Trucking Companys are not hiring !!! lets say state that is a fact

when i went to trucking school in the 70's, they were telling us there was a shortage of drivers, and we were needed RIGHT NOW!!!

and back then, if you wanted a great union job, or a local city job.....??

you had better have known someone.

 

Fewer drivers equals fewer drivers taking up parking spaces, perhaps? Not to mention that new truck stops and other parking areas are opening up on a regular basis.

 

Unless aliens kidnap working drivers there has never been a driver shortage, never can be one. If one idiot in the media reads that phrase in another media idiot's story, he uses the phrase.

There is no driver shortage. The industry chases away 80-90% of the 60,000 per month new CDL drivers entering the industry.

Does a drug addict have a drug shortage? He is constantly wanting more of his drug. Or does he have a throwing his life away problem?

 

The "shortage" is only a shortage of experienced and safe drivers. I went to CDL school in a vo tech. It was a 9 month course. You actually got your CDL in the first month and the remaining 8 months was "honing your craft". Most people left after they got their CDL. I stayed and graduated (G.I. bill paid me to go to school, so why not?), and a lot of the places I talked to coming out of school (that vo tech was rated as the 3rd best school in the country at the time) took that as actual work experience. And frankly a lot of it was. We used to run loads from farms and a lot of Green Giant to food shelves around the upper midwest (2 students in the truck, no instructor). So coming out school I had a leg up. That was 1984.

Ive only had 1 "chargeable" in my career (in Feb 1986) and my last accident (non-chargeable) was in 1998. Last ticket was 2004. People dont understand that SAFETY is the thing schools should be teaching. Churn out as many as you can and a few will actually amount to something. Rather than making it easier to get a CDL, they SHOULD go the other way.

Make it HARDER. Make it take LONGER.

Thats how you solve the problems we have other there...

 

While I do not disagree with you I will say that I have found it somewhat absurd what many companies are not only requiring of a potential driver candidate to get hired but also the incentives to actually work for many of these companies that have higher than average requirements, let's just say the juice is not worth the squeeze. For example someone posted a job on here recently that required two years experience and only paid $1,300 a week on average, I think that is absurd. You could very easily find a substantially better pay position with 2 years experience and you can also find that pay and more with as little as 6 months experience if not less. Why should anyone feel motivated to jump through a bunch of hoops in terms of requirements when the incentives to work for a lot of these companies are so poor especially compared to other companies that offer more and require less?

 

You can call it a shortage of quality drivers or just call it a shortage, either way if companies are only interested in x and they cannot find x then it is a shortage. The high turnover rate you mentioned is very real but the question is why, is it only because companies ask too much or could it also be that many people lack the work ethic we once had as a nation. My guess it is both. We have a many companies that will never care and their entire business model is churn and burn but then we also have drivers that want to be paid much more than the value they bring to the company, always want to go home, and complain non stop. The truth is almost always somewhere in the middle.

 

I was talking with a fellow driver who was complaining about the high number of trainees he's had to deal with lately, so...there are always anecdotal stories to support and deny every claim.

Maybe you are in a depressed area, or you are just not applying to the right companies. I don't know.

 

Well speaking for myself... I have had 2 dozen or more jobs over the past 40 years. I have been with my current for the past 5, so 2 dozen over 35 years - average just over a year a piece average. Why have I left jobs? Probably in this order:

1) Unsafe equipment. Had a few of these but the most memorable was R&L Carriers. Broke down 3 miles south of the Boondocks (thats a real place) in Iowa at around 20 below. Broke down 6 times my last 5 weeks there. Blown head gasket, bearings on the converter, air pump went, the list is endless.

2) Unsafe work environment. Drove a spotter for a couple months at 3M. There were chemicals bubbling up out of the ground all over that place. Worked in a food service delivery place and having to run up and down them skinny ramps with a 2 wheeler with hundreds of pounds of product on them. Slipping on the floors in some of them kitchens you had to deliver to. Tumbled down the stairs at 1.

3) Wasted time at shipper/receiver for no reason. About any refer job is going to have this issue (food warehouses are horrible places to deliver - you will be there 4-6 hours for a few skids). Another problem was R&L getting to Des Moines and having to sit there off the clock for 2-4 hours waiting for them to load the outbound trailers - EVERY NIGHT (I was hired to cross dock in La Crosse but they took me off that after a few months and put me on Des Moines).

4) Truck governed speed. JB Hunt said they were at 68 (62). Conway was at 65 but underpowered. Going up some hills would knock me down to 25mph. It took an average of 4 hrs 15 mins to go 183 miles from Fridley MN to Tomah WI.

5) Pay. Having them "forget" to pay you for things. USF Dugan we used to joke that the girls in payroll got bonuses from what they shorted us on our checks. Or not paying what they said they were.

6) General overall satisfaction of the job. Co-workers/supervisors being a pain in the ###, yard difficult to navigate (esp in the winter/plowing), endless amounts of needless paperwork.

I dont tolerate bull #### very well....

 

I had 5 in 42 years! The longest I was with a company was 20 years, the shortest was 7 months.

 

But there are not fewer drivers taking up fewer parking spaces.

The driver shortage issue has nothing to do with how many drivers there are, because it seems to be an issue of drivers moving from one company to another.
So many companies always 'needing' more drivers, so there is a shortage.

The parking issue has been a real problem for as long as I have been driving.
There are some new truck stops opening up, mostly Love's from what I have seen, but finding a parking spot after 5 or 6 PM can be a real chore in so many areas.