I am curious if the shortage driven demand is setting these kids of for future career trouble. I would guess there might be short-haul drivers for quite some time, but long-haul and fixed path shipments are maybe not too far off the automation path? Will automation creep in slow enough for attrition to weaken the impact to drivers?
It would have to very efficient to compete with a pool of driver-owners who would be motivated/desperate to undercut the automated fleet owners. Those will have to own the vehicles, be responsible for maintenance, and of course, shoulder responsibility for insurance/safety.
Besides, what are you going to do when your expensive rig and its cargo drives to the shoulder in the middle of the desert with a software issue? Someone will have to get there and drive it home manually.
I would agree with this. Andrew Yang made this a talking point for UBI, but it was always hypothetical. Automating big rig hauling is a long way off just based on where we are with the consumer sector. Even in cars that are currently automated, a driver is onboard at all times.
The way I see truck automation going is that the drivers will still be there, but the skill of the job will be dramatically reduced, at least for long haul loads. I'm thinking it will be a lower paying job for drivers that "babysit" automated driving trucks. I don't believe this is optimal. A distracted driver is more dangerous, regardless whether they have a computer helping them drive. But, the incentives are there. I would much rather it looks like the airline industry, where computers have come a long way in assisting pilots, but the job still has stringent requirements of the pilot.
I think the first step will be long-haul trucking across long, technically easy, high-demand routes. Think of a cross country route taking something from San Francisco to Chicago. A driver gets you out of San Francisco, through the valley, and through the Sierras. Once it reaches Reno, the driver exits the truck, then the truck self-drives across the Nevada and Utah deserts until you reach Salt Lake City. A new driver gets you across the Wasatch but then I-80 is easy again all the way from Wyoming to Chicago so it goes back to self-driving. A driver takes over again to navigate Chicago's busy roads. You've cut the driver out of 80%, and no driver is going more than 300 miles in one shot.
One nitpick, the driver will more likely simply drop the trailer off, and pick up a new trailer to go back back home with.
The self driving truck will be valuable enough that you wouldn't want to waste any costly mileage by having it being actually driven.
Another likely scenario, you'll want to design big drop off hubs that are optimized for self driving trucks to successfully park and drop off/pick up trailers.
> Besides, what are you going to do when your expensive rig and its cargo drives to the shoulder in the middle of the desert with a software issue?
Same thing truckers do today: call a local towing/repair company to come fix it. There are mechanics everywhere who can deal with large trucks, all they need is a way to get paid.
Possibly, but you have that problem with literally any trade.
This is elective course in general public school, so they are not shortchanged of more general education.
In the states, the lawyers tend to win. So whomever does the design, whomever writes the code and whomever has the deepest pockets better worry when that 18-wheeler barrels over grandma. And this work damn well better be done more to space shuttle standards than those of every web and software package I’ve used…
Edit: or just lay roads rather than tracks and call them trains. Keep the humans away like they do now.
Why are these sentiments always downvoted? Do people honestly think that this generation of software folks are significantly better than the last 3-4? Given programmers ego, I assume “damn straight”. But then, that’s what the previous bunch said also.
Good, safe, stable coding is HARD which it’s not often done cuz hard = expensive. And weregild costs lots and lots of money.
> Do people honestly think that this generation of software folks are significantly better than the last 3-4?
I don't think they're worse, just that the damage they can cause is far wider, both because of the ease of spread and the increase in reliance on technology
> Do people honestly think that this generation of software folks are significantly better than the last 3-4?
Yes, because as Issac Newton said, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. In 1950 the first programmers didn't know a lot of the tricks to write good code that I do. (they also didn't have computers that could handle the multi-million line programs that I work on) Over years a lot of things have had to be discovered, and a lot of seemingly-good bad ideas had to be rejected the hard way.
Of course today there are a lot more "programmers" writing simple web apps that depend on complex back ends, but demand even less skill than the programmers of old (who had to worry about where on the drum their next instruction was - concepts that are lost on us today). Still, we have a lot more programmers who are better than the best of the old, than the sum total of all the old programmers.
Though I do have to be careful. I'm soon entering the category of a previous generation. I expect anyone still programming today - regardless of age - is of this generation. There is a lot of overlap of people who started out in older generations not knowing as much as todays, but have learned and now are todays generation.
Is this something that you can do part-time? I could imagine making some extra money on the weekends or holidays. You can listen to lectures while driving or sit in the cab and read while resting. Question is whether it's feasible to get jobs that fit that schedule.
I would imagine not really. Logistics jobs are all about reliable throughput. There may be spikes that need extra demand, but you're better off with 5 full time employees who will always show up, than having 4 then scaling up to 6 when you need, since that introduces logistical hurdles.
Interstate commerce. Within a state, state laws apply. It probably varies from state to state (I am not an expert). Crossing state borders, federal laws apply.
Commercial trucking and transportation is really complex, with Federal, State and local authorities for various exerting various and sometimes overlapping jurisdictions. It’s a feature of federalism.
The federal government runs a pretty impressive safety program by enforcing rules and targeting enforcement based on statistical analysis and national standards. Shady operators basically cannot operate interstate business for long.
At the state or local level, it varies. States usually have more lax standards. There’s a cat and mouse game around the regs which evolve over time - Chinatown busses being the most notorious example recently.
The regulations shape business. Usually something like a hotel minibus or senior services bus operates with state or local authority. Large limos often operate in a legal grey zone. As a consumer it sucks, as the less regulated carriers are often a nightmare — that hotel minibus may not have operating brakes or a qualified driver.
Most of the truck rental places DGAF how old you are as long as you have a valid license. All the B2B ones basically expect that the person doing the rental won't be the one doing the driving and they're gonna slap a min-wage 18yo in the seat regardless.
That's not true. Most just charge a surcharge for under 25. When I was under 25 I bought a AAA membership which waved that surcharge as several major car rental companies.
In EU you can (generally) start driving when you are 18. I assume the intention of the 21 years limit was so that the truck drivers has at least some practice before driving 20t vehicles on public road.
Learner licenses (in the EU afaik) will not allow you to cross borders or operate commercially. Crossing borders is like driving without a license. They generally are completely valid as soon as you turn 18 though.
Driving big rigs is dangerous for all involved. I think maturity matters but that can be tested for at any age. Driving underload without skill and practice can be very dangerous and loads are variable weight. Pay truckers double or triple pay since our roads in be states are deteriorating.
Cool, but this has nothing to do with OP's question (why does the age limit only apply when crossing state borders?). The answer is interstate commerce allows the Federal government to regulate it.
Completely agree. Big rigs with full load can weigh something like 80,000 pounds (40 tons)! They're much more dangerous to begin with due to the size and weight. Add to that dangerous road conditions (fog, rain, ice, snow) and it's much worse. Now put someone who's only had their driver's license a few years. Lack of maturity (generally speaking) and experience really makes it dicey. Heaven help us if the driver is glued to their phone texting their pals.
Hitting something with truck damages the truck and the thing. With tank it only damages the other thing... And when has army cared about collateral damage?
I'm gonna guess there's a lot of stuff (expensive enough to make passenger cars seem cheap - including other tanks) to crash a tank into between when you get in on-base and when you arrive in enemy territory where you're supposed to break stuff.
It is entirely possible and legal to enlist at 17, and the first day on base be given the keys to some huge ten ton truck and told to drive it across the country.
"Basic training" would happen - but that may or may not cover driving the trucks. The above scenario happened to a person I know when they enlisted (though they were 18 at the time).
>>> work is dangerous, comes with low pay and and that the hours are unbearable.
All of which is true for the majority of drivers. If the industry wants to attract people they need to get off the "per mile driven" pay scheme where truckers can spend hours, or even days unpaid waiting at terminals, docks, etc...
Trucking today is a terrible job, with low pay if calculated on a per hour worked basis. Combined with most of the regulations being placed on the driver, not the company, with most of liability for violating the regulations born by driver not the company. There is a continual battle between doing what the company says, and doing what the law says. Drivers are stuck in the middle because it is perfectly legal for a company to have a driver break the law or drive an unsafe rig, the only person that has to pay the fine is the driver.
The companies are very careful in the language and punishments. If a driver refuses a load because the trucks turn signals are out as an example, well the company will not come right out and say "You must take the load" but that driver will likely find himself sitting for possible days unpaid waiting for the next dispatch as punishment or they will be assigned the less profitable routes, etc
I know personally more than a few drivers that would pay out of their own pocket to buy parts to fix trucks themselves so they would not end up in this dispatch punishment.
Also programmers. Walmart is a massive Clojure shop, puts out some very good open source libs, and very much views their IT department as a competitive advantage and not a cost center.
Even before Brexit, the UK was suffering from a massive shortage of truckers. Covid and the resulting upset of the transport industry definitely had an impact as well.
However, many UK truck drivers were foreign nationals that all got sent home or didn't believe in their job security after Brexit. Nothing in economics is ever the result of just one thing, but Brexit has made an existing problem much worse.
The difference can be seen all around the UK. Every European country has some kind of shortage in the logistics industry, but only in the UK are the problems bad enough that the army needs to step in.
The biggest, most publicly-visible problem that caused the army to have to step in - the fuel crisis - wasn't really caused by the trucker shortage itself though. It was a media-created phenomenon; breathless front-page headlines about petrol stations running out of fuel caused everyone to go out panic buying, and the infrastructure just doesn't have the capacity to handle everyone filling their tank at once. The actual underlying problems were so tiny that no-one would've noticed them without the media pushing it - a handful of stations out of fuel in the whole country - and as far as I can tell that's what happened in the USA. According to financial publications like Bloomberg and FT they've been having ongoing problems with petrol stations running out of fuel due to a shortage of tanker drivers too, but the mainstream media hasn't covered it so there's been no panic buying, no crisis, people don't even know it's an issue.
What you're saying is not backed up by the numbers. One of the reasons the army stepped in is because our demand exceeded what we could supply with our number of tankers. So we had enough tanker drivers, but not enough tankers. The tankers did not emigrate.
I am Polish. Poland reverted back to COVID-normal a lot earlier, and was later to implement lockdowns, than the UK.
For people on the fence about going back home, lockdowns were a major driver. Additionally, Poland has rejected vaccine mandates, whilst the UK seems on the cusp of implementing them, and requires them for re-entry to the UK.
For people who have experience living under totalitarianism, being forced by the Government to take a medical treatment (often for no purpose since many working-class people already survived COVID) is unacceptable.
The other big factor is that a lot of people who have worked in the UK for the last 5-10 years have now saved up enough money to buy a nice house in Poland. By contrast UK real estate remains continuously unaffordable due to the restrictions on development and continued population expansion from immigration (legal and otherwise).
