How's Everyone Doing in LTL Right Now?

a bunch of guys from my company went to ltl a few years ago after covid when everyone was getting 20k sign on bonuses they said all of SoCal has hiring freezes for ltl and can confirm by looking at their websites. My buddy is a ups feeder driver in Ontario California with 30 years seniority and they’re the top 5 busiest hubs in the us and he said they’re laying off and cutting hours

 

Kinda weird. I left fuel for ltl and was working 12 hours days. They were begging to work a 6th day. Crazy how it varies in different locations

 

As a Feeder driver who runs to CACH one of the biggest UPS hubs in the country maybe 700-800 drivers UPS is known for over hiring. They would rather have too many drivers compared to not enough

 

What I've been told by other drivers is if my barn starts doing layoffs, the wild board drivers are the first to be kicked off. The combo drivers will take their place, as combo guys can be switched around between city and linehaul based on what's needed and when. They'll also work the dock too, which never made sense to me. Drivers on the dock earn driver pay, and it's around $5-$8/hr more than what the dock guys earn for the same work.

I'm only #90 of 108 on the linehaul board as of December, but I have nearly 30 wild drivers below me (team and solo) according to the bid slots and 4+ years with OD. Hell, my co-driver has been at the terminal for longer but was hired on 6 months after I was. Gives me a bit of a cushion in case things get worse.

 

What’s insane is I see tons of people spending money like it’s water and these are just regular middle class folk, buying all kinds of needless goods at Costco and restaurants are all jammed packed with waiting lists every weeknight so this is much more weird than the 08 crash to me

 

Yeah, never made sense to me either. Especially if the terminal is in an OT state. You got combo guys on the dock working for 50/hr on OT at time when dock workers weren't allowed OT at all at 24-25/hr.

Our yard was small though, only 1-2 extra board guys at any given time.

Still nowhere near as bad there as the covid shut down. Supposedly out of 40 drivers/dock workers/office staff, they cut about 50%. Then when the covid boom hit they brought in a couple dozen new hires. A bunch of people got furloughed or something where they didn't get hours but weren't laid off. Just sat until they were starved out and moved on.

 

I think the #### hitting the fan is only for the freight world and IT world at the moment. Everyone I know and who knows people through proxy say trucking and tech are being gutted now. This is anecdotal of course but data backs it up. Meanwhile locally anything trades, construction, business, retail, etc are still going solidly. I could make a couple calls right now and have a job making 40/hr carrying shingles up ladders or dragging a trowel across wet concrete by the end of the week. My mind and body aren't on board with it but it's possible.

Everyone I talk to is living it up on the debt parade. This Memorial Day weekend I've seen more boats, campers, ATVs, dirt bikes, paragliders, cyclists, etc than I ever have. It's like a dispersed 50 mile radius block party.

It's either the calm before the storm or we've engineered a society where the chickens never come home to roost. I'm betting it's not a paradigm changing epoch though. Ostensibly, all this American isolationist rhetoric will end up biting us in the ### at some point. A stagnant, middling population country drowning themselves in more and more expensive debt is not capable of ever increasing growth. Capitalism and hyper-consumerism fails when the population growth stagnates or worse, declines.

Eventually the world will move on, American exceptionalism will cease to exist, and the coming generations will suffer exponentially more barring a complete technological revolution.

Living standards in the US are declining in the ways that matter for the future prosperity. The population is aging out, impoverished 3rd worlders are being brought in on visas as cheap slave labor to replace the lack of new children and drive down wages, anti-intellectualism has become a national crisis, economic opportunity and mobility is vanishing, the middle class is getting the old yeller treatment, and everyone is cheering it on while they finance even more worthless depreciating assets.

The failure of capitalism will be the innate inability to cope with scarcity. You cannot follow the motto of always making more money each quarter when there is a limit to how many people you can sell to. Look at Japan. 30 years of stagnation, declining birth rates, and societal stasis. The most advanced society in the 90s and it's frozen in time. Europe is following the same trend. The US is just catching up. It's why "the immigration crisis" will never actually be solved. It's why the feds have taken over the housing market. It's why auto companies are selling loans on decade long terms. It's why wages have stagnated in the face of a productivity explosion. It's why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I'm not advocating for any replacement system as I don't know the answer. However, it is blatantly obvious that humans in highly developed countries are eclipsing the capitalist machine's functional abilities. A new system will have to be formed or developed societies will have to revert to a previous point in time either through war, famine, plagues, etc.

It's the same thing as the famous rat experiments. Once the rats have all the food, sex, and freetime they could have. They fall to pieces. Humans are nothing more than highly socialized and intelligent mammals.

The civilization that we have built has begun to supercede our basal psychology. Technological progress has outstripped the evolution of primordial psychology by effectively eons. As a mass of individuals, we aren't prepared for what is coming in the next 50-100 years.

In other words, we're a planet of apes in a brave new world.

 

Could have been written in 1929

 

You’re way too smart to be a trucker

 

And look what happened in the 30s and 40s.