High schoolers are training to drive 18-wheelers amid shortage of truck drivers
npr.org
npr.org
Drivers have been making LESS over the years for a few decades now.
Nobody wants to hire 18 year olds generally, insurance wouldn't allow it any way...
Logistics companies who hire drivers have been complaining about driver shortages but not increasing wages for years as well... and they actually seem to meet demand just fine. Issues at choke points like ports don't seem to be a pure driver supply issue from what I've seen.
The logistics industry is super price sensitive, people will complain... but they'll also wait to ship a thing to save a couple bucks (I'm not kidding when I say a couple bucks) all while complaining.
The drivers you hear who make a good living have specialized skills / work for specialized companies and do not reflect the industry as a whole.
This has been made a lot more difficult with the electronic log books.
Edit: Just want to add some additional information. Trucking companies at least were my friends worked, were extremely toxic. They made close to $100k. However, their personal life suffered greatly. Dispatchers would call them non-stop, even when they had doctor visits/family gatherings scheduled. The dispatchers would give them loads, that were basically humanely impossible to be delivered on-time by the book. Some of them would be awake all day, and leave in the evening then drive 24 hours+. Dispatchers would often scream at them, when they would call because they were falling asleep and were not going to make the delivery on-time because they needed a nap.
Some of them actually crashed, because they saw a "deer" lol.....they fell asleep.
These friends were uneducated, and made terrible financial decisions, such a purchasing expensive cars and modifying them. Little to no savings. This put them in an awful position in which they had to keep driving no matter how toxic the environment was. Unfortunately, I don't really know how they are doing today, as we grew apart.
It was easy to make extra money, but it was at the cost of all of their time. It kinda inflated how good a living you could make...at least looking at the end results. But it also wasn't very realistic.
Do you really think a middle aged truck driver is (was) holding the steering wheel for 16hr straight as a matter of routine business? Of course not.
Tropes like that make for easy online virtue points but that wasn't the reality for the overwhelming majority of people who were cooking the books.
These guys were putting in 60-80hr 6/7 day weeks. It's no different than the plant maintenance tech or the IT guy doing the same thing. What they sacrificed was their outside of work life. Nobody is working those kinds of hours and having a life outside work. You would have physical complications from that in very short order.
And occasionally someone would go overboard, drive 36hr straight and cause a crash. And because that's an easy thing for people who have zero knowledge of industry incentives and feedback loops to get their panties in a knot over they made it "extra illegal" because you can't make being an idiot illegal.
And so now the industry cuts far less tasteful corners and pays everyone crap and you have drivers who have barely memorized the pre-trip, have barely and hours behind the wheel, can't read english, and who choose a different career in short order and are likewise treated as disposable.
So the net effect is more or less a wash but a handful of people get to get big raises and some politicians can pat themselves on the back for "solving" logbook fraud.
And how does this justify as something safe? When I worked 6/7 days a week, 60-80 hrs doing just mentally exhausting work I definitely went downhill after a while. Safely behind a computer. If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives.
I really don't understand your counterpoint here.
>If you are driving a 20-40 ton truck while being as tired as I was, doing stupid mistakes as I was, you are definitely endangering others' lives.
I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?
And that's just me in a small little sedan, not an overloaded 18 wheeler. For context, I also do have a commercial drivers license. Driving for 60-80 hours in a week is just not safe. There is no way to try and justify that it is.
The only people doing that many hours of driving a week "safely" were probably high on cocaine. Cocaine usage was quite prevalent in the trucking industry because of this huge push to have drivers fudging logs and overdriving.
There are tons of studies out there that prove that driving while tired can be just as bad as driving drunk, if not worse depending on how deprived of sleep you are and how long you've been going.
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/freight-trucking-dot-hours-136...
For example, drivers who transport property in the same state are subject to state regulations but not federal regulations. Whereas drivers who deliver materials from state to state must comply with federal regulations. Among the regulations:
A reset occurs when a driver has had marked 34 consecutive hours off duty. The workweek starts after the last legal reset. For example, if you begin at 1 a.m. on Monday, then the workweek continues until 1 a.m. the following Monday.
Each duty period must begin with at least 10 hours off-duty.
Drivers may work no more than 60 hours on-duty over seven consecutive days or 70 hours over eight days. And they need to maintain a driver's log for seven days and eight days after, respectively.
Drivers may be on duty for up to 14 hours following 10 hours off duty, but they are limited to 11 hours of driving time.
Drivers must take a mandatory 30-minute break by their eighth hour of coming on duty.
The 14-hour duty period may not be extended with off-duty time for breaks, meals, fuel stops, etc.
As a side note, as others have mentioned, truck drivers have been getting paid less and less over the years, and that's not accounting for inflation; plus it's rough on relationships, so it's no wonder there is a shortage.