These trends of de-migration would have played out slowly over the next 5 years but COVID rapidly accelerated them.
There is a large cohort of anti-brexit media that spins everything economically bad as a result of Brexit. It's hard to know what to thing when economist are so politically spiked.
Our little community college has a commercial license program. We, with some outside help, even bought a simulator. The program goes well with the other vocational programs. The students have had no problem finding jobs. The sequence of book, simulator, then roadwork in an actual semi has been quite successful.
We need more electricians as well. Got a quote to add a car charger last week and it was a hilarious four figure sum, with a month and a half lead time.
6-10 hours?! One is basically adding a 220V outlet, and usually in a place that's very close to the box full of circuit breakers (the garage). In our case, the charger is about three feet from the breaker box. I would have done it myself if it wasn't installed for free (because $REASONS). As it was, took the pro about 30 minutes.
Now, that's not to say there aren't more difficult installations. But I imagine in a lot of cases in the U. S., where a lot of breaker boxes live in the garage, it shouldn't be anywhere near a four figure installation sum. My guess is a lot of contractors of any kind can pretty much name their price right now. Or they do I used to do when I didn't want anymore consulting work: jack up the quoted price enough that I would drop other clients to do the job at that rate should the potential client be desperate enough to pay it.
Are you aware of the requirements needed to be a licensed, bonded electrician? In my state you need at least 4000 hours of training bare minimum, higher tier licenses require more. This usually entails getting average pay for very dull work, for 2-4 years. Then you need tools, insurance, a vehicle (usually a diesel truck with lock boxes on the sides here), and a reliable employer. If you're starting your own small company and training others, that's a bit of a gamble as well.
Also, most electricians make more money doing new construction, especially condo or apartment buildings. You're getting charged that much because they could have made the same amount of money (or a bit less) putting those hours towards a bigger, longer term project. As someone who works in a skilled trade, I can guarantee they just didn't think your project was important or worth it (and they're right). They see someone who can afford an electric car, and they know what it's worth to you to charge it.
But hey, you could always just google it, do it yourself and hope the inspector doesn't notice. What's the worst that could happen?
>Are you aware of the requirements needed to be a licensed, bonded electrician?
Yes. I'm also aware of their average income in the Bay Area, and it absolutely did not justify the price.
>Also, most electricians make more money doing new construction, especially condo or apartment buildings.
Barely any of that in the Bay Area.
>I can guarantee they just didn't think your project was important or worth it (and they're right). They see someone who can afford an electric car, and they know what it's worth to you to charge it.
Market is white hot for them, not going to lie.
>But hey, you could always just google it, do it yourself and hope the inspector doesn't notice. What's the worst that could happen?
Not where I live, need a city permit and a licensed installer. I'm leasing so that's what the home owner requires.
what did you think it's supposed to cost? i can't imagine it would cost less than $1000, even just running conduit inside the walls, instead of doing drywall.
You could always do it yourself if you feel it's overpriced.
It's no different than software engineers charging $300/hour consulting fees. Sure, they're just typing on a keyboard (or running some wires in this case), but you're paying for more than just the marginal cost of that particular job. You're paying for the investment that the specialist had to make to gain the experience required to be able to do the job.
Installing an EV charger (which are supposed to be installed in every new house built in California) versus consulting fees for an enterprise software build out are not apples and oranges, it's apples and horses.
I own a recruiting tech company, and we have more than a few trucking companies that use our P2P chat system. In general (yes, there are exceptions):
1. Insurance rates dictate the minimum age... which is often around 26.
2. Average age of a truck driver is 56. So 4 years from retirement.
3. Federal laws are now much stricter on disclosure, so drivers who would have just moved from company to company after an accident... are now not able to get jobs nearly as easily. This is for the best, but the short term effect is there are many drivers who will have to find a new profession.
4. Wages are going up quickly and many drivers are changing jobs once per year (sometimes more)
>>Insurance rates dictate the minimum age... which is often around 26.
Many of the larger trucking companies are self insured, so this really does not apply to them
>>Average age of a truck driver is 56. So 4 years from retirement.
Where do you get that drivers will retire @ 60? For most of them their Social Security will not kick in until 67, and I do not know many drivers that have a fully funded individual retirement account.
>>Federal laws are now much stricter on disclosure, so drivers who would have just moved from company to company after an accident..
This is really not due to Federal laws, there is a company the name escapes me right now that is similar to Consumer Credit Agency that tracks all driver activity, companies self report accident, and other adverse load events to this reporting agency
Edit: DAX/DAC System I believe, or something like that
>>Wages are going up quickly and many drivers are changing jobs once per year (sometimes more)
They are still using the flawed Per Mile pay scheme which means drivers will still end up being screwed in the end.
Further more companies are adopting the "Owner Operator" model where by the driver is leasing the truck from the company at an obscene rate far more than the truck is actually worth, and the driver then bares all the costs and if they do not get enough work the company takes back the truck, leases to a new sucker, and send the original driver into collections bankrupting him/her
> there is a company the name escapes me right now that is similar to Consumer Credit Agency that tracks all driver activity, companies self report accident, and other adverse load events to this reporting agency
> Many of the larger trucking companies are self insured, so this really does not apply to them
Yes, and those in-house insurance policies dictate hiring practices, not the other way around.
> This is really not due to Federal laws, there is a company the name escapes me right now that is similar to Consumer Credit Agency that tracks all driver activity, companies self report accident, and other adverse load events to this reporting agency
Yes, and last year the DOT (federal agency) rolled out required background checks. Was a really big deal from January to March, as companies large and small had to say no to a lot of applicants. Most of the data came from state BMV records that were "linked" and surfaced a lot of surprises when companies background checked their existing employees.
> They are still using the flawed Per Mile pay scheme which means drivers will still end up being screwed in the end. Further more companies are adopting the "Owner Operator" model where by the driver is leasing the truck from the company
For anyone thinking or saying - "isn't this something someone could do as an extra job at weekends" - from my personal experience driving some medium-size trucks in the UK while I was at university (helping a friend who had a delivery company), driving anything that's larger than a van is a totally different experience than driving any sort of car, and is both much harder work and a magnitude more stressful. Not to mention how f**ing difficult it is to reverse.
And I wasn't driving anything near the size of the rigs being talked about here.
I think it depends. I've driven stuff like larger box trucks or pulling a larger trailer (even a tiny house!) without any issue. I wouldn't want to drive them in a city though. That would be stressful.
Just don't get in a hurry. That way you can look far enough ahead to predict any issues before they become pressing. When you're starting out, this also gives you time to remember how the transmission works (although all new rigs are automatics now, which might explain the high schoolers). All the idiots on the street with you can either pass or wait behind.
I agree with this, but it doesn't solve all the issues of driving in the cities (maybe you're area is different). I would be concerned with the narrow streets with people not parked well, double parked, etc. Philly seems to be terrible to drive in compared to many other cities. If you do get into an accident, the police won't even come to make a report. The roads are generally in terrible condition too.
Never drive them into a city. That's one of my rules for operating a larger vehicle; if I can avoid urban/city zones I will. Sometimes you can't avoid them, but the rest of the time I plan to go around. Especially if I'm hauling something heavy.
Well, one of the differences between the US and UK is the US is much larger, and the long-haul 18-wheeler routes are going to take longer than a weekend to drive and back. Going between, say, Chicago and NYC takes ~12 hours... not counting stops. And that's one way!
Aren’t American trucks bigger though? Seems like the economics would encourage companies to make the biggest truck that can physically fit on the roads, to maximize cargo per driver hour.
true, but then in the UK you're working with roads that aren't even really designed to host trucks in the first place. American roads are pretty grid-ish, British roads are all over the shop and much more organic in structure.
That's an interesting point. It would seem that the idea truck would have the highest possible cargo to truck weight ratio for profitability purposes. The square cube law would seem to indicate that larger trucks are heavier, but add much more cargo space to compensate.
However, larger engines could be less efficient per pound than their smaller counterparts. My intuition is that the opposite is true, but I could definitely be wrong on that.
Slightly bigger, because in the US the regulation is on trailer length, whereas European regs are on total length. So Euro trucks are all cab-over designs, while American trucks are generally engine-in-front (easier to access for maintenance). But unless you're talking about a double trailer, not much difference.
The problem is a lot of American roads have poor clearance. You can find a lot of images online of trucks that have been opened like a sardine can along the top due to hitting a low bridge. You can't make the truck too long either or else it will be unable to turn on right angle intersections. When they deliver big things like wind turbines on American roads, its can be an extremely slow process with engineers spotting each and every single turn along the route.
It only takes one choke point or low bridge or prohibited route to ruin your whole trip. While 99% of US roads may be bigger and wider, 1% of a 400 mile daily trip can cause major problems.
Here's the problem with driving on the weekends. Unless you get hooked up with a company and they're ok with paying your insurance the answer is no. The TLDR here is that if you're and employee or contractor for a trucking company, you'll be paying insurance rates based on driving the legal DOT(in the states) limit.
If you want to see what this looks like, google around for "hot shot trucking". It doesn't require a CDL under, I believe, 24k lbs. BUT it does require a special insurance since you're no longer a person, but a company.
Each individual state may have more stringent CDL licensing requirements. However, every state must follow federal requirements as a baseline. One element in federal CDL operator requirements is a vehicle’s GVWR. The federal requirement specifies that, when a vehicle has a GVWR of 26,000 pounds or less, the operator does not need a CDL. However, this does not mean the truck GVW can be loaded above the GVWR of 26,000 pounds and operated by a non-CDL driver. Federal requirements state the GVW must, in addition, be 26,000 pounds or less. CDL requirements become more confusing when the vehicle is towing a trailer.
I 2nd this. I've driven a truck with a long horse trailer just pushing the edge of the requirement of a Class A license since I was 16 and I can say it is HARD. That's without having to worry about a tractor gear box and clutch brakes on an 18 wheeler. Everything you do has to be planned well in advance.
You need to constantly look out for human squirrels driving econoboxes and trying to pass you on the right while you make a wide turn. Crowded gas stations truly suck. Bollards hide and try to eat your trailer. If you get into a corner and can't turn sharp enough you can get trapped by your trailer.
Then there are the additional laws, weight limits, fines and fees, logging requirements, hour limits, hazmat, double trailers and a hundred other things that a trucker needs to know.
My brother is a Romanian truck driver (he’s on his way to France right now, if I’m not mistaken). He got into this career at 32 years of age because he couldn’t make it anymore running a small cow farm, his farm couldn’t compete against the subsidized milk coming from the likes of France or Poland (a temporary, politically-induced ban on selling beef to Russia also didn’t help, his cows’ value was halved over-night). What I’m saying is that every action has a reaction, those Romanians and Bulgarians are not into it to steal someone else’s job, most of them were forced to do it because of economical and political decisions taken over their heads.
