I've got some visibility to the logistics industry. My experience doesn't quite fit some of the posts in here / that story.
Drivers have been making LESS over the years for a few decades now.
Nobody wants to hire 18 year olds generally, insurance wouldn't allow it any way...
Logistics companies who hire drivers have been complaining about driver shortages but not increasing wages for years as well... and they actually seem to meet demand just fine. Issues at choke points like ports don't seem to be a pure driver supply issue from what I've seen.
The logistics industry is super price sensitive, people will complain... but they'll also wait to ship a thing to save a couple bucks (I'm not kidding when I say a couple bucks) all while complaining.
The drivers you hear who make a good living have specialized skills / work for specialized companies and do not reflect the industry as a whole.
I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job requirement. Drive 48 hours? No problem.
This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books.
Edit: Just want to add some additional information. Trucking companies at least were my friends worked, were extremely toxic. They made close to $100k. However, their personal life suffered greatly.
Dispatchers would call them non-stop, even when they had doctor visits/family gatherings scheduled. The dispatchers would give them loads, that were basically humanely impossible to be delivered on-time by the book. Some of them would be awake all day, and leave in the evening then drive 24 hours+. Dispatchers would often scream at them, when they would call because they were falling asleep and were not going to make the delivery on-time because they needed a nap.
Some of them actually crashed, because they saw a "deer" lol.....they fell asleep.
These friends were uneducated, and made terrible financial decisions, such a purchasing expensive cars and modifying them. Little to no savings. This put them in an awful position in which they had to keep driving no matter how toxic the environment was. Unfortunately, I don't really know how they are doing today, as we grew apart.
> This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books.
I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the next 50 years. We have a lot of laws and standards that, in effect, allowed people to cheat a little but not too much (or break a few traffic laws but not too many, etc). All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.
We are going to need to do a lot of work to find new equilibrium points where the various parties can cheat less. It will be made especially difficult because technology penetrates industries more quickly these days so it would be best if everything changed at once, but that also makes it more difficult.
I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules. I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.
I hope we never reach a state where technology actively defeats us.
The only time that I think it’s responsible to have total enforcement is when the rules perfectly capture reality and every facet of it …which to say is never.
Gray areas are also where all manner of corruption is born. Officials soliciting bribes, nepotism, exploitative labor practices, these things love gray areas.
They also keep bad rules around and encourage selective enforcement to target the disadvantaged. Lincoln said it best: "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."
Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.
For example, I encounter far less discrimination and less racism living in where I do now than in other places, and yet the laws are practically the same here as in anywhere else. The reason I experience less discrimination here is due to the encompassing framework that everyone here is subjected to as part of their experience growing up. The strictness of the laws is irrelevant to that issue.
If you want to change how people act, you need to change the entire framework that people are growing within.
I may be missing something, but increased enforcement sounds like a great way to solve the corruption problem?
Eg. Public servants make ends meet by fudging timesheets => Enforcement clamps down on practice => Employees bargain for higher pay to make up for difference => Public gets a more transparent accounting of their labor costs
There's no set of laws that can efficiently govern dishonest people. Or in "low trust" environments, if you prefer think of it amorally.
Enforcement just moves around where the corruption is incentivized to happen. Is it at the bottom -- workers stealing extra pay or higher up where the enforcement happens?
Sure, but those are symptoms of larger problems. Increasing enforcement is an act of hiding the symptoms and it does not and will never solve the underlying problem.
That's sometimes true but I'd just note this has nothing to do with the original argument made praising gray areas.
The drug war is a place where there's an escalating war between dealing and enforcement, yes. But most dealers aren't having a lot of fun in this gray area.
I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules. I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.
Hmm, this sounds so appealing, yet I think it's terribly confused. I think you're confusing the "gray area" between what people and rules say and what people do, with "areas of slack". Slack areas are where people can take initiative to do what they want (following the rules or not). Gray areas can be that sometimes, were more like that in the past, but today, gray areas are often areas of over-determination - the rules are contradictory, you could be punished or suffer for violating any of them and you have to carefully calculate which violation will let you survive. There's no joy in that kind of shit. And, as mentioned by other posters, breaking some rules can kill people.
The reason we now have electronic tracking of freight truckers is because they used to be notorious for taking uppers and driving as long as possible, causing all sorts of nasty accidents. That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.
Exactly. I want absolutely zero gray areas when I'm on a highway in the middle of Indiana at night and cross paths with at least a few hundred semi trucks. The less gray the better.
To your point, a few winters ago I was driving up the NY Northway (north of Albany) in January, in a heavy snow storm, and cargo trucks were consistently passing me at 70+ mph.
One deer or one owl into traffic...it would have been a complete charlie foxtrot.
I agree in general but there are some places where gray areas benefit the employer more than the employee and I think this is one of them. If everyone is forced to cheat the regulations to get their jobs done then it's no longer just a gray area and the regulations are pointless.
At least in this case, breaking the rules kills a lot of people - IIRC out of all the truck-caused fatalities, more than 1000 deaths/year in USA can be directly attributed to drowsy driving.
Sleep-deprived truckers should not be a thing, it has pretty much the same effects as driving drunk, but much more common so causes more crashes and more deaths. Breaching the rules for that should have as much tolerance as those intentionally driving drunk and endangering others that way.
I have mixed feelings on this. I actually think this is a reasonable response to overly rigid systems but also creates fertile ground for unethical behavior. Ideally, I think we need systems with rigid guardrails, but that the distance between them is proportional to the amount of risk incurred by what you call the practice of "art".
Bending the rules is great in some areas, but I don't think it should apply across the board. Ignoring rules is fine in low-risk scenarios (particularly when the risk is not borne by someone else) but I don't want, for example, my commercial airline pilot to get too artsy when it comes to his approach for landing, or the programmer writing critical code for the autonomous vehicle to unilaterally decide they know better, or the electrician I hire to flagrantly disregard consensus standards.
From previous work in safety critical code, I regularly confronted situations where rule-breaking was done as a means to an end, while not being cognizant confronting the risks that incurred because of cognitive biases. People also loved gray areas in this role because it limits accountability. I'm sure there were people who at Enron thought they were playing the gray areas as an artistic endeavor to maximize profit, but I don't think incentivizing that behavior is the best for society.
