Stop saying there’s a trucker shortage

It just makes everything worse for truck drivers.

If you are a journalist, or know a journalist, or have spent time with a drunk journalist, you probably know how closely they read and comment on each other’s stories. Sometimes I think the whole media industry is just supported by journalists obsessively reading and criticizing each other’s work.

Usually these discussions happen in private, or through layers of subtweets on media Twitter. But sometimes not. Which brings me to a story I published today on TIME:

The Trucker Shortage Doesn’t Exist. Saying There is One Makes Conditions Worse for Drivers.

In the last six months or so, I’ve been seeing the same story appear again and again in publications with huge readerships like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  They say that the reason the supply chain is screwed up is that there’s a shortage of truck drivers. At first I just rolled my eyes—you can find stories where the trucking industry claims there is a shortage of drivers dating back to the 1980s—but then I started to get annoyed. 

Saying there’s a truck driver shortage is kind of like saying there’s a shortage of tributes volunteering for the Hunger Games. The game creators can’t complain that no one wants to play if they’re the ones who made the games so terrible in the first place. 

Of course, I’m not sure who the game creators are in this analogy. Maybe the American consumer? 

Before the 1980s, trucking jobs were some of the best in America. The industry was regulated, so certain carriers had permission to take loads from one place to another. They set rates, which meant that their labor was more expensive, but also that people worked in this industry for their whole lives and told their kids to work in this industry.  

This wasn’t the most efficient system, so the industry was deregulated at the urging of just about every economist at the time. It made things cheaper, but rates became a race to the bottom, where whoever would bid for the lowest rates would get a contract to deliver goods. You can’t really blame trucking companies for offering lower rates—they need to get contracts or go out of business. You can’t really blame retailers that are bidding for lower rates, because if they pay higher rates, their goods will be more expensive, and shoppers will go elsewhere. You can maybe blame the American consumer, who would not have had access to the cheap goods of big box stores before deregulation. 

If you’re sensing a theme in some of my recent stories, it’s this: we are now starting to see some of the big downsides of Americans’ obsession with consuming cheap goods. 

I learned about all of this when I did a story about the trucking industry in 2017. I visited a truck driving school in Indianapolis, where workers lived in dorms and were shuttled through an intense course to become drivers. Most wouldn’t be working as truck drivers in a year, because most truck driving jobs really, really suck. You go into debt to go to school, then owe the school a lot of money while making around $25,000 your first year and basically living in the truck, sometimes with a total stranger who is your trainer. (This leads to all sort of sexual assault problems for women drivers, which you can find out more about through REAL Women in Trucking.)

For that story, I talked to Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at Penn who has been a great source ever since, including for my story about what it’s like to deliver for Amazon Flex. He’s the author of The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, which I highly recommend for anyone with even a passing interest in the industry. He was trained as a truck driver for his book and has talked to countless drivers about the reality of driving today. 

Over the years, Steve and I have had many conversations about the conditions in the trucking industry, and kept in touch about the many lawsuits in which workers in the trucking industry sue over poor treatment, win a settlement, and then nothing changes.

When I started to read the many stories about truck driver “shortages,” I reached out to him, which led to the story from today. Again, the link is here:

https://time.com/6116853/truck-driver-shortage-supply-chain/

I also talked to a great driver, Sunny Grewal, who told me about why his job gets worse as more people pour into the industry to try to become drivers. Steve has written a whole book about trucking, but there could probably be volumes more written about all the crazy/scary/hard/frustrating things that are happening to drivers now, in the midst of record consumer spending.

For more reading:

USA Today had a great series in 2017, Rigged,  about how terrible the trucking industry is for owner-operators

This Planet Money piece from May was right-on about the lack of a truck driver shortage

My Amazon Flex piece from 2018 talks with Steve about how jobs delivering packages have now followed the deregulation route because of the gig economy

This Bloomberg piece talks about how unionized UPS is having much fewer retention problems than non-unionized FedEx

And lastly, in case you missed me at 5 am on your TV, here’s a link to that Matter of Fact interview about women business owners, it’s mostly about cranberry farmers:

https://www.matteroffact.tv/the-cranberry-farmer-taking-charge-in-a-male-dominated-industry/

(Does my hair really look like that?)