I spent 4 years driving a 35ft RV with our family. The trips were fun, the driving is scary.
Wind affects you so much. You can feel big vehicles passing you. Every slight angle on a road makes you feel like you’re going to tip over. You need special navigation systems that know your vehicle size so you don’t get routed down a road where you can’t turn around or a bridge can’t support you.
Definitely learned to appreciate truck stops and rest areas though. Parking overnight fills up so many times you’ll end up in a Walmart parking lot because of all the cameras.
It’s an adventure. It could be fun and a lot of people love it. Some people especially get into long distance trucking.
But IMO it’s definitely a full time job with a lot of responsibilities. I’m shocked there aren’t more accidents which is really a credit to all of these drivers and their training.
I have spent a little over a year traveling every few days/weeks with a 35ft fifth wheel RV.
I hope to high heavens that you didn't have a normal bumper pull with a length of 35 ft. That would be utterly crazy!
It is completely uneventful if you have a proper truck and hitch, even with a 30 mph crosswind, though I have never gone over 75 mph with this setup. If you EVER feel like you are not in control or the vehicle is unstable, your setup is fatally flawed, and you need to reconsider your hitch and truck setup.
Open source OSMAND has truck navigation with weight, width, and height restriction considerations.
Truck stops and rest areas should be your last resort. You need to make phone calls and strike deals with potential places to stay at discounted rates. Being nice over the phone goes a long way.
In fairness, UK streets are often tiny compared to those in the US (at least in my experience motoring around southern England for a week). I suspect that plays a nontrivial role.
No doubt, but in my short experience in southern England, if you're not on a major highway, you're often on a lane just big enough for one compact car and sidewalks are used in case of oncoming traffic. Chicago alleys are positively spacious by comparison. I imagine truck drivers just learn routes with wider roads.
Just this past weekend I drove a 25ft truck for a 400 mile move. It was the first time I've driven something bigger than a car and I gained a lot of respect for truck drivers. Surprisingly difficult to do basic things like lane centering.
There was one experience where the local Uhaul gave me a 20' truck instead of the 10' van I requested. It was the most stressful, surreal experience I ever had trying to maneuver that big dumb truck around city streets. And this was just to move a broke college graduate's stuff; basically a cheap futon, book case, and desk. Nothing in the truck was worth the damage of hitting or scraping a car.
This would've been a perfect time to switch over to unmanned vehicles. A large number of senior drivers stay on the job, but we start moving to self-driving tech for the boring all-interstate stuff.
Exactly my thoughts as well. We've had test sandboxes for EV trucks with overhead wiring, have been talking about autonomous driving for over ten years now - yet nothing tangible and usable has come out of it except maybe autonomous lot parking and assists.
Or we can just put one driver in the front of a truck with a bunch of trucks behind it, and put it on a "self driving road" made of iron rails and call the front truck a locomotive ...
Is there really a shortage of truck drivers? Or are there enough people with the needed licences, but they'd rather work in McDonalds, because they pay more?
That article says "As of the start of 2020, Chinese investors owned about 192,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land valued at about $1.9 billion". That's out of 900mil acres of farmland in the USA. So about 0.02% -- hardly a "huge amount".
I mean.. houses are an item.... a better question would be, is there enough (desirable) land to build houses on, and will the government let you build there.
I live in a city where we have enough land, but the government wont let anyone build pretty much anywhere, and the housing prices are horrible.
Depending on how you do it, long haul trucking is a worse job than McDonald's, if McDonald's is paying enough.
> The average truck driver salary in the USA is $61,843 per year or $31.71 per hour. Entry level positions start at $45,970 per year while most experienced workers make up to $85,000 per year.
McDonald's is approaching $20/hr around here, which is getting close to those entry-level positions, no special training needed, and you get to live at home with family instead of being OTR all the time.
I was just in rural Idaho and the McDonald's sign said pay starting at $15/hour. COL index is about 5% higher than national average, based on a quick search.
No, it's a low COL area but there are just no workers. Closing shifts are $18/19 starting (at least according to the sign they've had stuck up since before COVID).
McD's won't start everyone at $20/h, but in an environment where starting wage is $15-$17, shift managers will be at least within striking distance of $20/h. This is not necessarily in a high COL area.
My understanding is that it really depends on how you calculate pay. Trucking is often paid pr mile driven rather than pr hour 'worked'. So if you divide your total wage by the number of hours you are in or around your truck then hourly wage can come out much lower than McDonald's.
Here in Canada, truckers have an entry wage of about $18/h. Starbucks pays $15-16 and from what I’ve heard anecdotally, has excellent benefits and flexible hours, neither of which are guaranteed as a long-hauler.
$30 an hour driving might be more than $12 an hour at Macnaldo's or Prince Hamburger, you're only getting paid for the eight hours you're driving and not for the time you're away from home.
I used this as a literary device, because apart from many other unregulated professions, trucking requires special licences that most people don't have. Anyone can clean toilets, most just don't want to for the money offered. Not anyone can drive a trucks... so i was wondering is this a "not enough licenced people" issue to cover the work, even with "infinite pay", or just a "not enough pay" issue for people with licences and other job offers.
But considering the other comments, McDonalds-like jobs pay similar amounts of pay for a lot better working conditions (less responsibility, stay at home with family, less dangerous,...).
It is my understanding that at least a part of the problem (not sure how significant) is that some new pollution prevention regs at California ports have sidelined many independent operators because their rigs do not meet the required standards. New trucks are extremely expensive so a good chunk of these operators have left the market.
There is absolutely no labor shortage in america, it's 100% a fair wage shortage. Truck drivers are a bit like boot campers in a way, you can go and take like a 6-month course and become one. So the market flooded with these folks, and while let's just say a fair wage for a truck driver would be around 100K a year, most are only making 60 to 70.
I bet if the trucking companies decide it to start all of their employees at 110k they'd have no shortage of people willing to drive.
So I just looked it up. Unless you make $4.75 an hour or less, you're coming out ahead working and putting your child in daycare. I'm in a ~1 million population US city.
$4.75 is half the state minimum wage, and a fraction of what anywhere near me is starting people out at. No one pays minimum wage any more. Target is paying $15/hr to stock shelves.
How does this work out? Most daycares have a legally required low ratio of staff-to-babies (like 3:1 or so). So just on wages alone you need 1/3 the minimum wage per baby. Add in all the overhead and the fact that maybe you don't want your daycare staff making the absolute minimum wage to watch your children..
+1. America has two different labor pools: those who are willing to compromise on their lifestyles and those who will only accept a living wage.
One side of America has been celebrating a reduction of migrants entering the country for four years, and now suddenly business owners are seeing that resource pool run dry. Even if these business owners did not rely on immigrant laborers, their own workforce is finding more opportunities. In many ways, it seems like that particular populist administration has provided what was promised.
Unless there is some major shift back to the norm, I can see businesses shifting to leverage labor more productively. I don't think this is a bad thing - America has always been addicted to its cheap, exploitable labor and this trend has gotten worse over the last three decades. Hopefully, these changes can continue to be more equitable to both sides. I could also foresee a reduction in excessive consumption - maybe a reduction in the number of "fast casual dining trends" and other horizontal growth trends.
I would argue a competitive salary at 18 can make the world of difference for a graduate who doesn't have the resources to attend college (as long as they were taught financial literacy by a parent or school)
They've been saying the same about factory and warehouse work for several decades, and yet Amazon (who has spent over a billion $ buying robotics companies) is hiring hundreds of thousands of people in the US at higher than prevailing wages.
Further -- we know that employment in a job trails off over decades, it doesn't fall off a cliff suddenly. Truck driving jobs are still increasing. I would wager that the average 18-year-old truck driver today could retire from that job when she's in her 60s.
I used to work at a factory. In 1950 there were 2000 people on the assembly line. Today there are 200. Today they make just as much as in 1950, perhaps more depending on how you measure. Sure there are still people there, but automation keeps getting better. Not too long ago 80 people lost their job when laser CNC cutters became good enough to do their job. Even where manual work is done, rechargeable tools tighten the bolts faster than a manual wrench.
Things have gotten a lot safer too. Many less people have nicknames like "stubby" or "lefty" because the automatic safety stops the machine when (not if - repetitive work leads to forgetting to be safe) body parts are in the way.
> In 1950 there were 2000 people on the assembly line. Today there are 200
I had a feeling this would get raised. The obvious retort is that the US has been creating tons of manufacturing jobs, but that due to changes in our trade regime, those jobs are generally created overseas. One could very easily imagine modifications to our existing trade regime that create incentives to employ Americans in factories, if such an outcome was desired.
Yes, factories are more automated, but factory workers globally are still a huge and growing segment of the workforce.
> factory workers globally are still a huge and growing segment of the workforce.
Do you have a source to support this claim? It's obviously a huge workforce, but growing? Automation is happening all over the globe. I couldn't find exact numbers, but it feels like factory workers are going the way of the farmers.
Page 12 details change in manufacturing employment 2001-2014. The US dropped 4 million manufacturing jobs over that period, but Vietnam and Indonesia each added nearly that many. Total employment in the sector increased by 56 million. That's over 4 million new jobs, annually, over the period.
Even the US has been adding manufacturing jobs the last 5-10 years. 2018 saw the addition of 300k manufacturing jobs in the US:
If there were some automation on the near horizon that could slow that job growth, there's a 5-year addressable market of $50B for the jobs added in 2018 alone. I am skeptical such automation is on the near horizon in any state where it is ready to be widely deployed.
The dot-com crash overlapping with China entering the WTO slide in manufacturing employment was especially brutal. A third of US manufacturing jobs relocated in 10 years. ("Relocated" instead of "lost" because Americans are still buying those goods, and their production did not become completely automated in that timeframe.)
Let me know when they manage to automated cross country freight trains, then we can talk about when they will have automated interstate trucks, let alone intrastate trucks (which make up probally 60% or more of the driver jobs)
in 2060 there will still be a huge demand for drivers. Fully Automated driving is vaporware, even if they make the tech work which they are still decades away from, there is legal and political hurdles that will be even harder to over come.
The main reason we don't automate cross country trains seems to be unions. The technology is there. If railroads had the will it would be done. However the productivity of a train driver (pulling a long train) is high enough that it probably isn't a high priority for the railroads even though they could. Trucks are so much less productive that automation makes more sense even though it is a harder problem.
And you do not think there will be not Union, and Political issue with Automating away one of the largest employment sectors in the nation?
For crying out loud we still build tanks that the military has not wanted for years because its a jobs program, and your telling me States and Federal government are just going to stand by and allow all of those primary, not to mention the thousands of secondary jobs just go poof, with no push back
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I love how people only talk about the technical problems here, the Technical problems with level 5 Freight Trucks are HUGE, and likely at least 20 years away from solved...
