There’s A Trucking Industry Crisis The U.S. Isn’t Doing Anything To Address

The load-hauling truck driver used to be a respectable and near-romanticized job with reliable upper-middle class wages, flexible on-the-road time, and the beauty of the American open road. As demand for truck drivers on U.S. roads continues to increase, you would imagine that companies would be paying more and offering more benefits, but the reality is exactly the opposite. The promise of high wages and “being your own boss” remain, drawing in a larger supply of drivers looking for one of the last middle-class blue collar jobs that doesn’t require a college education, and instead are finding their take-home-pay cut by delays, traffic, and deleterious working conditions. The promises of big wages are basically lies to trick America’s working poor into a cycle of near-indentured servitude labor. 

According to Time, enough truckers have been burned out or washed through the cycle of getting their CDL and suffering with low wages that the real issue isn’t a shortage of truckers, but a retention crisis. This is corroborated by Vision Magazine‘s piece, essentially saying that these drivers are vital parts of the economic puzzle, and aren’t compensated well enough for the hassle. 

While the trucking industry once relied on owner/operators to get the work done, many drivers now contract with a major retailer like Amazon or Walmart to find some semblance of decent pay and work/life balance in exchange for being micro-managed by a faceless corporation. While this kind of trucking was once the norm, it is now reserved for the best of the best, drivers with several years of experience, spotless records, and demanding physical fitness. For most drivers on the road the reality is bleak, with some sectors delivering wages well below federal minimum thanks to hours and even days of waiting around for a load unpaid. 

You don’t have to take my word for it, check out this recent video from Wendover Productions for more details and an explanation of how it got this bad. 

As with basically every job, conditions have gotten worse and pay has decreased as laborers are further removed from the value that they create for the company. With a greater supply of increasingly poorly trained and deceived drivers, corporations and logistics facilitators can continue to squeeze their truckers because they are increasingly replaceable with another cog in the machine if they get fed up. With companies investing heavily in automating trucks, an attempt to push the worker out of the process altogether, the industry is even more aggressive with its drivers lately. The feeling is that workers have to accept lower wages because otherwise they’ll just be replaced by a machine. 

Slower retail sales, lower factory demand, supply chain disruptions, and economic instability are all threats to the once-thriving American trucking industry. If the supply chain fails, everything gets significantly worse, and the entire economy could be on the precipice of a crisis if this individual problem doesn’t get solved soon. As with many other industries bent on providing slavish wages and worse working conditions, the trucking industry has increasingly relied on importing drivers from the global south, says LA Times, who are easier to control and threaten, and more likely to work for lower pay without complaint. Unfortunately there seems to be no rush to fix anything from any lawmakers or trucking companies, more interest seems instead to be placed in squeezing further blood from the stone.