That’s great until we’re talking about safety. I’m not willing to have my family run over by a semi truck with a drowsy and over worked driver for the sake of protecting these grey areas.
A good regulatory scheme will give people flexibility in how they comply with the rules so that productivity and innovation aren't (overly) constrained. If you find that you constantly need to break rules to be productive then it means you need regulatory reform, not less oversight or enforcement within the current regulatory context.
> I love that gray areas exist. Gray areas are where art and ingenuity is born. Gray areas allow me to break the rules at work to push improvements. Gray areas are what I use to show people how things can be better.
A longish life has confirmed this to me, over and over.
> I actually vehemently disagree and will fight to allow people to break the rules.
I think we agree actually. I didn't say it was good that rule breaking is getting harder, just that it's a fact.
We have a lot of enculturation around a certain level of surveillance and visibility. Things are quickly becoming more visible and we will need to adjust. Preserving grey area can be part of that, but only if we decide to preserve it.
The breaking of the rules here is not for the driver's benefit, though. Its the owners greed pushing serious costs on their employees. Disruptive innovation doesn't always make things better.
All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.
- I think stability depends on what time frame you look at. Pushing how much time you spend driving, how little you sleep and so-forth may be stable for some period (weeks, months, a few years..) but it's not stable for a person longish term. Letting wages drift downward, so you wind-up hiring people with more problems (say, amphetamine addiction) may also be short-term stable but not long term stable.
The actually instability of the situation I think is illustrated by "chameleon carrier". Companies that shutdown and restart when they accumulate too safety violations.[1]
The thing about the situation is when things are being continually jury rigged to keep people working in the most profitable conditions for the carriers and the worst conditions for them, it's the opposite of stable, it's extremely fragile.
Saying the system as a whole is stable does not mean there are no unstable parts. Goods get delivered at an acceptable cost with an acceptable loss rate - even with chameleon carriers and any other bad actors that exist. Suddenly changing how easy it is to break the rules, without changing anything else, could destabilize that equilibrium.
> I think stability depends on what time frame you look at.
What is the timeframe that you are thinking of where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?
-- When we're talking of a system, "stability" is roughly the property that a small perturbation in the system causes it to return to the position that it was previously in. The pandemic was significant shock but the notable thing we see is that the system.
...where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?
The individual rule-breaking (working more hours than a person could stand) still allowed day functioning of the system but it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them. Hence, the system was fragile to shock.
> it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them
That situation seems pretty exceptional to me. I think it's fair to call an equilibrium that requires a covid pandemic to disrupt "stable." I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.
If you just mean that capitalism is inherently unstable, then yes of course, but that doesn't seem closely related to the space for rule breaking as the space varies from place to place and industry to industry.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.
I never said trucking was unusually fragile for the America today. Many other industries follow the paradigm of barely paying enough and relying on a trickle of people willing to put with their framework and all of them are whining but not actually changing [2]. The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1] is also a description of how a lot of industries operates. It's fragile, ugly and profitable.
> The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1]
Look, are you talking about trucking or are you talking about capitalism writ large? The larger capitalistic structure is both unjust and deeply unstable - but that topic is outside of the specific conditions of trucking and the accuracy of monitoring systems. The limits of the accuracy of surveillance systems are relevant, as far as I know, to all economic systems.
Or, to put it another way, I will ask again: what period do you see this system being unstable over? If it's just the covid pandemic then I see the disruption, but I disagree that the system was not 'stable' before. It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.
> It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.
It really wasn't, though; IIRC, the current reading of the evidence is that the mass extinction started about 10 million years before the impact delivered the coup de grace.
But I think you were assuming the somewhat popular fiction where things were stable, but then the meteorite wiped them out.
Maybe the state will have to outsource enforcement of these issues so that it doesn't have to admit to allowing some rule breaking. Anyone want to co-found Selective-Enforcement-as-a-Service?
I think we will see "micro fines" and electronic car systems in the next 10 years.
Go over the speed limit for a certain period of time (eg, 10 mins)? Microfine. $5.
Park in a no parking area for too long? Microfine.
Don't signal your turn? Microfine, $0.50.
The thing that would hold that back is the huge stock of existing analogue/gas vehicles. For all the talk of going electric, no one is going to buy everyone a new electric car and no one is going to just prevent the gas cars from driving since the economy needs people to work. Not that I'm in favor of the CO2 pollution this implies - though I'm not in favor of your Orwellian scenario either, which would be plausible otherwise.
Nah, you don't need a fancy car for the nightmare. Insurance companies are already letting you put in a device that measures your driving. It connects to the OBD-II port - standard on all vehicles since 1996.
This is a terrible idea. It fixes the cost for speeding or not signaling to something that a well off person can easily afford. Even I would consider just paying a $5 fine in order to speed to get to an important meeting, etc. A $500 fine for 10 minutes of speeding would make me think twice
I think that actually illustrates the above commenter's point about gray areas? the highway does not devolve into lethal chaos when people exceed the limit by 10 mph. even 20 mph over is not so bad when the relative speed among vehicles is low. or on the other hand, a few outliers are not a huge problem when proper lane discipline is maintained (ie, don't pass on the right, keep right except to pass). it's not a big deal if most people occasionally speed to get to an important appointment. it's also not catastrophic if a few people who can afford it take the hit and speed everywhere. mostly, it just offends our sense of fairness.
But, if this were to come to pass, rich people would just speed and pay the fines as the cost of running the business. It's why fines to pick up late from the daycare backfired badly.
The anecdotes I hear about "cheating the system" before electronic logs are mostly along the lines of: stuck in stand-still traffic for 30 minutes, I'll log it as a break. Whereas according to the electronic log you're still driving.
Say you have a truck governed at 68mph which means you can log an average of 65mph without raising any eyebrows. So what we would do is log the miles you drove/65 and not the actual time you drove.
Or, how I used to run, keep your logbook behind so you can backfill the driving hours and breaks so you can eventually be legal again — usually at a shipper or receiver you could catch up as they commonly would keep you there for 6-8 hours. What’s the buzzword, eventually consistency?
Not even mentioning “loose leaf” logbooks where one could rewrite whole days to gain hours.
Would you support speed limit enforcement by checking license plates at the beginning of a stretch of highway and at the end and auto-ticketing anyone who averaged over the speed limit?