The political problems with it however are far far far far more daunting
Assembly lines can replace a lot of that. My company has several miles to move parts. Get the part off the truck (Just in time - nothing is on the truck if we don't need it that day), attach it do the line, 30 minutes later (after going all over the factory) the guys detach it and put it in the cnc laser. Then back on that line to go to the bending operations, then off to welding, then paint, then to final assembly. Parts can be on and off a dozen times in a process that takes days.
We don't have a line like a traditional car factory final assembly because we need to be more flexible, but there are conveyors going all over. (interestingly final assembly is still pushed down the line by hand)
Everyone should expect to change careers a few times in their life. Forty years ago was 1980. The world has changed dramatically in since then.
Even if you are in ostensibly the same role in 2060 as you are today, what that role looks like is going to be completely different. Unrecognizable even.
Isn't truck driving in the US a horrible job? Pay is shit. Sometimes you work for free. You can't really have a family like you could in other industries, and every year your pay stays stagnant if you're lucky.
My friend operates a truck. He owns his own and only with that is he able to earn 80k a year. And even he is looking to get out because 3 months on the road at a time means no family life.
There is no free lunch. Every blue collar business that you can cook up either comes with significant start up costs or a decade of crap jobs working your way up the ladder. The money you make is directly proportional to the amount of stuff you do in house from customer acquisition to maintaining your machines. This comes with employees, paperwork, compliance, etc, etc or it caps your scale.
True, but it says that the guy owns his own truck. Those are not inexpensive to pay for (purchase price, insurance, and maintenance). I can't imagine what it costs just to replace a few tires.
Yeah if you don't own your truck, and can't get a loan, you might be looking at 20-30k a year AND possibly negative numbers often times! Lease-to-fail.
It sounds good on paper until you consider the facts. Being an owner-operator means you maintain your own truck, find your own loads, and take care of everything related to your business (insurance, licensing, rent, parking, etc).
Just maintaining a truck is crazy stressful. It might be ok for some time until something major breaks on your truck and you’re not working for a week and you’re out an additional $5k for repairs. Just hope you’re not stranded in the middle of nowhere and have to pay thousands to have your truck towed.
It’s also in the top 10 most dangerous jobs. It’s incredibly stressful. And all the latest regulations will put you on edge at all times. When you’re an owner-operator, you are constantly walking the line between pissing off customers and losing your license.
Given his age, he's probably been in the game a while. Does he own his truck? Is his truck paid off? How old is it?
What does he haul? It is specialized?
Does he cover his lease, insurance, gas, etc from his own pocket? Do you know about how much that is monthly?
How many miles does he drive on average?
I don't mean to bombard you with questions, but there's so much variation in pay you need more information than just salary to really understand that number.
100k is pretty normal for Teamster drivers, with a company vehicle, benefits etc. Of course, those positions are extremely easy to fill. There's not even close to a labor shortage there.
According to my father, there is a labor shortage for this position, at least at his company.
He is pretty high up in seniority, but there are so few drivers that he still gets called in on days he would normally have off because they don't have enough drivers under him.
"Teamster" yeah I heard that a lot. Teamster is mostly dead. They (companies hiring / employing drivers) kind of destroyed the reasonable union and saved a dollar, only to their own demise.
The other reply is correct. He is a union employee working for a major carrier.
He drives nights up to the legal number of hours/miles as required and sleeps in cheap hotels during the day. My understanding is that his carrier does not use sleeper cabs because they use the same trucks for both local and over the road deliveries.
TIL 80k is a shit salary and truck drivers don't have families.
Truck driver is certainly not a dream job, but salaries are fairly good compared to the median in the US. And its not more difficult to have a family than if you're in the military or a night nurse or any other job with unusual schedule.
> And its not more difficult to have a family than if you're in the military or a night nurse or any other job with unusual schedule.
Military has huge divorce rates. And it is not like women were super eager to date military guys seriously. In a lot of ways it is worst then being with truck driver even, due to forced relocations every couple of years.
Night nurse get to be present outside of shift. Night nurse gets to be present parent. That is impossible for a soldier on deployment.
80K for a owner operator is shit, he is not bring home 80K in salary, out of that 80K he has to pay for the Truck, Fuel, Insurance, Repairs, Self Employment Taxes, License Fees, and a whole host of other things
My Guess that is eating about 50% of that revenue way, so then his pay is probably around 40-45K gross profit before taxes.
As the son of a life-long truck driver, this comment does not accurately reflect the difficulties of a 1-2 day a week father. While you are correct that truck driving is not unique in respect to difficulties with family life, I would never recommend anyone go into over-the-road driving if they have any plans to have a family.
It would be more palatable to offer free university tuition to the top 20 percent (which has been true many places in the past and is still a thing in some places).
my father went to high school in rural Illinois in the late 60’s. He got a full ride “hardship grant” simply because he was a decent (not exceptional) student and came from a poor farming family.
To be fair, the problem isn't the people not going to Uni, it's the chasm that exists in-between. A decent investment in trade-schools/polytechs and it wouldn't matter so much.
But then, the UK fcked over a lot of its trades to become a "service economy", so who knows.
In my opinion people really should have jobs. Our ancestors didn't sit around all day. They had "jobs" like hunting and gathering. Jobs and careers give people structure and meaning to their lives; a kid being a trucker is probably better for his mental health than having no job and just being a UBI recipient.
Why does the thing from which we derive meaning have to be a job? Why can't UBI recipients create art, have hobbies, meaningfully interact with their community during their day? Our ancestors didn't sit around - they did all those things, too, and those things also gave them structure and meaning.
I think hobbies are distinctly different from careers. I suck at golf. If I had UBI I might golf all day. I’d still suck. I think you need something that fits your skills that makes you feel like you’re contributing
Also, California's AB5 law has outlawed owner operators, which is a very large chunk of how trucking has worked for decades, making trucking a less desirable career. This is also one of the big reasons for the large backlog at the CA ports.
I find it hard to believe that a single state is able to cause such large supply problems nationally (and internationally) because of a law barring independent trucking companies from doing business in their state.
But then again, it _is_ California so I'm not surprised.
I just hope that maybe whoever is making the laws comes to their senses, because they're not just hurting California with this legislation.
AB5 did not outlaw owner-operators; however, some owner-operator fleets have decided not to operate in California due to possible driver reclassification from contractors to employees due to AB5.
An owner-operator making a haul for Costco is not at all prevented from operating in California as they can satisfy the ABC test for contracting. Large logistic companies that hire owner-operators on a contract basis are impacted as their restrictions on the contracts bump the owner-operator into the employee rather than contractor bucket. This increases costs, so they are pushing back.
Seems likely that there will eventually be a care out for trucking since that industry was not really the target of AB5 in the first place.
> Seems likely that there will eventually be a care out for trucking since that industry was not really the target of AB5 in the first place.
AB5 which codified the existing ABC test, made it consistent so that people in one working relationship with an employer wouldn't be employees for some purposes and contractors for others, and carved out industry specific exceptions to the test—those exceptions were the specific “targets”, not every other industry in the state where the existing judicially-applied ABC test was merely codified. Trucking already got some exceptions in AB5 (so they kind of were a “target”); they might get more.
The gig-economy firm propaganda that they were targets of AB5, rather than just a particular moneyed interest that was out of compliance with the law before AB5, is inaccurate.
No, it didn't. One because as the FAQ you link notes, owner-operators of trucks are not categorically banned. Second, as your FAQ also obliquely indicates but fails to clearly and directly state, to the extent ant existing business process was banned, it was banned by the California Supreme Court decision in Dynamex applying the ABC test to determine employee vs. contractor status, which is why
the lawsuit it refers to against the application of the ABC test was before AB5 was passed, and later amended to include claims challenging AB5, which codified the rule of Dynamex, added exceptions, and made some consistency changes in other law so that relationships that were employment for some purposes under Dynamex would not still be contractor relationships for purposes of other law.
> Also, California's AB5 law has outlawed owner operators
No, it didn't. To the extent anything did, the application by the California Supreme Court of the ABC test in Dynamex (prior to AB5) did (which also isn't entirely true, owner-operators usually meet 2 of the 3 prongs of the test, and the third prong depends on the core business of the employing firm; some will pass and some won’t.) AB5 actually created an explicit time-limited exemption to the ABC test for certain owner-operators of trucks (notably, in construction.)
This is a symptom of the decline of union labor in trucking and deregulation causing a race to the bottom. I'm unsure we should be happy high schoolers are being pulled in, versus making trucking jobs more secure and paying a living wage.
There is no lack of workers, only workers willing to tolerate poor working conditions and pay.
"This paper examines the forces that have reduced truck drivers' earnings. First, using 1973-91 Current Population Survey data, the authors find that deregulation accounted for one-third of the decline in drivers' wages, with a larger negative effect on non-union workers than on organized workers. Second, using unique survey data gathered in 1997, they explore the effects of three specific factors frequently cited as sources of blue-collar wage decline. This analysis indicates that only one new technology, satellite communication systems, had important effects on drivers' earnings, increasing them through improved efficiency and work intensification; education had no important influence; and union membership increased earnings by between 18% and 21%. They conclude that the two dominant and intertwined sources of wage decline and increased wage inequality among truck drivers have been deregulation and de-unionization. (Author's abstract.)"
Unions are a red herring, they've been mostly confined to specific economic niches (like port work) for decades and in trucking being in a niche pretty much always pays better.
This has nothing to do with unions and everything to do with regulation and better administrative technology making the "mega-fleet body shop" business model more viable and owner operators and small fleets less economically viable.
Swift has always paid crap and we've regulated everything else out of existence, same story as many other industries.
I'll play this one the way you play them. I'm gonna post my disagreement and then take my sweet time finding some links (of dubious relevance and quality) and then I'll edit my post to add them. Or not. Time will tell.
"driver wages were highest in the “Other” category at 67.7 cents per mile, reflecting the specialized skills and credentials that carriers in this group require. For instance, many Tank haulers are involved in the movement of hazardous materials, which require a special endorsement on a driver’s CDL."
The truck driver shortage reminds me on the fossil fuel situation.
Generally, we hear that truck drivers won't be needed in the future: Trucks will drive themselves. But now we have less truck drivers than we need, and the future with self driving trucks hasn't quite arrived yet
Similarly, we hear that fossil fuels should be out phased. And now we have an energy crisis with not enough oil and gas. The future of renewable energy isn't quite there yet.
I’ve had friends in the truck driving business and the hardest part is finding people who can stay clean with the drug testing. The Venn diagram of people wanting to drive truck and who recreationally use drugs seem to overlap a touch.
