Can you be a really good truck driver and still be bad?

Here's my thing. When it comes to my compensation, I'm not really thinking about the driver shortage. I have no way of knowing if there is or isn't one. If I go ask for a raise, it'll be because I feel I have out performed what I'm paying. What my company pays me is in line with the industry average, and they run me well, so for now it's working. I've never had to ask them for a raise. They just give them out yearly. Sometimes it's been a penny a mile, other times 2. Once it was 4 cents a mile increase, but that really don't tell the story if there isn't any freight to move. It's apparently enough for us to run something daily.

 

If you're happy enough being paid average more power to you. For some it's not worth the extra effort.

 

"I know the ship is sinking but I don't have time to worry about the hole in the bottom of the hull."

Using the phrase "driver shortage" accepts that what the employers want is the just right level of truck drivers and that having less drivers than what the employers want is a shortage. Employers, customers, drivers, etc all have wants. Why pick employers as the one particular player who says what is the true measure of what should exist? If we use the perspective of drivers we could replace "driver shortage" with "pay & conditions shortage". If pay was tripled and HOS were set at 40 hours per 8 day period A LOT more drivers that recently entered the industry would still be in the industry. When there is an obvious hole in the "gas can" it's foolish to keep saying the "gas can" has a fuel shortage. The "gas can", or the trucking industry, is dumping 400,000 brand new CDL drivers into the industry EVERY YEAR. Dumping 480,000 new drivers into the leaky "gas can" isn't going to solve the hole in the gas can any more than filling the leaky "gas can" at a faster rate will fix the "gas can". Plugging the hole in the can will solve the "fuel shortage". The only response to improving conditions/pay ever heard is "yeah, let's do that too." It's the almost non-existent recognition of how much pay and working conditions are chasing drivers out of the industry "driver shortage" is covering up. There is no driver shortage. EVERY year more new drivers are put into the industry than even the most alarmist projection claims will be needed in 10 years. "We'll need 80,000 new drivers in 2035." Ask what did you do with the 320,000 (400,000 - 80,000) new drivers coming to work last year that left the industry?"

The economy isn't just one signal it's almost an infinite set of signals. Using the phrase "driver shortage" indicates we are looking at only one of those many important signals. Consumer demand can increase all it wants but that doesn't mean ANYONE other than the future driver decides whether that new driver should leave his IT job and start driving a truck. The pay and conditions in trucking may attract the burned out IT guy or it may not. It's not his responsibility to keep the trucking industry supplied with enough drivers. It's his job to get a good enough deal for himself and if trucking doesn't want to attract enough drivers, they industry should wither or be replaced. There is no right for continued existence just because some company or industry has been going for X years. The industry is working on attracting lower-status applicants from poorer backgrounds because it's cheaper to hire them. The industry has abused drivers so long, almost nobody in the outside world looks at truck driving as reasonable or proper for a normal person. To the rest of the economy only drop-out, criminals, defective units would want to do that job and in some cases they are correct.

 

I'm not sure I understand you logic. You're saying I should pay attention to whether there's a driver shortage, some there is one and some say there is t. If it's reported that there is a driver shortage, I'm supposed to go to my company and ask for a raise.....

Me: Mr. Company Owner, I'd like to talk about my pay. I think I deserve a raise.

Company Owner: What are you basing it on?

Me: There is a driver shortage.

Company Owner: Huh?

So driver shortage should be considered whe talking about driver pay? I can't imagine aby company thinking about that. It doesn't really make sense. The only way to really make big time money is to get every endorsement and go work for a company in which those endorsements will be honored. Hauling general freight, there really isn't a way to get raises outside of longevity, and you achieve that by being reliable and available, picking up and delivering on time, I really don't have to tell you. So what makes a driver hauling general freight worthy of high pay? The driver shortage that many think is a myth?

 

The driver shortage could be over tomorrow except the trucking companies want govt money to pay them for recruiting recent immigrants and other desperate people to work in an industry that chase away 80-90% of the new drivers that try it out each year. Imagine if 80-90% of Ford's customers ran away from Ford vehicles within 12 months of buying a Ford. If the problem is a driver shortage, then the answer is to force lots of people to be drivers. If the problem is pay and conditions are too low to attract the drivers then the solution is to improve pay and conditions. Which problem will the trucking company and the media talk about? Driver shortage. There is no driver shortage. There are unattractive pay and conditions in trucking and 300,000 new driver every year are voting with their feet. Maybe half of the trucking companies are unnecessary yet their continued operation keeps freight rates low which means pay and conditions don't attract drivers in the "needed" numbers. You can train ANYONE to get a CDL in 3 weeks. You can start a trucking company in what 4 -8 weeks, if that. No other industry has the big players controlling such a small amount of capacity in the industry. Because nobody has market power in trucking customers set rates and those rates don't permit better pay and conditions and because there are 10,000 other trucking companies almost no company is able to pay substantially more or work drivers substantially less than any other trucking company, so drivers are leaving in huge numbers.

 

This particular sentence is why I say, it depends on who you ask. Werner with 9000 trucks and only 7000 occupied will say driver shortage. That's because they don't have enough workers to cover all their freight. In the world of megas, they will push the narrative. I n our society, it's all about the big powerhouses in every industry. They set the tone, even though they are actually the minority. The minority has big money, and big money can pass any narrative, especially since they don't think a world outside of mega carriers matters.

 

If I ask a drug addict if there is enough heroin available what will he answer? If I'm giving my wife $400,000 per year in allowance and she screams she will be $80,000 short of her expenses in 10 years did I cut her off? She has an inflated expectation and she is wasting what she does have in her hands right now. The media don't report accurately, industries use propaganda and reward journalists for reporting what the industry wants reported and then people that don't pay much attention claim what is in the media is what is really happening, mostly because the media outlets say the same thing over and over until enough people think it must be true.

 

I've been looking for a link that verifies this. Not a biased link, not anecdotal scare stories, just good hard facts that I can quote to a group of people I'm talking to next week. I won't quote you, nor credit you as the source of the link but the people I'm taking to aren't fools and they've seen smoke screens before.
I know ATA and a lot of the state associations like to inflate the figures but I really don't think that anybody is going to believe the numbers without a trustworthy source.

 

I believe that even if pay was raised, shippers and receivers didn't detain drivers, and there were state of the art parking for every driver at night, we would still be having this dialogue. I think so many drivers leave the industry because of the psychological effect. The loneliness and homesickness is too much for a lot of people to overcome. In one of your previous posts, you said that if it was a 40 work week, high pay, that would solve the problem. To a point you're right, but people want that type of scenario without having to leave home, risk their lives, risk bad weather or other circumstances keeping them from home etc. Before people get their licenses, the glamorize the hell out of trucking. They envision open road trucking, mom.and pop truck stops, pretty what many of you have described that trucking was decades ago. They never stopped to think that you'll miss holidays, get-together, kids' birthdays and such. I personally think trucking is good money, considering how easy the job itself is. It aint necessarily the kind of money in which you can get out here and live like a king, but you can make a living. The first anniversary a driver misses, and his wife let's him hear it, that's pretty much the end of his career. When new drivers see that trucking isn't the glamour career they envisioned, it's over. I personally wrestled with it for over a year before I decided to go for it, and I've got no complaints. I never glamorized it either. So even if some of those conditions did improve, the price is too steep to pay for people to get in this line of work.

 

Well....we've seen a lot of companies close, merge, sell in the last 3 or so years, probably many more to come. I wonder what it would look like is some the megas downsized.