Yes, can confirm, such cameras exist in Serbia and generate electronic tickets available to the vehicle owner on a government website if the calculated average speed is above allowed.
To what, 55 mph? It's the most fuel-efficient speed for the majority of vehicles, and is far less likely to kill people in an accident, than a collision at 70*1.15 = 80mph.
why stop there? pretty much any form of transportation is more dangerous and/or generates more emissions that humans on their own two legs. collectively, we have decided to trade some of that away to actually get places in a reasonable amount of time. but if you don't feel comfortable driving in 65+ mph traffic, there are plenty of surface roads that run parallel to interstates.
Next 50 yrs? This will be lucky to still be an issue in 5 to 10 yrs. Soon enough, the long haul routes will be autonomous. Humans will handle the short haul from some rural / suburban hub to the suburban / urban final destination. Autonomous might not be able to do "the last mile" but that's not what cause ppl to not want to be drivers.
I'm personally skeptical about the immediate practicality of autonomous driving, but either way, I was not just speaking about driving. I was talking about nearly every area of rule around 'public order.'
Long haul is practical and doable. Full door to door autonomous is unnecessary in the short term. Simply cracking the long haul nut is going to be significant.
That's really interesting. I've a similar anecdote from a different industry: pizza delivery.
I'm old enough that my first job was right at the cusp of computerized order entry (as opposed to handwritten tickets) at the small pizza shop I worked at in high school.
Prior to the computer order entry system drivers would routinely "lose" one or two tickets a shift and just pocket the cash for the order. One of them told me that the computerized ticketing basically halved their actual take home pay.
I worked at a pizza shop with paper tickets. Every single one was accounted for at the end of the day. If any tickets were missing, that was out of the manager's pocket, so he made sure he had them all.
Except if everyone does it and nobody really gets busted for it, then it is. You just don't like business being run that way.
The end result of 30 years of deunionization and relentless downwards pressure on wage growth and you wind up with employees cheating the system wherever they can.
Something is certainly going to break in this society/culture in the next 5-10 years, because we're not on a sustainable path. A wage-price spiral and a lot of inflation would probably be the least-painful thing to happen.
I understand that the dictionary follows usage, and i get that you have a rhetorical goal, but with that logic Enron was simply overpaying its employees.
I think there's an aspect of whether it's expected or not here.
If the culture of the delivery drivers was that this was a perk of the job that everyone sort of knew about, then I think it's reasonable to call it a type of compensation.
Sort of like how unreported cash tips are a type of perkany rely on, even though no contract could ever stipulate that.
The question, to me, is whether the people with "lost" orders actually got a pizza in the end. If they didn't, then it is theft—if not by the individual, then by the company whose structure incentivizes the individual's behavior. (Similar to how Wall-street investment-auditing firms were ultimately responsible for incentivizing their auditors to mischaracterize the risk of certain asset classes in 2008.)
I thought it was obvious that the delivery person takes the cash at the door in exchange for the pizza and pockets it. If the pizza isn't delivered, there's no cash to pocket.
Oh and I'm not arguing it isn't theft. I'm arguing that the system we've built basically demands that people steal from their employers in order to survive.
If you don't like our sort of downwards spiral into a trustless third-world society where everyone is trying to scam everyone else then you might want to look at what policies you support that crush wages for people who aren't at least software devs.
In the EU it got harder and harder to cheat the digital tachographs. The latest generation of smart tachographs record GPS coordinates of start/stop points so one can no longer cheat with a magnet on the wheel's Hall sensor. Everything is signed cryptograpghcally, even the wheel sensors have a crypto seal, the only way to cheat is to use tampered firmware, which carries huge penalties. I'm surprised at how deregulated the US transportation market is by comparison.
EU and US is just fundamentally different. It is hard to overstate that. But it comes with trade-offs. Workers in EU, in general, have better standards at work than in US. It helps that in EU, healthcare is not directly part of employer cost ( everyone pays into it ). EU tends ( I do mean tends, because it seems to vary greatly ) toward unions, whereas US truckers seeem un-unionized by and large.
> ICC is a checking on down the line
> Well I'm a little overweight and my logbook's way behind
- Dave Dudley, "Six Days on the Road" 1963
The give-and-take between making a living and obeying the law in truck driving is well established in our culture.
Anyone who's interested I'd encourage to check out Dave Dudley's music. It's all there: racing time, avoiding the law, fatigue, loneliness, bodily harm, drug abuse, etc.
The electronic logs are probably the reason these rules have been relaxed recently. When you could cheat, everyone just cheated because you needed to in order to make a living. Now you can't cheat and the industry is speaking up about it.
Yup, there was a big hit to guys driving extra hours when it became easier to spot them.
It was easy to make extra money, but it was at the cost of all of their time. It kinda inflated how good a living you could make...at least looking at the end results. But it also wasn't very realistic.
>Driving too much is not just at the cost of time. It is at the cost of life, drivers and whoever he crashes into.
Do you really think a middle aged truck driver is (was) holding the steering wheel for 16hr straight as a matter of routine business? Of course not.
Tropes like that make for easy online virtue points but that wasn't the reality for the overwhelming majority of people who were cooking the books.
These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order.
And occasionally someone would go overboard, drive 36hr straight and cause a crash. And because that's an easy thing for people who have zero knowledge of industry incentives and feedback loops to get their panties in a knot over they made it "extra illegal" because you can't make being an idiot illegal.
And so now the industry cuts far less tasteful corners and pays everyone crap and you have drivers who have barely memorized the pre-trip, have barely and hours behind the wheel, can't read english, and who choose a different career in short order and are likewise treated as disposable.
So the net effect is more or less a wash but a handful of people get to get big raises and some politicians can pat themselves on the back for "solving" logbook fraud.
> These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order.
And how does this justify as something safe? When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while. Safely behind a computer. If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives.
I worked 12 hour shifts as a 911 dispatcher and was mentally exhausted after those shifts. I had an hour drive home each of those shifts. There were definitely many shifts I wasn't driving home safe. Luckily my hour drive was like that because I was "temporarily relocated". The employer gave us the option to go book a hotel stay so I had some days where I was too tired to drive home safely and would stay in the hotel 5 minutes away.
And that's just me in a small little sedan, not an overloaded 18 wheeler. For context, I also do have a commercial drivers license. Driving for 60-80 hours in a week is just not safe. There is no way to try and justify that it is.