They said underpaid, not low paid. It's not just a job, it's a way of living that completely dominates your life and taxes your body with the lifestyle associated with it.
Clearly not enough people are willing to make that tradeoff for the salary.
It is still low paid. Money per hour, volatility of income, and quality of life at work including morbidity and mortality risk are just as relevant as money per year.
BLS does not incorporate these metrics, but there is an easy way to see if a job is low paid relative to quality of life at work (and outside of work). And that is to see people advise their kids to aspire to be. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, but not truck driver.
I dont know how reliable these indeed salaries are, I also know many many many drivers that are making less than 50K a year putting in 50-60 hours a week (or more) and are away from their familes for 5-7 days at a time
This is delusional. The vast, vast majority of people in the USA cannot hope to make $150k per year, so you'd FOR SURE see people jumping into trucking if it paid that much.
Say you're a trucker working 60 hours a week that's $22.55/hour.
Here's the day of a truck driver...
Most truck drivers are paid by the mile. If you're a long-haul truck driver you live in your truck. Driving all day, then sitting at a warehouse for 3 hours while you get unloaded. You're not getting paid while sitting there but you also can't leave. You have to stay with the truck at all times. Then it's 11pm when you're finally unloaded and you have to find a truck stop to park and sleep at. The closest truck stop is 10 miles away but it's 11pm, it might be full. You only have 20 minutes of legal driving time left on your log book. Do you risk going to the truck stop even though it might be full and you run out of driving hours or do you try to find a street to park on? Most cities don't allow trucks to park on the street so that's a gamble too.
If you run out of hours looking for a spot to park you risk getting a fine if you are inspected. State troopers and police can pull truck drivers over at any time for an inspection. If you are fined it's out of your own pocket, not the company.
So even if you were doing your job perfectly legally, you ran out of time because the warehouse took too long to unload. Now you might get fined and completely wipe out any income you made today. It also goes on your driving record and future companies won't hire you if you have too many incidents.
Now it's 6am and you're not feeling well and need to use the bathroom. The truck stop bathroom has a 15 minute wait but your next pickup is in 30 minutes and it's a 20 minute drive way.
Also your kids birthday is tomorrow but you might not make it back in time.
Now do this every day for less than $25/hour. All while every car on the road rages at you because your truck is limited to 65mph.
There are 3.6M truck drivers in the US, and this number has only been increasing. The shortage has nothing to do with self-driving trucks. The problem is it’s a dangerous, high-stress, and comparatively, low pay job. It has only gotten worse with all of the additional regulations in the past 5-10 years. Not saying I disagree with all the regulations, but the implementation needs work. Truckers are constantly on edge nowadays.
Anyways, if they wanna solve the shortage, pay them more. Simple as that.
If there wasn't a shortage then sure they might lose money by paying drivers more, but the supposed shortage of labor hurts more (it leads to business that they don't do at all)
You still have to provide last mile delivery, loading and unloading operations thus it takes more time. Plus adjust the logistics chain. If you have big warehouses built for trucked goods, tough luck.
Too bad the rail industry doesn't care to compete in general. Trucks run when you want them to. Rail means you need to rearrange your shipping to fit them.
There are exceptions, but when it doesn't take much digging to discover rail doesn't care to get more of this business even though they could with a bit of customer service.
Maybe comparing the bill from a trucking company against the bill from the rail; How much does it cost to get that freight from the train station to my delivery location, though?
> At some point, companies will simply not purchase the goods if they can't truck it economically or will look for alternatives.
I don't know why you were downvoted. Maybe people assumed a political position, but AFAICT you're just stating facts.
If trucking in its current form becomes unsustainable then it'll evolve into leaner alternatives, or we'll simply pay more / consume less. Nothing wrong with that.
I think it’s more the “assume a perfect spherical cow” style of argument. It’s true that people will stop buying if the shipping price hits some incredibly high level but it’s a complex system where driver pay is just a small part. The most likely outcomes are things like raising their own prices, becoming more economical in their use or packaging, shifting the delivery times & intervals, etc. — things which happen all of the time without reaching such dramatic levels. The data I’ve seen has the cost of fuel being right behind compensation in cost and that fluctuates all the time without people halting purchases.
Some customers won’t buy but the driver’s pay is only one part of the total cost and most businesses aren’t running on margins that tight for very long. If shipping prices drift up, they’ll adjust their usage or raise their own prices rather than voluntarily go out of business.
True, but isn't that the while point of the supply-demand curve? Not enough drivers to cover the work means that prices should go up, and some marginal customers will go away, until the whole thing balances.
It's odd the way people understand that increased prices will lower demand, but not see that demand will also drive prices.
Truck transportation is a bidding market. I think this is exactly what's going on, up to the point customers have private fleets that are losing people.
One group I worked with they were yelling they did not have enough drivers. But we sent someone over and watched how they ran their op for a few weeks. The real issue was they had one guy who would only come in at 6:30AM sharp. The entire org had somehow worked itself around that one hard requirement. He was also the guy who signed off on shipments. So lines of trucks would sit waiting empty because no one could leave until it was signed off. They thought they needed more drivers because shipments were low. Just to keep up and more loaders to load the items. Drivers would show at 9 and would not even roll out until 1. When the real solution was to hire 2 more people to sign off on orders and put them on different shifts. Throwing more money at the problem would never fix it. They just did not have enough space for that many drivers to show up at the same time.
They had designed their whole shipping system around max capacity at a particular time. They started adding more shipping capacity to cover it. When they really needed to shift when the work was happening. Once they fixed that they actually found they had overstaffed on drivers. They quickly found those guys more work as they were putting off orders because of capacity.
very much so. A lot of LTL and shipping companies should re-evaluate how and when they load things. The rules changed fairly recently and those will create all sorts of spots like that. So the old routes and loadtimes probably no longer make sense. Where 1 guy coming in at a particular time was fine but now with the way shifts are going to be you may need 2 and shift the pickup time out by x hours. That sort of thing. The rule changes also constrained the actual number of hours drivers can do (so there is an increased demand for drive time). When I started with this stuff 20+ years ago it was 5x5 shifts were common and legal. But now you will have to make sure you give people their weekends and core sleep times and about a dozen countdown clocks per driver. Getting that scheduling right will be quite the linear algebra optimization problem.
Re: pay, here's a comment of mine from another thread on this topic. You need to take into consideration that there are two sides to this market -- the supply side and demand side:
There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.
It’s very essential, but it is independently transactional - I.e. very not sticky.
It’s the same reason that buying a drink is independently transactional and competitive vs buying health insurance is very non competitive and very sticky.
> There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.
Why should truck drivers subsidize these companies, then?
A company should not be in business if it isn't sustainable without screwing the workers.
Why this is so poorly understood by people is beyond.
Small businesses always complain about how they can’t afford to pay more. But if you need to pay less than a minimum wage to make your business viable then… it’s not viable.
Well..if there were laws to enforce a higher minimum wage, all of your competitors would have to do it too and the price of products across your industry would rise.
The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.
Over the years we’re in the same boat and the cycle begins again with a new minimum wage - that’s ok.
> The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.
that is a myth. Only people on the bottom can afford to spend more. For the rest of us we don't get a raise.
With higher wages prices need to go up for the same profit. Supply and demand may or may not allow prices to go up. Some marginal products go off the market. Some prices go up. People adjust to buying less things because they can't afford them. Slowly inflation catches up and wages are back to "too low" - this is a bad thing.
You're basically saying that both demand is exceeding supply (=shortage) and that demand is weak enough that supply increases aren't worth it. That's not a shortage. That's just a price equilibrium i.e. business as usual.
It’s not the regulations causing problems - it’s the price pressure seeking lower and lower standards. The rest of the drivers on the road don’t want to share it with a truck driver on two hours of sleep, steering 15 tons of truck and cargo.
Nor do they want to be around vehicles that have skipped their brake maintenance because they pushing operational hours to the edge.
Agreed 100%. The problem is the regulations have increased the difficulty and stress of the job while the pay has steadily decreased. That’s why my solution is to pay more, not remove the regulations.
Though there is plenty of room for improvement in the regulations. They need to provide some leeway for drivers that have been stuck in traffic for hours and can’t complete a load that’s just a couple miles away.
Also, you have no idea how many truckers work around these regulations and go through insane hoops just so they can fudge the numbers. When you see that happening en masse, your regulations probably need some tuning.
In the EU the transport regulations are doubled by workplace security, capped maximum work hours and minimum wage regulations. So far socialism has somehow worked fine in this sector. Still, 70% of the trucking market is served by East Europeans and Westen companies have registered fleets in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria and are using staff from these markets specifically. It's not only because of staffing pressure, but also heavy regulation in the West.
I agree the solution is to pay more - that would also reduce the level effort being expended to bypass regulations by independent drivers. The problem is the independent drivers are squeezed between the logistics companies and the regulations. They need to form a union to get both better pay and better implemented regulations - but that’s difficult the way the market for their services has been evolved to break them down into individual contractors.
I think “quite” is doing a lot of work here. I agree with this characterization of the mechanics of what’s happening, but more broadly I’d say western culture has been suffering a growing disconnect between dream and reality for some time now. What is seen as “futuristic tech”, driven by endless hype machines, perpetually seems to be just a few years away, regardless of things like: physics, funding, business models, government aptitude and will, human behavior, public opinion, and frankly human ingenuity/adaptability. As a consequence, instead of planning based on the world we live in today and the most likely near term projections, we try to plan for entirely unrealistic futures. It’s a mixture of being sold a future as being closer than it is or entirely different than it will be, and trying to will into existence a future we want (or want to avoid). Nobody wants to stay tethered to reality anymore, for various and varied reasons, so they try to act like it doesn’t exist.
There's plenty of oil and gas. It's just the still available sources are difficult and expensive to extract from, requiring high prices to be worth it, but plentiful supply inherently drives the prices down, so it either needs to be kept artificially low via cartels or subsidized, which voters are understandably not big fans of given the history of fossil fuel subsidies.
I have been following oil news closely for a better part of a decade now, the oil industry did not reduce capacity due to renewables. They respond to price, especially higher cost productions like fracking and oil sand. Consistently low oil prices since 2014 crash has scared many investors away, and it'll take some time of consistently high oil price before investor confidence return.
Current high prices is a combination of inflation (primarily caused by money printing), OPEC+ not going full speed, and other high cost producers not ramping up due to lack of confidence.
Automated electric long-haul trucking looks good but there's an issue that requires an on-board human: self-driving at present only makes sense for long steady stretches of freeway, say I80 through Nevada and so on. Even though that's the majority of the travel time, human drivers will be needed for:
(1) 'the last few miles' i.e dealing with local complexity at delivery points, and
(2) unexpected emergencies (flat tires, etc.) and general maintenance.