They generally are circumvented to make it to the receiver or next shipper within a given "shift". So instead of stopping 1hr from the receiver you might cook the books, get there, go off duty, sleep, etc. They unload at their convenience before you clock back in and then you cook the books again making it look like you're still off duty when driving an hour to your next load where you repeat the same 2-6hr loading delay shitshow. Then you cook the books a third time running 30min across town to somewhere you can get prepared food and park, hit up the massage parlor, etc, whatever it is you do to burn half a day off duty.
So instead of burning a work day doing busy work and sitting in your truck watching movies on an ipad you've accomplished a 34hr reset in that time and most of those 34ish hours were in fact spent off duty.
The body can run on unsafe amounts of sleep for a long time. It is unhealthy, it is unsafe and leads to mistakes and crashes, but people in fact regularly attempt that. Many many people in fact think they are being hardworking and strong for doing that.
The pressure to drive unsafely is very real on professional drivers. The drivers (not trucks) I knew were telling me exact same story. Regularly driving a lot and without good sleep. Pressure to drive more and faster.
Also, this is how the debate started:
> I used to be friends with a few truck drivers, and all of them were making money because all of them were cheatings the books non-stop. It was basically a job requirement. Drive 48 hours? No problem.
While I think 48 hours drive was exaggeration or drivers brag, it was meant to express "a lot of driving way more then is reasonable".
Don't assume that everyone is American or that American culture for commuting is widespread across the globe.
So in many places, your options would be sleep at work, or drive home tired.
A bus from my hometown to the office, a trip of about 25 km, took me 3 hours somedays, usually would be between 1h30m-1h45m. One way.
> So in many places, your options would be sleep at work, or drive home tired.
Please, there are other options, they are just more inconvenient than what you are used to accept living on.
I've slept in offices' cafeteria room because I had no public transportation back home more times than I could count on all my fingers and toes...
I too have slept in a break room. I've also slept under a desk in an office (spending 8+ hours outside until everyone went home). And I'm in the US.
The grass is not always greener on the other side, my friend.
"Twelve percent of all passenger vehicle occupant deaths and 22 percent of passenger vehicle occupant deaths in multiple-vehicle crashes in 2019 occurred in crashes with large trucks."
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/large...
"Large trucks accounted for: 10% of all vehicles involved in fatal crashes; 4% of all registered vehicles; 7% of total vehicle miles traveled"
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/large-t...
One is SIGNIFICANTLY (twice!) more likely to kill people in an accident. To say otherwise is just a lie.
Show me where I said that. You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car but not a truck because you're only half as likely to kill someone than a large truck. To say otherwise is just a lie! See I can put words in your mouth and use it as a red herring too.
The correct answer is it's not ok to drive home exhausted regardless of the vehicle you are in.
Or, you know, when you literally said that it's no different:
> I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?
--
> You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car
Show me where I said that.
YOU are the one who claimed that driving exhausted in a truck is no different from driving exhausted in a car. They are EXTREMELY different. One is SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to end in a death, which is why that one has significantly more regulation, even though driving recklessly is illegal in any case.
Ok so you are just arguing because you want to be right. I asked what's different. Do you not understand the difference between a statement or a question?
You quoted me as saying I literally said driving tired in a car or truck is no different:
>> I assume you drove home after your exhausting day, which according to you is endangering others' lives, so what's different when you do it?
That's obviously a question. It starts with "what" and ends with a question mark. It can't "literally" be a statement.
>Show me where I said that.
Sorry you completely missed the point I was making. You are using red herrings and I called you out on it by using a red herring.
I'm gonna be done here, you aren't arguing in good faith, so it's a waste of both our time. I know you are going to reply because you just have to have the last word, so be my guest.
Now for health our hypothetical trucker above should get out and move, but face it, most people aren't getting their exercise.
Also on the mandated Sunday stop I see many drivers maintain their trucks and cabs. Life doesn’t have to be boring.
Railroads have had to deal with that since the Hours of Service Act in 1907. After 12 hours, train crews and dispatchers are "dead on the law", and have to stop the train. The railroad tries hard to prevent that. They don't schedule people for the full 12 hours. There are crew change points. Railroads put train crews up in motels. Ferry crews around in crew vans. Once in a while a train does end up stopped for that reason, usually because some other problem tied up traffic.
Interestingly, while there's theoretical work on the Truck Driver Scheduling Problem [1], there doesn't seem to be someone offering this as a service. That might be a startup opportunity for someone.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589631...
Even with the best shift scheduling software, it's difficult to handle cases outside the railway company's control -- like the driver being tired because they were kept awake by external noise, stress etc when they were trying to sleep.
Uhh... keep driving home because HOS regulations don't apply when you're off duty? https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/personal...