The only people doing that many hours of driving a week "safely" were probably high on cocaine. Cocaine usage was quite prevalent in the trucking industry because of this huge push to have drivers fudging logs and overdriving.
There are tons of studies out there that prove that driving while tired can be just as bad as driving drunk, if not worse depending on how deprived of sleep you are and how long you've been going.
For example, drivers who transport property in the same state are subject to state regulations but not federal regulations. Whereas drivers who deliver materials from state to state must comply with federal regulations. Among the regulations:
A reset occurs when a driver has had marked 34 consecutive hours off duty. The workweek starts after the last legal reset. For example, if you begin at 1 a.m. on Monday, then the workweek continues until 1 a.m. the following Monday.
Each duty period must begin with at least 10 hours off-duty.
Drivers may work no more than 60 hours on-duty over seven consecutive days or 70 hours over eight days. And they need to maintain a driver's log for seven days and eight days after, respectively.
Drivers may be on duty for up to 14 hours following 10 hours off duty, but they are limited to 11 hours of driving time.
Drivers must take a mandatory 30-minute break by their eighth hour of coming on duty.
The 14-hour duty period may not be extended with off-duty time for breaks, meals, fuel stops, etc.
I would say the only issue is on your required break time, you sit around doing nothing and not get paid for it. If you are at home that is fine, if you are a long haul trucker, you're stuck at a truck stop waiting for time to complete.
As a side note, as others have mentioned, truck drivers have been getting paid less and less over the years, and that's not accounting for inflation; plus it's rough on relationships, so it's no wonder there is a shortage.
The safety issues the parent posts were talking about are greatly increased when these rules are circumvented in order to drive a bunch more hours than that.
They're generally not circumvented to "drive a bunch more hours". That's a fools game. You need to take breaks eventually. Cramming more hours into the work week doesn't actually help you in the long term because the human body can't sustainably run on unsafe amounts of sleep. The books get cooked to avoid wasting valuable on-duty hours while sitting around waiting to be loaded/unloaded.
They generally are circumvented to make it to the receiver or next shipper within a given "shift". So instead of stopping 1hr from the receiver you might cook the books, get there, go off duty, sleep, etc. They unload at their convenience before you clock back in and then you cook the books again making it look like you're still off duty when driving an hour to your next load where you repeat the same 2-6hr loading delay shitshow. Then you cook the books a third time running 30min across town to somewhere you can get prepared food and park, hit up the massage parlor, etc, whatever it is you do to burn half a day off duty.
So instead of burning a work day doing busy work and sitting in your truck watching movies on an ipad you've accomplished a 34hr reset in that time and most of those 34ish hours were in fact spent off duty.
> Cramming more hours into the work week doesn't actually help you in the long term because the human body can't sustainably run on unsafe amounts of sleep.
The body can run on unsafe amounts of sleep for a long time. It is unhealthy, it is unsafe and leads to mistakes and crashes, but people in fact regularly attempt that. Many many people in fact think they are being hardworking and strong for doing that.
The pressure to drive unsafely is very real on professional drivers. The drivers (not trucks) I knew were telling me exact same story. Regularly driving a lot and without good sleep. Pressure to drive more and faster.
Also, this is how the debate started:
> I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job requirement. Drive 48 hours? No problem.
While I think 48 hours drive was exaggeration or drivers brag, it was meant to express "a lot of driving way more then is reasonable".
The big issue truckers have is that typical loading/unloading delays tend to result in large stretches of what is effectively off duty time punctuated by moving the truck a few hundred yards that they don't get credit for.
And you assume it wrong, having a car is a luxury in my native country and I was only able to afford one after I got into a comfortable 9-19 work schedule.
Don't assume that everyone is American or that American culture for commuting is widespread across the globe.
Good public transportation is a luxury in the majority of the US. Most jobs in most places require a vehicle + license + insurance + maintenance. In my city, we have a bus service but it can be 2 hours late on a consistent basis. Sometimes they don't even show up and you have to wait for the next pass and hope it shows up. Sometimes the driver is sick and there is no replacement, so no bus. Also, many places will fire you if you are late, so you need to be at the stop 2 hours before it shows up just to be safe, and you might not even be safe if the driver is sick. This is a medium sized city.
So in many places, your options would be sleep at work, or drive home tired.
The danger from a 2,000 pound car is not comparable to the danger from a truck that weighs up to 80,000 pounds (or FORTY TIMES as much). And that's not even considering overweight loads.
"Eleven percent of all motor vehicle crash deaths in 2019 occurred in large truck crashes."
"Twelve percent of all passenger vehicle occupant deaths and 22 percent of passenger vehicle occupant deaths in multiple-vehicle crashes in 2019 occurred in crashes with large trucks."
>One is SIGNIFICANTLY (twice!) more likely to kill people in an accident. To say otherwise is just a lie.
Show me where I said that. You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car but not a truck because you're only half as likely to kill someone than a large truck. To say otherwise is just a lie! See I can put words in your mouth and use it as a red herring too.
The correct answer is it's not ok to drive home exhausted regardless of the vehicle you are in.
> I mean both will significantly kill people in an accident.
Or, you know, when you literally said that it's no different:
> I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?
--
> You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car
Show me where I said that.
YOU are the one who claimed that driving exhausted in a truck is no different from driving exhausted in a car. They are EXTREMELY different. One is SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to end in a death, which is why that one has significantly more regulation, even though driving recklessly is illegal in any case.
>Or, you know, when you literally said that it's no different:
Ok so you are just arguing because you want to be right. I asked what's different. Do you not understand the difference between a statement or a question?
You quoted me as saying I literally said driving tired in a car or truck is no different:
>> I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?
That's obviously a question. It starts with "what" and ends with a question mark. It can't "literally" be a statement.
>Show me where I said that.
Sorry you completely missed the point I was making. You are using red herrings and I called you out on it by using a red herring.
I'm gonna be done here, you aren't arguing in good faith, so it's a waste of both our time. I know you are going to reply because you just have to have the last word, so be my guest.
Why would you assume that they drive home? Regardless, there would hypothetically be massive differences such as distance and size of vehicle. Both are bad.