Something like a remote drone operator probably wouldn't work(for changing tires etc.) or be completely reliable (disconnecting in a snowstorm etc.).
However, this could be an attractive work situation for many people. If you have an 8-hour straight automated run with a truck cabin, the operator can sleep, study, write code... hopefully something more productive than online games, anyway. Supplemental earnings could be possible.
This also benefits the trucking companies as they can plausibly run trucks on much longer 20+ driving / day schedules, since operators can sleep on the automated streches of the freeways.
You can also run convoys with one team per 5 trucks. They will want to maintain a person in the loop if only for protecting from highway robbers. What happens if two cars ride side by side in two lanes, force the truck to stop and steal the load?
It's not about the cost, it's about the availability.
Go look at the percent generated by source and you'll see how far off we are from phasing out fossil fuels. Couple this with the projected usage of electricity in the coming years and the outlook is that much bleaker.
Two different things. Driving a farm truck on a rural road in Nebraska is very different from driving a tractor-trailer loaded in heavy traffic on the interstate.
And I assume you mean that navigating a farm truck in heavy traffic on a dirt road going into the co-op, sometimes waiting for 2 hours to dump the load, with tight busy traffic passing both ways on a narrow dirt road lined with ditches that could roll the vehicle is different than what you're saying.
I work on diesel trucks for a living and ive also been a professional driver. I never had a problem driving, but like all jobs, you gotta find something that fits.
the highschool things nothing new really, as ive personally seen some young drivers in my time. trucking companies have paid for school for about 2 decades now so thats not really anything new. they pay you while you learn and in return you have offers like buying your own truck, setting your own hours, competitive pay rates and bonuses. you can even ditch your rent payments if you want, its not that hard to just live on the road.
you have typically 3 job types. local (the beer truck for example), regional (milk, eggs, poultry), and intermodal/interstate (IPhones and engine blocks.) wanna stay home more? pick local. wanna see literally the entire country? then interstate professional is your calling. Literally everything you own came on a truck, so i dont think "limited future" is a fair assessment. cities like NY would grind to a halt in a few hours if they didnt have trucks and drivers.
people have been calling out the death of trucking for 20 years now but its not technology thats killing it, its greedy profiteering logistics companies. the "shortage" has always been caused by this and few other things.
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[ 9.1 ms ] story [ 589 ms ] threadIt would have to very efficient to compete with a pool of driver-owners who would be motivated/desperate to undercut the automated fleet owners. Those will have to own the vehicles, be responsible for maintenance, and of course, shoulder responsibility for insurance/safety.
Besides, what are you going to do when your expensive rig and its cargo drives to the shoulder in the middle of the desert with a software issue? Someone will have to get there and drive it home manually.
Edit for a classic look at long-haul transport of hazmats, I can recommend this piece by John McPhee from 2003: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/a-fleet-of-one
Same thing truckers do today: call a local towing/repair company to come fix it. There are mechanics everywhere who can deal with large trucks, all they need is a way to get paid.
Edit: or just lay roads rather than tracks and call them trains. Keep the humans away like they do now.
Good, safe, stable coding is HARD which it’s not often done cuz hard = expensive. And weregild costs lots and lots of money.
I don't think they're worse, just that the damage they can cause is far wider, both because of the ease of spread and the increase in reliance on technology
Yes, because as Issac Newton said, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. In 1950 the first programmers didn't know a lot of the tricks to write good code that I do. (they also didn't have computers that could handle the multi-million line programs that I work on) Over years a lot of things have had to be discovered, and a lot of seemingly-good bad ideas had to be rejected the hard way.
Of course today there are a lot more "programmers" writing simple web apps that depend on complex back ends, but demand even less skill than the programmers of old (who had to worry about where on the drum their next instruction was - concepts that are lost on us today). Still, we have a lot more programmers who are better than the best of the old, than the sum total of all the old programmers.
Though I do have to be careful. I'm soon entering the category of a previous generation. I expect anyone still programming today - regardless of age - is of this generation. There is a lot of overlap of people who started out in older generations not knowing as much as todays, but have learned and now are todays generation.
Why is that what determines the age limit? The USA has very consistent signs and roads between states.
It's 21 in the EU [1], but it doesn't matter if you're crossing a border or not.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/vehicles/driving-licen...
The federal government runs a pretty impressive safety program by enforcing rules and targeting enforcement based on statistical analysis and national standards. Shady operators basically cannot operate interstate business for long.
At the state or local level, it varies. States usually have more lax standards. There’s a cat and mouse game around the regs which evolve over time - Chinatown busses being the most notorious example recently.
The regulations shape business. Usually something like a hotel minibus or senior services bus operates with state or local authority. Large limos often operate in a legal grey zone. As a consumer it sucks, as the less regulated carriers are often a nightmare — that hotel minibus may not have operating brakes or a qualified driver.
Same with be road crews, give them a bump too.
All of which is true for the majority of drivers. If the industry wants to attract people they need to get off the "per mile driven" pay scheme where truckers can spend hours, or even days unpaid waiting at terminals, docks, etc...
Trucking today is a terrible job, with low pay if calculated on a per hour worked basis. Combined with most of the regulations being placed on the driver, not the company, with most of liability for violating the regulations born by driver not the company. There is a continual battle between doing what the company says, and doing what the law says. Drivers are stuck in the middle because it is perfectly legal for a company to have a driver break the law or drive an unsafe rig, the only person that has to pay the fine is the driver.
IANAL but i can guarantee it's not - whether or not it gets enforced on the other hand...
I know personally more than a few drivers that would pay out of their own pocket to buy parts to fix trucks themselves so they would not end up in this dispatch punishment.
https://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/thre...
That may be a factor, but there are others in place as well such as the tax regime changing for self-employed drivers (IR35) etc.
However, many UK truck drivers were foreign nationals that all got sent home or didn't believe in their job security after Brexit. Nothing in economics is ever the result of just one thing, but Brexit has made an existing problem much worse.
The difference can be seen all around the UK. Every European country has some kind of shortage in the logistics industry, but only in the UK are the problems bad enough that the army needs to step in.
For people on the fence about going back home, lockdowns were a major driver. Additionally, Poland has rejected vaccine mandates, whilst the UK seems on the cusp of implementing them, and requires them for re-entry to the UK.
For people who have experience living under totalitarianism, being forced by the Government to take a medical treatment (often for no purpose since many working-class people already survived COVID) is unacceptable.
The other big factor is that a lot of people who have worked in the UK for the last 5-10 years have now saved up enough money to buy a nice house in Poland. By contrast UK real estate remains continuously unaffordable due to the restrictions on development and continued population expansion from immigration (legal and otherwise).
These trends of de-migration would have played out slowly over the next 5 years but COVID rapidly accelerated them.
More opinions here: https://emerging-europe.com/news/the-poles-disappointed-by-b...
Now, that's not to say there aren't more difficult installations. But I imagine in a lot of cases in the U. S., where a lot of breaker boxes live in the garage, it shouldn't be anywhere near a four figure installation sum. My guess is a lot of contractors of any kind can pretty much name their price right now. Or they do I used to do when I didn't want anymore consulting work: jack up the quoted price enough that I would drop other clients to do the job at that rate should the potential client be desperate enough to pay it.
I did not say low. It was a middling number which is madness.
>seems about right for a 6-10 hour job plus transportation costs and a helper.
6-10 hours to install a dryer circuit, with a helper? The job was going to take two hours max, with wire, box, outlet only costing about $75.
Also, most electricians make more money doing new construction, especially condo or apartment buildings. You're getting charged that much because they could have made the same amount of money (or a bit less) putting those hours towards a bigger, longer term project. As someone who works in a skilled trade, I can guarantee they just didn't think your project was important or worth it (and they're right). They see someone who can afford an electric car, and they know what it's worth to you to charge it.
But hey, you could always just google it, do it yourself and hope the inspector doesn't notice. What's the worst that could happen?
Yes. I'm also aware of their average income in the Bay Area, and it absolutely did not justify the price.
>Also, most electricians make more money doing new construction, especially condo or apartment buildings.
Barely any of that in the Bay Area.
>I can guarantee they just didn't think your project was important or worth it (and they're right). They see someone who can afford an electric car, and they know what it's worth to you to charge it.
Market is white hot for them, not going to lie.
>But hey, you could always just google it, do it yourself and hope the inspector doesn't notice. What's the worst that could happen?
Not where I live, need a city permit and a licensed installer. I'm leasing so that's what the home owner requires.
Not $3600.
>i can't imagine it would cost less than $1000, even just running conduit inside the walls, instead of doing drywall.
No conduit required, no drywall required.
It's no different than software engineers charging $300/hour consulting fees. Sure, they're just typing on a keyboard (or running some wires in this case), but you're paying for more than just the marginal cost of that particular job. You're paying for the investment that the specialist had to make to gain the experience required to be able to do the job.
1. Insurance rates dictate the minimum age... which is often around 26.
2. Average age of a truck driver is 56. So 4 years from retirement.
3. Federal laws are now much stricter on disclosure, so drivers who would have just moved from company to company after an accident... are now not able to get jobs nearly as easily. This is for the best, but the short term effect is there are many drivers who will have to find a new profession.
4. Wages are going up quickly and many drivers are changing jobs once per year (sometimes more)
Many of the larger trucking companies are self insured, so this really does not apply to them
>>Average age of a truck driver is 56. So 4 years from retirement.
Where do you get that drivers will retire @ 60? For most of them their Social Security will not kick in until 67, and I do not know many drivers that have a fully funded individual retirement account.
>>Federal laws are now much stricter on disclosure, so drivers who would have just moved from company to company after an accident..
This is really not due to Federal laws, there is a company the name escapes me right now that is similar to Consumer Credit Agency that tracks all driver activity, companies self report accident, and other adverse load events to this reporting agency
Edit: DAX/DAC System I believe, or something like that
>>Wages are going up quickly and many drivers are changing jobs once per year (sometimes more)
They are still using the flawed Per Mile pay scheme which means drivers will still end up being screwed in the end. Further more companies are adopting the "Owner Operator" model where by the driver is leasing the truck from the company at an obscene rate far more than the truck is actually worth, and the driver then bares all the costs and if they do not get enough work the company takes back the truck, leases to a new sucker, and send the original driver into collections bankrupting him/her
You may be thinking of AAMVA?
Yes, and those in-house insurance policies dictate hiring practices, not the other way around.