"The following are examples of appropriate uses of a CMV while off-duty for personal conveyance ... Commuting between the driver’s terminal and his or her residence ... Authorized use of a CMV to travel home after working at an offsite location"
Although frankly the answer is "stop somewhere and sleep because your trip is too long to do in a single day" and I'm not sure why you think that somehow that's too much of an inconvenience for them.
Hi, IT guy here. When I'm sleep-deprived, there is absolutely 0 chance of it causing some family to die. It's very different.
No thanks on that analysis, maybe trucking companies should stop unsafe driving practices and stop exploiting their workers.
The difference is that IT guy won't crash truck into another car when overworked. Truckers did.
And it was not because they were idiots. It was, because humans are affected by tiredness. And it did not happened because of some larger goal, but because it is cheaper to pressure trucker to drive too much.
I'm old enough that my first job was right at the cusp of computerized order entry (as opposed to handwritten tickets) at the small pizza shop I worked at in high school.
Prior to the computer order entry system drivers would routinely "lose" one or two tickets a shift and just pocket the cash for the order. One of them told me that the computerized ticketing basically halved their actual take home pay.
The end result of 30 years of deunionization and relentless downwards pressure on wage growth and you wind up with employees cheating the system wherever they can.
Something is certainly going to break in this society/culture in the next 5-10 years, because we're not on a sustainable path. A wage-price spiral and a lot of inflation would probably be the least-painful thing to happen.
If the culture of the delivery drivers was that this was a perk of the job that everyone sort of knew about, then I think it's reasonable to call it a type of compensation.
Sort of like how unreported cash tips are a type of perkany rely on, even though no contract could ever stipulate that.
Oh and I'm not arguing it isn't theft. I'm arguing that the system we've built basically demands that people steal from their employers in order to survive.
If you don't like our sort of downwards spiral into a trustless third-world society where everyone is trying to scam everyone else then you might want to look at what policies you support that crush wages for people who aren't at least software devs.
I worked at a pizza shop with paper tickets. Every single one was accounted for at the end of the day. If any tickets were missing, that was out of the manager's pocket, so he made sure he had them all.
US is a weird place sometimes. Business/Money trumps safety. Regulations are often met with huge push back even when they can potentially save lives.
I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the next 50 years. We have a lot of laws and standards that, in effect, allowed people to cheat a little but not too much (or break a few traffic laws but not too many, etc). All in all, that system sucked - it placed all the burden and risk on individuals to figure out how to cheat enough to make the system livable - but it was stable as a system.
We are going to need to do a lot of work to find new equilibrium points where the various parties can cheat less. It will be made especially difficult because technology penetrates industries more quickly these days so it would be best if everything changed at once, but that also makes it more difficult.
Say you have a truck governed at 68mph which means you can log an average of 65mph without raising any eyebrows. So what we would do is log the miles you drove/65 and not the actual time you drove.
Or, how I used to run, keep your logbook behind so you can backfill the driving hours and breaks so you can eventually be legal again — usually at a shipper or receiver you could catch up as they commonly would keep you there for 6-8 hours. What’s the buzzword, eventually consistency?
Not even mentioning “loose leaf” logbooks where one could rewrite whole days to gain hours.
Those days are long gone now…
I hope we never reach a state where technology actively defeats us.
The only time that I think it’s responsible to have total enforcement is when the rules perfectly capture reality and every facet of it …which to say is never.
A longish life has confirmed this to me, over and over.
Gray areas are also where all manner of corruption is born. Officials soliciting bribes, nepotism, exploitative labor practices, these things love gray areas.
They also keep bad rules around and encourage selective enforcement to target the disadvantaged. Lincoln said it best: "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."
For example, I encounter far less discrimination and less racism living in where I do now than in other places, and yet the laws are practically the same here as in anywhere else. The reason I experience less discrimination here is due to the encompassing framework that everyone here is subjected to as part of their experience growing up. The strictness of the laws is irrelevant to that issue.
If you want to change how people act, you need to change the entire framework that people are growing within.
Eg. Public servants make ends meet by fudging timesheets => Enforcement clamps down on practice => Employees bargain for higher pay to make up for difference => Public gets a more transparent accounting of their labor costs
But it’s not the “coarse” knob. You can only turn enforcement up or down so much before you need a paradigm shift.
Enforcement just moves around where the corruption is incentivized to happen. Is it at the bottom -- workers stealing extra pay or higher up where the enforcement happens?
That's sometimes true but I'd just note this has nothing to do with the original argument made praising gray areas.
The drug war is a place where there's an escalating war between dealing and enforcement, yes. But most dealers aren't having a lot of fun in this gray area.