Most of them didn't really have an opportunity for a life so you can't blame them. What are you going to do when you are 10 hours from home and hit your maximum allowed to drive time? Legally you can only stop at a truck stop. If you wake up at 6:30, spend an hour on breakfast, then drive for 4 hours, with a 10 minute break every hour (30 minutes) , then stop for an hour for lunch (at 11:30), then drive for another 4 hours with half hour brakes before an hour for supper (now 6:00), then two more hours, it is 9:00. For a normal 8 hour sleep night you now have an 1.5 hours to kill in a middle of nowhere area with nothing to do. Most people don't need that much time for breaks. You can easily see how someone would want to cheat for more pay - there isn't much else to do.
Now for health our hypothetical trucker above should get out and move, but face it, most people aren't getting their exercise.
> What are you going to do when you are 10 hours from home and hit your maximum allowed to drive time?
Railroads have had to deal with that since the Hours of Service Act in 1907. After 12 hours, train crews and dispatchers are "dead on the law", and have to stop the train. The railroad tries hard to prevent that. They don't schedule people for the full 12 hours. There are crew change points. Railroads put train crews up in motels. Ferry crews around in crew vans. Once in a while a train does end up stopped for that reason, usually because some other problem tied up traffic.
Interestingly, while there's theoretical work on the Truck Driver Scheduling Problem [1], there doesn't seem to be someone offering this as a service. That might be a startup opportunity for someone.
Some railways are using "Driver Status Monitoring", which uses things like eye tracking to check the driver is alert.
Even with the best shift scheduling software, it's difficult to handle cases outside the railway company's control -- like the driver being tired because they were kept awake by external noise, stress etc when they were trying to sleep.
"The following are examples of appropriate uses of a CMV while off-duty for personal conveyance ... Commuting between the driver’s terminal and his or her residence ... Authorized use of a CMV to travel home after working at an offsite location"
Although frankly the answer is "stop somewhere and sleep because your trip is too long to do in a single day" and I'm not sure why you think that somehow that's too much of an inconvenience for them.
Perhaps dystopian to say, but this sounds like a perfect use-case for 5G-streamed VR MMO games. Have an hour to kill in the middle of nowhere? Jack in!
> These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing
The difference is that IT guy won't crash truck into another car when overworked. Truckers did.
And it was not because they were idiots. It was, because humans are affected by tiredness. And it did not happened because of some larger goal, but because it is cheaper to pressure trucker to drive too much.
Electronic log books are not "a lot more difficult." Google "truck electronic log cheat"
In some cases it's just pulling a fuse or the right connector.
In other systems you can literally tell the e-logger that you're doing a kind of driving that 'doesn't count' and the system goes "oh okay" and that's that.
Reportedly a lot of state police commercial vehicle cops don't bother to check e-loggers because they're lazy and it's not as easy as flipping open a paper book.
Actually remember a presentation from one of the logbook startups from a few years ago. The key feature that skyrocketted adoption was the ability to fudge (...er, "correct") the logbook manually. When it was automated, they had issues because it would basically lock them down to the rules.
Depending on how the driver is contracted 100k is not a big deal. Because the take home is not even close to that. For instance take off the fuel costs off that 100k just for starters
I watched a grown man, a skilled and conscientious man, learn to drive an 18-wheeler in California and try to make a living.
It is dangerous, it will test the nerves of the driver. You will be bullied, it is the culture. The price pressure on wages, for a fully qualified and competent driver, were relentlessly downward in the USA.
The ports here are full of refugees sleeping in the cabs of their leased trucks. The callousness and stupid-on-stupid business practices are a cacophony. Civilized people need not apply to either end of it.
>Civilized people need not apply to either end of it.
That's a big part of the problem. We are gradually transforming our economy so that bigger and bigger chunks of it are run by people living in miserable conditions, driven there out of desperation. The media cheers it as giving another chance to disadvantaged, and goes out of their way to redirect the average person's ambitions away from accumulating wealth. And if you oppose it, they will just claim that you hate all those poor people, rather than disagreeing with the lowering of the average living standard. The end game is slums for everyone (except the ruling class of course).
You are onto something here, I think. And it certainly does not help that driving was one of those few remaining jobs that did not require a lot of education. To me personally it seems like recipe for a disaster to basically prime a chunk of your population for an anger for being left behind by 'the rich', who set the system up to skim few more bucks from labor savings and "the poor", who are desperate enough to take their spots in those jobs.
>To me personally it seems like recipe for a disaster to basically prime a chunk of your population for an anger for being left behind by 'the rich'...
What are they going to do about it? It's no coincidence robot dogs are now being outfitted with guns.
The entire USA logistics industry is filled with toxic, below average IQ, bro-to-the-max managers. It's like Wall Street, but dumber and no math requirements. See my other comment in this thread for details on that.
Nope, not really. Economy is sort of a closed loop. There is that much basic resources and this much people, and it's all about how it gets distributed between them. "Sort of", because it creates incentives for people to do some things, and if these incentives are right, the economy creates new value.
In an anarchy it boils down to who's got a bigger gun. Under feudalism, it's about what class you were born to. For a brief moment in human history in a bunch of Western countries it was about who managed to create something of value and sell it to others. But that would also mean bankrupting inefficient behemoths to make room for the next generation, but we stopped doing that in 2008.
So now, if you have bought a couple of Walmart shares back in 1970s, you're good. If you have purchased a house prior to 2010s, you are great. But if you are younger, you're screwed. The media tells you that living in a box and having no family is OK, and if you are ambitious - go play a victim and get forced non-monetary recognition from others. The incentive to create things is gone, so the society is inevitably converging to some weird corporate feudalism, and that only means further degradation for those except the hereditary elites.
Maybe you're being ironic, but it sounds like you're whining... there are "other" Walmart shares, nowdays it's easier and cheaper to buy them...there are houses which'll appreciate in value (most? do) but wealth does have that bad habit of holding you still, those shares need researching, the house repairing... and anyway I'm sure you prefer to travel...
I never did understand why people keep up with their 9/5 5 days a week (and in Europe a month holiday ) when they could save more, spend less (on heating) by heading south in the winter... in a way the most important thing people from the west have is their passport which (unfairly) allows them pretty much freedom to travel anywhere...and a basic salary which would cover a years expenses for a couple months of work...
A sense of place and belonging is critical to life satisfaction. If we can't settle down and build a life in a community, then that is not a slight obstacle to happiness, its a major detriment to the health of the population.