> This is really not due to Federal laws, there is a company the name escapes me right now that is similar to Consumer Credit Agency that tracks all driver activity, companies self report accident, and other adverse load events to this reporting agency
Yes, and last year the DOT (federal agency) rolled out required background checks. Was a really big deal from January to March, as companies large and small had to say no to a lot of applicants. Most of the data came from state BMV records that were "linked" and surfaced a lot of surprises when companies background checked their existing employees.
> They are still using the flawed Per Mile pay scheme which means drivers will still end up being screwed in the end. Further more companies are adopting the "Owner Operator" model where by the driver is leasing the truck from the company
This practice has always been a bad thing.
things that will never happen in our lifetime.
And I wasn't driving anything near the size of the rigs being talked about here.
Also please give cyclists some space.
However, larger engines could be less efficient per pound than their smaller counterparts. My intuition is that the opposite is true, but I could definitely be wrong on that.
If you want to see what this looks like, google around for "hot shot trucking". It doesn't require a CDL under, I believe, 24k lbs. BUT it does require a special insurance since you're no longer a person, but a company.
Moar info https://www.ntea.com/NTEA/Member_benefits/Industry_leading_n...
You need to constantly look out for human squirrels driving econoboxes and trying to pass you on the right while you make a wide turn. Crowded gas stations truly suck. Bollards hide and try to eat your trailer. If you get into a corner and can't turn sharp enough you can get trapped by your trailer.
Then there are the additional laws, weight limits, fines and fees, logging requirements, hour limits, hazmat, double trailers and a hundred other things that a trucker needs to know.
I know someone who is a truck driver and recently retired. He saw the company he worked for replace the natives with Bulgarians and Romanians.
Wind affects you so much. You can feel big vehicles passing you. Every slight angle on a road makes you feel like you’re going to tip over. You need special navigation systems that know your vehicle size so you don’t get routed down a road where you can’t turn around or a bridge can’t support you.
Definitely learned to appreciate truck stops and rest areas though. Parking overnight fills up so many times you’ll end up in a Walmart parking lot because of all the cameras.
It’s an adventure. It could be fun and a lot of people love it. Some people especially get into long distance trucking.
But IMO it’s definitely a full time job with a lot of responsibilities. I’m shocked there aren’t more accidents which is really a credit to all of these drivers and their training.
I hope to high heavens that you didn't have a normal bumper pull with a length of 35 ft. That would be utterly crazy!
It is completely uneventful if you have a proper truck and hitch, even with a 30 mph crosswind, though I have never gone over 75 mph with this setup. If you EVER feel like you are not in control or the vehicle is unstable, your setup is fatally flawed, and you need to reconsider your hitch and truck setup.
Open source OSMAND has truck navigation with weight, width, and height restriction considerations.
Truck stops and rest areas should be your last resort. You need to make phone calls and strike deals with potential places to stay at discounted rates. Being nice over the phone goes a long way.
But tech (and laws) aren't quite there yet.
[0] https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/07/china-is-buying-bil...
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-largest-landowners-i...
I live in a city where we have enough land, but the government wont let anyone build pretty much anywhere, and the housing prices are horrible.
> The average truck driver salary in the USA is $61,843 per year or $31.71 per hour. Entry level positions start at $45,970 per year while most experienced workers make up to $85,000 per year.
McDonald's is approaching $20/hr around here, which is getting close to those entry-level positions, no special training needed, and you get to live at home with family instead of being OTR all the time.
But considering the other comments, McDonalds-like jobs pay similar amounts of pay for a lot better working conditions (less responsibility, stay at home with family, less dangerous,...).
I bet if the trucking companies decide it to start all of their employees at 110k they'd have no shortage of people willing to drive.
This is like saying that there is no housing shortage, just a shortage of people willing to pay a fair price.
$4.75 is half the state minimum wage, and a fraction of what anywhere near me is starting people out at. No one pays minimum wage any more. Target is paying $15/hr to stock shelves.
One side of America has been celebrating a reduction of migrants entering the country for four years, and now suddenly business owners are seeing that resource pool run dry. Even if these business owners did not rely on immigrant laborers, their own workforce is finding more opportunities. In many ways, it seems like that particular populist administration has provided what was promised.
Unless there is some major shift back to the norm, I can see businesses shifting to leverage labor more productively. I don't think this is a bad thing - America has always been addicted to its cheap, exploitable labor and this trend has gotten worse over the last three decades. Hopefully, these changes can continue to be more equitable to both sides. I could also foresee a reduction in excessive consumption - maybe a reduction in the number of "fast casual dining trends" and other horizontal growth trends.
Something tells me that being a truck driver isn't going to be much of a career by then.
Further -- we know that employment in a job trails off over decades, it doesn't fall off a cliff suddenly. Truck driving jobs are still increasing. I would wager that the average 18-year-old truck driver today could retire from that job when she's in her 60s.
Things have gotten a lot safer too. Many less people have nicknames like "stubby" or "lefty" because the automatic safety stops the machine when (not if - repetitive work leads to forgetting to be safe) body parts are in the way.
I had a feeling this would get raised. The obvious retort is that the US has been creating tons of manufacturing jobs, but that due to changes in our trade regime, those jobs are generally created overseas. One could very easily imagine modifications to our existing trade regime that create incentives to employ Americans in factories, if such an outcome was desired.
Yes, factories are more automated, but factory workers globally are still a huge and growing segment of the workforce.
Do you have a source to support this claim? It's obviously a huge workforce, but growing? Automation is happening all over the globe. I couldn't find exact numbers, but it feels like factory workers are going the way of the farmers.
https://www.bruegel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/RP-19-04-...
Page 12 details change in manufacturing employment 2001-2014. The US dropped 4 million manufacturing jobs over that period, but Vietnam and Indonesia each added nearly that many. Total employment in the sector increased by 56 million. That's over 4 million new jobs, annually, over the period.
Even the US has been adding manufacturing jobs the last 5-10 years. 2018 saw the addition of 300k manufacturing jobs in the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
If there were some automation on the near horizon that could slow that job growth, there's a 5-year addressable market of $50B for the jobs added in 2018 alone. I am skeptical such automation is on the near horizon in any state where it is ready to be widely deployed.
The dot-com crash overlapping with China entering the WTO slide in manufacturing employment was especially brutal. A third of US manufacturing jobs relocated in 10 years. ("Relocated" instead of "lost" because Americans are still buying those goods, and their production did not become completely automated in that timeframe.)
in 2060 there will still be a huge demand for drivers. Fully Automated driving is vaporware, even if they make the tech work which they are still decades away from, there is legal and political hurdles that will be even harder to over come.
For crying out loud we still build tanks that the military has not wanted for years because its a jobs program, and your telling me States and Federal government are just going to stand by and allow all of those primary, not to mention the thousands of secondary jobs just go poof, with no push back
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I love how people only talk about the technical problems here, the Technical problems with level 5 Freight Trucks are HUGE, and likely at least 20 years away from solved...
The political problems with it however are far far far far more daunting
We don't have a line like a traditional car factory final assembly because we need to be more flexible, but there are conveyors going all over. (interestingly final assembly is still pushed down the line by hand)
Even if you are in ostensibly the same role in 2060 as you are today, what that role looks like is going to be completely different. Unrecognizable even.
- Quite possibly you still used punch cards to enter your programs.
- Probably you had a degree in something other than computer science. Math, physics, electrical engineering, something like that.
- Probably you were the only one working on whatever application or system you worked on.
- Probably you didn't have any kind of internet or email access. If you needed help figuring out a problem, you went to books.
- Very likely you didn't have any kind of proper source control, automated testing, or bug tracking.
- Most likely you didn't have any software libraries to work with other than whatever came in your language core library.
(I learned to program in 1981, but I was only 9 years old at the time, so some of this is secondhand.)
Github: "You rang?"
https://copilot.github.com/
My friend operates a truck. He owns his own and only with that is he able to earn 80k a year. And even he is looking to get out because 3 months on the road at a time means no family life.
Just maintaining a truck is crazy stressful. It might be ok for some time until something major breaks on your truck and you’re not working for a week and you’re out an additional $5k for repairs. Just hope you’re not stranded in the middle of nowhere and have to pay thousands to have your truck towed.
It’s also in the top 10 most dangerous jobs. It’s incredibly stressful. And all the latest regulations will put you on edge at all times. When you’re an owner-operator, you are constantly walking the line between pissing off customers and losing your license.
It’s such a demanding job nowadays.
What does he haul? It is specialized?
Does he cover his lease, insurance, gas, etc from his own pocket? Do you know about how much that is monthly?
How many miles does he drive on average?
I don't mean to bombard you with questions, but there's so much variation in pay you need more information than just salary to really understand that number.
Downside is 60 hour weeks for 30 years.
He is pretty high up in seniority, but there are so few drivers that he still gets called in on days he would normally have off because they don't have enough drivers under him.
He drives nights up to the legal number of hours/miles as required and sleeps in cheap hotels during the day. My understanding is that his carrier does not use sleeper cabs because they use the same trucks for both local and over the road deliveries.
Truck driver is certainly not a dream job, but salaries are fairly good compared to the median in the US. And its not more difficult to have a family than if you're in the military or a night nurse or any other job with unusual schedule.
Military has huge divorce rates. And it is not like women were super eager to date military guys seriously. In a lot of ways it is worst then being with truck driver even, due to forced relocations every couple of years.
Night nurse get to be present outside of shift. Night nurse gets to be present parent. That is impossible for a soldier on deployment.
My Guess that is eating about 50% of that revenue way, so then his pay is probably around 40-45K gross profit before taxes.
University should be only suggested to the top 20% of each yearly cohort, and senior highschool to the top 50%.
that's going to be politically suicide to implement.
my father went to high school in rural Illinois in the late 60’s. He got a full ride “hardship grant” simply because he was a decent (not exceptional) student and came from a poor farming family.
But then, the UK fcked over a lot of its trades to become a "service economy", so who knows.
The impression I get being in the UK is that driving HGVs is a cruel and soul destroying activity.
Also, California's AB5 law has outlawed owner operators, which is a very large chunk of how trucking has worked for decades, making trucking a less desirable career. This is also one of the big reasons for the large backlog at the CA ports.
But then again, it _is_ California so I'm not surprised.
I just hope that maybe whoever is making the laws comes to their senses, because they're not just hurting California with this legislation.
https://www.caltrux.org/ab-5-faq/
Seems likely that there will eventually be a care out for trucking since that industry was not really the target of AB5 in the first place.
AB5 which codified the existing ABC test, made it consistent so that people in one working relationship with an employer wouldn't be employees for some purposes and contractors for others, and carved out industry specific exceptions to the test—those exceptions were the specific “targets”, not every other industry in the state where the existing judicially-applied ABC test was merely codified. Trucking already got some exceptions in AB5 (so they kind of were a “target”); they might get more.
