got fat.

After a series of deregulation acts beginning in the 70’s there was a race to the bottom on prices. Many carriers went out of business. Driver pay dropped (all though you could still make a good living doing certain types of OTR.

Swings in the economy are felt in transportation.

Until the trucks drive themselves there will forever be too many/few drivers. It’s the nature of a deregulated industry that moves with the economy.

Every swing in a labor market is not a social crisis. Although we can all probably foresee some real social crises’ related to driver labor in the future and not of the “too little” kind.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#78

Post by vkou »

chrisseaton wrote: post #64
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.

I wouldn't re-train as a truck driver for $200k a year? Would you? And you can't just say 'there's lots of people for whom $200k would be a lot of money' because there's a lot of people who whom $50k is a lot of money and those jobs aren't filled either. Short of literally offering a million dollars a year, it's got to be more complicated than how much you offer.

I wouldn't re-train as a truck driver, but my partner, who makes $35,000/year moving heavy things around in a Seattle theater would. She'd step over a lot of bodies to do so.

The $50,000/year jobs that aren't being filled have one of:

1. Require years of non-transferable training.

2. Have insane working hours, that make your real pay closer to minimum wage.

3. In especially shitty working conditions.

4. Are in locations where $50,000/year isn't enough to live on.

5. Destroy your body after a few years on the job.

6. Have better-paying, better-work-condition alternatives that use similar skill-sets.

7. Or, more typically, two or more of the above.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#79

Post by Implicated »

jacobkg wrote: post #41

I hired the same company to move my car across the country then back four years apart. The same man drove the truck. He told me he expects the company will shut down in another decade or two as it’s too hard to find good reliable drivers who want a long term trucking job. It’s a family run company with a stellar reputation and they aren’t interested in short timers

I'll be shipping a car soon - have any contact details you can pass along?

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#80

Post by Someone1234 »

So the headline ("$80K job") and actual content of the article are at complete odds. All of the people they interviewed were making $45K-50K ish, with this one company offering $80K and claiming there is a "shortage."

If there is a real shortage why do truckers get paid less than some fast food employees? The article seems to answer its own question: Very low pay, very high hours, and little time spent at home/with family.

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