I'm of the opinion that we are more animal than we remember, and the human animal thrives in a participatory community. I reject that casualness of your point.
You're right except stocks don't matter at all. It's the land that matters if you want to reinstate feudalism. USA was the land of the free because nobody "owned" it. 300 years later it is running into the same problems that drove people out of Europe to North America.
Yeah I think it’s ridiculous that people forget that we only got to this point because previous generations built a framework which we currently live in and where many of us can prosper.
If we want to abandon that and go back to the centuries of fiefdom where we barely made progress, by all means do it somewhere else.
You forgot the part where people under 21 years of age aren't allowed to drive big rigs across state lines.
Electronic logbooks are the main reason drivers lost wages recently. Turns out that the market had adjusted to an equilibrium that expected drivers to fudge their log books, and once the ability to fudge was removed, the absolute morons who fill the ranks of logistics companies wouldn't up their rates and the market equilibrium was broken. This caused drivers to leave the business.
It can't be overstated how absolutely dumb the average desk jockey in the logistics space truly is. Having had to deal with a few different companies over the years (Hapag Lloyd, various CPG companies, Marten), there was no contest in offices with just straight up low-IQ but cocky jocks filling the desks. A brother-in-law is in the transportation industry, and he routinely uses fancy words he doesn't understand on calls (I hear them when I'm visiting) and nobody on the call is capable of calling him out. A recent example was when he was saying that "we need to work on improving the linear regressions on our deliveries"........ I tried to explain to him that the term wasn't what he thought it was, and he literally couldn't absorb what I said. He is in charge of hundreds of millions of throughput for a massive food corporation whose products are in every household in the country. Near as I can tell, the entire industry is a bunch of mediocrities with spreadsheets spending most of their days in meetings comparing their numbers and getting yelled at when they don't line up correctly.
Basically, this guy says take it on the chin for a year or two and keep a clean record. Then you can easily change companies and earn a solid middle class salary. Do you believe it or think his wages are bit "bubbly"? Honestly, I'm not involved in the logistic industry, but his video looks "no-BS" and straight forward. If was looking for solid working class / middle class job, I would be watching this video for tips!
The downsides caught up to him after ~3 years. He also worked his salary out to roughly $8/hr (see video for details) considering time spent "on the job".
So, perhaps this isn't the solid advertisement for the industry you were thinking it is.
Wow, thank you so much to share this follow-up video. I watched it today. My heart goes out to him. He is trying to be emotionally naked in front of an Internet audience about serious quality of life issues for OTR truckers.
He mentioned the intensity was simply too high. It's an "all or nothing" job. Honestly, when I first posted, I wasn't aware how griding the job is. I'm glad I watched this follow-up video.
What if trucking companies offered to allow two truckers to split the schedule? Then, it is up the pair to work it out. I feel the same about people who quit their office careers early for emotional labour -- family care. Many of them could easy return to their old role in 50% capacity, and split with another person. I know it could be done, but management has no interest.
It's not impossible that anyone could drive well for a while and land in a good place, but that's not the industry I see. I don't see people suddenly getting paid well after 30 months.
I don't have first hand experience with the Walmart example, but I've heard from others they get their pick of the most experienced drivers / don't pay poorly, but they're not the industry and the idea of just meeting their minimum to be considered and magically getting a job sounds a bit silly.
To me that's a YouTube video that implies a lot, isn't impossible, but doesn't say much about the odds of any of it being true for a given person either ...
The industry I know has demand for drivers, but the outcome of that isn't what you might think. There's "demand" where they demand folks who aren't paid well, and then there's real demand.
> complaining about driver shortages but not increasing wages
This is the core truth in virtually every "<worker> shortage" story. It's true for every profession, every occupation, every market. Pay a market wage and the problem goes away.
What the headlines really should be is "Rapid change in wages causes headaches for employers".
I mean, it's true that short term shocks to wage levels (and covid has been one hell of a shock) cause disruption to markets. That's worth covering. But the root cause is not and never has been a "lack of people", it's that the population of people willing to work at the now-sub-market wage is smaller than employers want.
> What the headlines really should be is "Rapid change in wages causes headaches for employers".
It's more like employers are feigning a labor shortage because they want access to the cheap and abusable visa labor they exploited before the pandemic.
It's an extremely difficult and dangerous job. The drivers deserve to be paid more than the current wages. Driving ruined my dad's health permanently - the long term costs aren't even factored in usually.
From acquaintances I know, the combination of long periods of sitting, stimulant abuse, lack of healthy food options, inconsistent sleep, air quality from being around other trucks, stress from the job, and mental isolation from being away from friends and family all are really hard, even for a year. Now imagine a 30+ Year career.
Sitting for 8-12 hours a day in a cramped position is bad for your back, neck, shoulders, hips. Name a joint and it's gonna get messed up eventually. There's also a risk of blood clots and generally anything that can be caused by poor circulation, especially in your legs. Add to that poor sleep from sleeping in your cab or possibly a crappy motel if you're lucky, not getting enough sleep, rarely being able to exercise or eat well, and obesity and muscle degeneration start to become pretty serious risks, too.
You can compensate for all those things, and some drivers do. Taking walks on their breaks, doing calesthenics, bringing good food from home, etc. Many of them don't, just as many other people don't take care of themselves and are fat and sedentary.
The amount of sitting a software dev does is comparable if not more to most truck drivers, I'd guess.
I can get out of my office chair, stretch, and then return back to my seat in a minute as much as I'd like. An 18 wheeler has to exit the highway, find a place to park that accommodates large trucks, put on the brakes, Climb out, walk around, and then go back to the highway. All while not being paid a salary but being paid by the mile.
This picture sprang to my mind when thinking of the consequences of trucking. Essentially, the sunlight from his driver side mirror aged the right side of his face. This is why I wear sunscreen almost constantly when going outside and to keep exposure to a minimum.
Something not mentioned in the article, and I'm sad to see NPR ignore is that the trucking industry turned predatory in the past few years (mainly because I'm sure they reported on it in the past).
Certain logistics companies have been pushing drivers into "owner-operator" scenarios, where they are responsible for gas, insurance, maintenance, and lease payments, while not being given the flexibility to drive for other companies. Leaving some drivers with negative paychecks (basically, their pay didn't cover expenses).