The gig-economy firm propaganda that they were targets of AB5, rather than just a particular moneyed interest that was out of compliance with the law before AB5, is inaccurate.
No, it didn't. One because as the FAQ you link notes, owner-operators of trucks are not categorically banned. Second, as your FAQ also obliquely indicates but fails to clearly and directly state, to the extent ant existing business process was banned, it was banned by the California Supreme Court decision in Dynamex applying the ABC test to determine employee vs. contractor status, which is why the lawsuit it refers to against the application of the ABC test was before AB5 was passed, and later amended to include claims challenging AB5, which codified the rule of Dynamex, added exceptions, and made some consistency changes in other law so that relationships that were employment for some purposes under Dynamex would not still be contractor relationships for purposes of other law.
No, it didn't. To the extent anything did, the application by the California Supreme Court of the ABC test in Dynamex (prior to AB5) did (which also isn't entirely true, owner-operators usually meet 2 of the 3 prongs of the test, and the third prong depends on the core business of the employing firm; some will pass and some won’t.) AB5 actually created an explicit time-limited exemption to the ABC test for certain owner-operators of trucks (notably, in construction.)
We can't complain about lack of people doing these jobs and then also be upset that young people are taking these jobs.
There is no lack of workers, only workers willing to tolerate poor working conditions and pay.
"This paper examines the forces that have reduced truck drivers' earnings. First, using 1973-91 Current Population Survey data, the authors find that deregulation accounted for one-third of the decline in drivers' wages, with a larger negative effect on non-union workers than on organized workers. Second, using unique survey data gathered in 1997, they explore the effects of three specific factors frequently cited as sources of blue-collar wage decline. This analysis indicates that only one new technology, satellite communication systems, had important effects on drivers' earnings, increasing them through improved efficiency and work intensification; education had no important influence; and union membership increased earnings by between 18% and 21%. They conclude that the two dominant and intertwined sources of wage decline and increased wage inequality among truck drivers have been deregulation and de-unionization. (Author's abstract.)"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5119434_The_Effects...
(can get the paper from SciHub, a family member is a truck driver)
This has nothing to do with unions and everything to do with regulation and better administrative technology making the "mega-fleet body shop" business model more viable and owner operators and small fleets less economically viable.
Swift has always paid crap and we've regulated everything else out of existence, same story as many other industries.
Edit: That was too easy.
https://truckingresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ATRI...
https://truckingresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ATRI...
From the 2018 report:
"driver wages were highest in the “Other” category at 67.7 cents per mile, reflecting the specialized skills and credentials that carriers in this group require. For instance, many Tank haulers are involved in the movement of hazardous materials, which require a special endorsement on a driver’s CDL."
Generally, we hear that truck drivers won't be needed in the future: Trucks will drive themselves. But now we have less truck drivers than we need, and the future with self driving trucks hasn't quite arrived yet
Similarly, we hear that fossil fuels should be out phased. And now we have an energy crisis with not enough oil and gas. The future of renewable energy isn't quite there yet.
The hardest thing is finding people who won't take drugs _at that salary, with those working conditions_
The average salary for a truck driver is $70,363 per year in the United States.
https://www.indeed.com/career/truck-driver/salaries
So just my 2 cents from looking from the outside
Clearly not enough people are willing to make that tradeoff for the salary.
BLS does not incorporate these metrics, but there is an easy way to see if a job is low paid relative to quality of life at work (and outside of work). And that is to see people advise their kids to aspire to be. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, but not truck driver.
Say you're a trucker working 60 hours a week that's $22.55/hour.
Here's the day of a truck driver...
Most truck drivers are paid by the mile. If you're a long-haul truck driver you live in your truck. Driving all day, then sitting at a warehouse for 3 hours while you get unloaded. You're not getting paid while sitting there but you also can't leave. You have to stay with the truck at all times. Then it's 11pm when you're finally unloaded and you have to find a truck stop to park and sleep at. The closest truck stop is 10 miles away but it's 11pm, it might be full. You only have 20 minutes of legal driving time left on your log book. Do you risk going to the truck stop even though it might be full and you run out of driving hours or do you try to find a street to park on? Most cities don't allow trucks to park on the street so that's a gamble too.
If you run out of hours looking for a spot to park you risk getting a fine if you are inspected. State troopers and police can pull truck drivers over at any time for an inspection. If you are fined it's out of your own pocket, not the company.
So even if you were doing your job perfectly legally, you ran out of time because the warehouse took too long to unload. Now you might get fined and completely wipe out any income you made today. It also goes on your driving record and future companies won't hire you if you have too many incidents.
Now it's 6am and you're not feeling well and need to use the bathroom. The truck stop bathroom has a 15 minute wait but your next pickup is in 30 minutes and it's a 20 minute drive way.
Also your kids birthday is tomorrow but you might not make it back in time.
Now do this every day for less than $25/hour. All while every car on the road rages at you because your truck is limited to 65mph.
Anyways, if they wanna solve the shortage, pay them more. Simple as that.
At some point, companies will simply not purchase the goods if they can't truck it economically or will look for alternatives.
There are exceptions, but when it doesn't take much digging to discover rail doesn't care to get more of this business even though they could with a bit of customer service.
I don't know why you were downvoted. Maybe people assumed a political position, but AFAICT you're just stating facts.
If trucking in its current form becomes unsustainable then it'll evolve into leaner alternatives, or we'll simply pay more / consume less. Nothing wrong with that.
It's odd the way people understand that increased prices will lower demand, but not see that demand will also drive prices.
They had designed their whole shipping system around max capacity at a particular time. They started adding more shipping capacity to cover it. When they really needed to shift when the work was happening. Once they fixed that they actually found they had overstaffed on drivers. They quickly found those guys more work as they were putting off orders because of capacity.
The new rules are brutal on that sort of fix.
There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.
It’s the same reason that buying a drink is independently transactional and competitive vs buying health insurance is very non competitive and very sticky.
Why should truck drivers subsidize these companies, then?
A company should not be in business if it isn't sustainable without screwing the workers.
Small businesses always complain about how they can’t afford to pay more. But if you need to pay less than a minimum wage to make your business viable then… it’s not viable.
Well..if there were laws to enforce a higher minimum wage, all of your competitors would have to do it too and the price of products across your industry would rise.
The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.
Over the years we’re in the same boat and the cycle begins again with a new minimum wage - that’s ok.
that is a myth. Only people on the bottom can afford to spend more. For the rest of us we don't get a raise.
With higher wages prices need to go up for the same profit. Supply and demand may or may not allow prices to go up. Some marginal products go off the market. Some prices go up. People adjust to buying less things because they can't afford them. Slowly inflation catches up and wages are back to "too low" - this is a bad thing.
So why don't you argue to make the minimum wage $10 million a year? Then everyone is rich. Hell, I wonder why the Sudan hasn't thought of that.
There is surely an upper-bound on the minimum wage in an economy? What if you are already at it?
What if people _think_ we're at it because they don't factor in food stamps, Medicaid, etc.
If the minimum was a _livable_ wage, maybe we could get more people off of so called "entitlements".
Nor do they want to be around vehicles that have skipped their brake maintenance because they pushing operational hours to the edge.
Though there is plenty of room for improvement in the regulations. They need to provide some leeway for drivers that have been stuck in traffic for hours and can’t complete a load that’s just a couple miles away.
Also, you have no idea how many truckers work around these regulations and go through insane hoops just so they can fudge the numbers. When you see that happening en masse, your regulations probably need some tuning.
I have been following oil news closely for a better part of a decade now, the oil industry did not reduce capacity due to renewables. They respond to price, especially higher cost productions like fracking and oil sand. Consistently low oil prices since 2014 crash has scared many investors away, and it'll take some time of consistently high oil price before investor confidence return.
Current high prices is a combination of inflation (primarily caused by money printing), OPEC+ not going full speed, and other high cost producers not ramping up due to lack of confidence.
(1) 'the last few miles' i.e dealing with local complexity at delivery points, and
(2) unexpected emergencies (flat tires, etc.) and general maintenance.
Something like a remote drone operator probably wouldn't work(for changing tires etc.) or be completely reliable (disconnecting in a snowstorm etc.).
However, this could be an attractive work situation for many people. If you have an 8-hour straight automated run with a truck cabin, the operator can sleep, study, write code... hopefully something more productive than online games, anyway. Supplemental earnings could be possible.
This also benefits the trucking companies as they can plausibly run trucks on much longer 20+ driving / day schedules, since operators can sleep on the automated streches of the freeways.
Citation required.
> The future of renewable energy isn't quite there yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
You were saying? Wind and solar, cheaper than all fossil fuel sources for almost ten years now.
The cost of solar has plunged by a factor of almost 6x
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/3-...
Offshore wind is the most expensive renewable and is surpassing the cheapest fossil fuel source.
Go look at the percent generated by source and you'll see how far off we are from phasing out fossil fuels. Couple this with the projected usage of electricity in the coming years and the outlook is that much bleaker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Ge... https://www.statista.com/statistics/192872/total-electricity...
These transitions will take place, but they will take place precisely because shortages like these force them to happen.
My first job was at 12 years old; I drove a 6 wheeled grain truck for our family's farmer friend in the July heat to help with his wheat harvest.
No a/c, windows were stuck down, 3 speed. Bruce, the farmer, rigged up a pedal extension for me on the clutch.
Plenty of kids down here can drive a skid steer, tractor, truck, or loader.
And I assume you mean that navigating a farm truck in heavy traffic on a dirt road going into the co-op, sometimes waiting for 2 hours to dump the load, with tight busy traffic passing both ways on a narrow dirt road lined with ditches that could roll the vehicle is different than what you're saying.
No, the first thing that comes to mind is another shit job that has limited future and should be automated so humans don't have to do it.
I work on diesel trucks for a living and ive also been a professional driver. I never had a problem driving, but like all jobs, you gotta find something that fits.
the highschool things nothing new really, as ive personally seen some young drivers in my time. trucking companies have paid for school for about 2 decades now so thats not really anything new. they pay you while you learn and in return you have offers like buying your own truck, setting your own hours, competitive pay rates and bonuses. you can even ditch your rent payments if you want, its not that hard to just live on the road.
you have typically 3 job types. local (the beer truck for example), regional (milk, eggs, poultry), and intermodal/interstate (IPhones and engine blocks.) wanna stay home more? pick local. wanna see literally the entire country? then interstate professional is your calling. Literally everything you own came on a truck, so i dont think "limited future" is a fair assessment. cities like NY would grind to a halt in a few hours if they didnt have trucks and drivers.
people have been calling out the death of trucking for 20 years now but its not technology thats killing it, its greedy profiteering logistics companies. the "shortage" has always been caused by this and few other things.
Found the link: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1104630323217300...