I'm betting they are going after 18 years olds specifically because they are kind of primed to into debt for a career because the college admissions process kind of primes them to think this is normal.
Since listening to that, a lot of the recent news I've been seeing, including this article, haven't been a surprise to me.
I remember they talked specifically about how predatory the trucking industry is. They interviewed both the truckers and some of the representative from companies exploiting them. (Business model didn't sound all that different from Uber. Drivers pay for their own trucks, work as independent contractors, while large operating under control of companies.)
I can't actually locate it on this site so it may have been reported in some follow-up stories. Or perhaps in details of actual story audio.
Yep the whole "owner operator" thing is just another scam. It seems like I'm seeing fewer of those on the road lately but that may just be that I'm seeing fewer of them not that there actually are fewer.
> Certain logistics companies have been pushing drivers into "owner-operator" scenarios, where they are responsible for gas, insurance, maintenance, and lease payments, while not being given the flexibility to drive for other companies. Leaving some drivers with negative paychecks (basically, their pay didn't cover expenses).
So basically the trucking industry looked at Uber and Lyft and said "Oh, hey. Neat."
No, from what I remember 10yrs ago when Uber was still starting it was already quite popular to push people into 'fake B2B' arrangement.
I remember truck drivers, paramedics and others pushed into 'fake B2B' for years and there is quite a lot of regulation in EU that if you have a single customer as a single proprietor you might be checked if it is 'fake B2B'.
As far as I recall, the roach coach that stopped at the place I worked at in 1980, twice a day, was 'staffed' by such an independent contractor.
We call them food trucks now and some of them really are independent I think, like the ones that cluster in Portland. But what I refer to served food that was not nearly as good.
> while not being given the flexibility to drive for other companies. Leaving some drivers with negative paychecks (basically, their pay didn't cover expenses).
This seems to me that the drivers should just file a self-written W-2 as a statutory employee and let the IRS figure it out. Not allowing an 'owner-operator' to work for other companies pretty clearly puts the 'owners' into the category of statutory employee.
That’s easy to say if you can trivially find another job. If they’re concerned about that and don’t want to be in a tax case (which seems extra unappealing for someone who spends most of the day driving) they probably won’t - and that’s what those companies are banking on.
California regulatory requirements basically shut down drivers owning their own trucks: the cheap old diesel trucks aren't in compliance anymore. So there's a lot of scummy leasing arrangements for the newer more expensive trucks.
That’s what the situation in this thread sounded like: those companies must have some kind of lever to force exclusivity and I’d assume it’s something like a loan.
The question is whether they are confident enough that this will be true, not lead to retaliation, and some consequences will happen. If not, a lot of people might feel they’re trapped.
I dunno.. maybe the government should start an advertising campaign, but that would imply that they would be able to put individual interests above those of their corporate overlords.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
> 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
> 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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So according to you, the 2008 recession was caused by... gap between productivity and hourly compensation?
also, comparing productivity to hourly compensation is a bad comparison because it entirely omits other forms of compensation (stocks, healthcare). if i try to compare total compensation to productivty using FRED, I get: https://i.imgur.com/ohabUFu.png, which seems to say the opposite? Total compensation seems to have outpaced productivity growth, at least starting from 2000.
You should actually read through that website. The gap between productivity and wages is only one of the charts on there. The thesis posits that both the 2008 recession and the productivity-wage gap is a consequence of the monetary regime that began in the early 1970s.
what thesis? The first link is a chart, and the second link is a collection of charts with a bunch of arrows, and a quote at the end. Neither be plausibly called a thesis, unless you're already to primed to believe it.
Yes. People getting paid fairly don't need ridiculously unreasonable loan conditions to buy a house.
The fact that you are bringing up stocks as compensation says a great deal.
Cool so I can have healthcare while I starve naked on the street cause I can't pay for food,clothing or housing with my insurance card.
FRED... oh man. You mean the private business that was created specificity to rob every person in the united states says nothing is wrong. In fact it is great? Cool....
> Yes. People getting paid fairly don't need ridiculously unreasonable loan conditions to buy a house.
certainly not due to other factors, say NIMBYism or more urbanization (more people crammed into the same piece of land)
>The fact that you are bringing up stocks as compensation says a great deal.
Well? What does it say?
>Cool so I can have healthcare while I starve naked on the street cause I can't pay for food,clothing or housing with my insurance card.
I'm not sure what your point here is. Are you upset that employers are compensating employees on a non-cash basis?
>FRED... oh man. You mean the private business that was created specificity to rob every person in the united states says nothing is wrong. In fact it is great? Cool....
if you look more carefully you'll see the actual data is sourced from the BLS.
Spoiler: US Government spent more money than they had in gold reserves culminating in the breaking of the Bretton Woods agreement with European nations. The USD from 1973 became a fully fiat currency. So yes, if it deals with the US economy after 1970's, as the graphs indicate, it's inseparable from USD inflation most likely caused by government spending.
Probably at least a little: logistics has improved substantially since then. Also the value of the stuff in the truck is up, I'm not sure how that plays in.
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."
Reminds me this headline from Aug: “Jet pilot, 37, who lost his job in lockdown when Flybe collapsed now earns MORE as a lorry driver in Britain's HGV crisis” [1]
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.)
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)
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.
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)
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?
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.
+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.
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..
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,...).
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 ...
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.
Quite a contrast from the automation-driven jobs loss that was being forecast back in 2016, even by those who should have known better. For example a quote from a piece by Ryan Petersen, the CEO of Flexport:
"driverless trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory."
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
Life on the road is tough. Lonely, eating truck stop food and sitting for 12 hours a day is terrible, not to mention being trapped in a truck for your whole life.
It’s really hard on your family too. I had a few friends in high school who’s dads drove trucks, some of them single fathers. Those kids almost certainly did worse in school and got into more shit because their dad was gone all the time. It’s a really tough gig.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
These stories are all planted by the trucking companies. These stories have shown up a million times over the last twenty years, and maybe earlier. The WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg, WaPo and now NPR run this same article about every two weeks. It always amazes me when people tweet this article or it shows up on HN because it is so predictable. Haven't you seen this same article at least a hundred times? Where are all the truckers' yachts?
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?
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.
> 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
It's entirely self-inflicted by the greed and avarice of the trucking companies. Such as paying $3/hour for the first 40k miles driven, which is 4-6 months of employment depending on whether driving in city areas or doing longer haul highway driving.
You can read the summmary of the Supreme Court case called New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira to see some of the scummy tactics that large trucking firms pull on people:
"In the present case, Dominic Oliveira sought employment with New Prime Inc., an American trucking company. When he was hired, he first had to drive 10,000 miles as an unpaid "trainee", followed by 30,000 miles as an "apprentice" working at US$4 an hour. Oliveira was then brought into the company proper, he was given the option to be hired as an employee, or as an independent contractor, which the company asserted would be more economical for Oliveira. Oliveira opted to be hired as a contractor. However, because he was an independent contractor, this allowed New Prime to charge Oliveira and other drivers through leasing of the New Prime vehicles and to pay for their own fuel and equipment through deductions from their paychecks, items that the company would normally pay for if the person was an employee. Oliveira frequently found these costs exceeded his base rate, effectively paying New Prime for his employment. While the terms of his independent contract allow him to drive for other companies, Oliveira found that his schedule was heavily dictated by New Prime. Oliveira eventually dropped the independent contractor and was rehired as an employee of New Prime, where his work duties and commitment were essentially identical to what he had done as an independent contractor, but taking home much more from his paycheck."
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.
>>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Basically anything that has you in your own bed at night and not breaking your back is going to be low pay or require a lot of experience. If you have a driver on staff the incentive is to use them for every hour you legally can because your business insurance costs reflect the number of drivers more than the hours your fleet spends on the road.
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.
Is it just me or does it seem.. cruel, enlisting youth into what is a hard, and soon to be a dead-end job? They're saying "shortage of truck drivers" but that's just another way of saying "the pay is too low".
A family friend manages a trucking company here in Michigan. He tells me that it’s not a shortage - but rather an attrition problem. Companies are having a hard time keeping drivers.
He doesn’t even have employees. He coaches all of his drivers through the process of setting up their own LLC and becoming independent. They love it.
Growing up in the 80s, probably around a third of the adults in my neighborhood were truck drivers, and I can confidently say that truck driving is not the same profession as it was back then. The unions were strong back then, and when they threatened to strike, companies had to pay attention.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone needs to invent a standing desk like driving rig (wearing harnesses or what not). It wouldn’t be a bad job if you could stay fit and listen to audio books.
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.
> Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the trucking industry, says adding young drivers won't solve the industry's biggest problem: retention.
The article linked at "retention" seems much more interesting to me:
> Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter.
> In a 2019 study[1] published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists Stephen V. Burks and Kristen Monaco investigated claims by industry leaders that the trucking labor market was somehow "broken" enough to create a decades-long shortage. ... A thorough investigation led them to conclude that the trucking labor market is ... not broken. Yes, they say, the trucking labor market is "tight" — meaning that companies are competing to fill open jobs — but it functions in the same way as any other labor market.
> "There is no shortage," says Todd Spencer, the president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. His organization represents more than 150,000 mostly self-employed truck drivers around the United States.
> The big trucking companies want to secure a steady supply of cheap labor, and the ATA [lobbying organization for the nation's big trucking employers, the American Trucking Associations] has spent years lobbying the federal government to loosen regulations in the industry. It's now pushing for the DRIVE-Safe Act[2] in Congress, which would allow 18-year-olds to begin driving trucks across state lines. Right now, drivers must be at least 21.
> The real problem, Spencer says, is not a shortage but retention. According to the ATA's own statistics, the average annual turnover rate for long-haul truckers at big trucking companies has been greater than 90% for decades.
> "We have millions of people who have been trained to be heavy-duty truck drivers who are currently not working as heavy-duty truck drivers because the entry-level jobs are terrible," says Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the trucking industry.
> Compared with other blue-collar occupations, the median annual income of trucking is actually pretty good: $47,130. But long-haul truckers commonly work extremely long hours, often 60 to 70 hours per week or more. And drivers are typically not paid by the hour. Instead, they are typically paid only for the number of miles they drive. The average truck driver gets paid 52.3 cents per mile, according to the Department of Transportation. Even if weather or traffic slows them down and extends their working day, they get paid the same. Moreover, they're not compensated for the significant time it takes to load or unload their trucks. And they're not compensated for their "off time," even though they're miles and miles away from home.
> Being a long-haul trucker also means living out of your truck, because motels are pretty expensive and often don't have parking for big rigs. Meanwhile, finding parking to rest anywhere is a growing problem. Truckers sacrifice their health, sitting on their butt for hours and hours and eating junk food on the road. And the job is dangerous: Truck drivers are 10 times more likely to be killed on the job than the average worker.
> But, Viscelli says, through political lobbying, legal activism and harsh business practices, big trucking companies have made a difficult job even harder, especially for entry-level truckers. He says the companies have been "systematically degrading trucker working conditions." Scholars have referred to trucks as "sweatshops on wheels." Viscelli says the industry is rife with minimum wage violations and what he calls "debt peonage." Basically, new drivers become indentured servants, going deep into debt to get training and to lease trucks from their employers
> The debate over whether to call this a retention problem or a shortage may seem like mincing words. But it matters for the solution. The ATA and its allies argue that the "shortage" means the government should further relax regulations and make it easier for anyone to become an interstate truck driver. Insurance and rental car companies know that teenagers are much more likely to get into an accident — which is why they charge them more. But the "shortage"! We need teenagers to do the job!
> Frame the issue as a retention crisis, however, and the onus falls on the industry to make long-haul trucking more attractive as a profession. After decades of stagnant wages and shriveling opportunities for blue-collar workers, this is the market working on their behalf for a change: forcing employers to pay workers enough to do a really hard but vital job.
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.
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.
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.
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Drivers have been making LESS over the years for a few decades now.
Nobody wants to hire 18 year olds generally, insurance wouldn't allow it any way...
Logistics companies who hire drivers have been complaining about driver shortages but not increasing wages for years as well... and they actually seem to meet demand just fine. Issues at choke points like ports don't seem to be a pure driver supply issue from what I've seen.
The logistics industry is super price sensitive, people will complain... but they'll also wait to ship a thing to save a couple bucks (I'm not kidding when I say a couple bucks) all while complaining.
The drivers you hear who make a good living have specialized skills / work for specialized companies and do not reflect the industry as a whole.