Bending the rules is great in some areas, but I don't think it should apply across the board. Ignoring rules is fine in low-risk scenarios (particularly when the risk is not borne by someone else) but I don't want, for example, my commercial airline pilot to get too artsy when it comes to his approach for landing, or the programmer writing critical code for the autonomous vehicle to unilaterally decide they know better, or the electrician I hire to flagrantly disregard consensus standards.
From previous work in safety critical code, I regularly confronted situations where rule-breaking was done as a means to an end, while not being cognizant confronting the risks that incurred because of cognitive biases. People also loved gray areas in this role because it limits accountability. I'm sure there were people who at Enron thought they were playing the gray areas as an artistic endeavor to maximize profit, but I don't think incentivizing that behavior is the best for society.
The new rules save lives. Crash accidents involving large trucks statistic: https://zarzaurlaw.com/category/blog/trucking-accidents/
'Sure, that will save a few lives but millions will be late.' is a Simpsons quote, not a good argument.
Hmm, this sounds so appealing, yet I think it's terribly confused. I think you're confusing the "gray area" between what people and rules say and what people do, with "areas of slack". Slack areas are where people can take initiative to do what they want (following the rules or not). Gray areas can be that sometimes, were more like that in the past, but today, gray areas are often areas of over-determination - the rules are contradictory, you could be punished or suffer for violating any of them and you have to carefully calculate which violation will let you survive. There's no joy in that kind of shit. And, as mentioned by other posters, breaking some rules can kill people.
Sleep-deprived truckers should not be a thing, it has pretty much the same effects as driving drunk, but much more common so causes more crashes and more deaths. Breaching the rules for that should have as much tolerance as those intentionally driving drunk and endangering others that way.
The reason we now have electronic tracking of freight truckers is because they used to be notorious for taking uppers and driving as long as possible, causing all sorts of nasty accidents. That isn't ingenuity, that's selfish greed, both on the part of the driver and the dispatch companies employing them.
I believe it's "selfish greed" on behalf of the company, but a reasonable response to difficult constraints, on behalf of the driver.
One deer or one owl into traffic...it would have been a complete charlie foxtrot.
Safety rules are written in blood, after all.
I think we agree actually. I didn't say it was good that rule breaking is getting harder, just that it's a fact.
We have a lot of enculturation around a certain level of surveillance and visibility. Things are quickly becoming more visible and we will need to adjust. Preserving grey area can be part of that, but only if we decide to preserve it.
- I think stability depends on what time frame you look at. Pushing how much time you spend driving, how little you sleep and so-forth may be stable for some period (weeks, months, a few years..) but it's not stable for a person longish term. Letting wages drift downward, so you wind-up hiring people with more problems (say, amphetamine addiction) may also be short-term stable but not long term stable.
The actually instability of the situation I think is illustrated by "chameleon carrier". Companies that shutdown and restart when they accumulate too safety violations.[1]
The thing about the situation is when things are being continually jury rigged to keep people working in the most profitable conditions for the carriers and the worst conditions for them, it's the opposite of stable, it's extremely fragile.
[1] https://www.teletracnavman.com/resources/blog/the-hunt-for-c...
> I think stability depends on what time frame you look at.
What is the timeframe that you are thinking of where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?
-- When we're talking of a system, "stability" is roughly the property that a small perturbation in the system causes it to return to the position that it was previously in. The pandemic was significant shock but the notable thing we see is that the system.
...where our goods delivery network broke down due to individual rule breaking (as opposed to, say, a global pandemic)?
The individual rule-breaking (working more hours than a person could stand) still allowed day functioning of the system but it created situation it was easy for a lot of people to just quit driving and hard to find more drivers to replace them. Hence, the system was fragile to shock.
That situation seems pretty exceptional to me. I think it's fair to call an equilibrium that requires a covid pandemic to disrupt "stable." I think you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that hasn't been disrupted, so I am skeptical that we should understand trucking to be revealed as being unusually weak.
If you just mean that capitalism is inherently unstable, then yes of course, but that doesn't seem closely related to the space for rule breaking as the space varies from place to place and industry to industry.
I never said trucking was unusually fragile for the America today. Many other industries follow the paradigm of barely paying enough and relying on a trickle of people willing to put with their framework and all of them are whining but not actually changing [2]. The description of the trucking by duxup in the base of this thread [1] is also a description of how a lot of industries operates. It's fragile, ugly and profitable.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28918853 [2] https://coloradosun.com/2021/10/03/labor-shortage-missing-wo...
Look, are you talking about trucking or are you talking about capitalism writ large? The larger capitalistic structure is both unjust and deeply unstable - but that topic is outside of the specific conditions of trucking and the accuracy of monitoring systems. The limits of the accuracy of surveillance systems are relevant, as far as I know, to all economic systems.
Or, to put it another way, I will ask again: what period do you see this system being unstable over? If it's just the covid pandemic then I see the disruption, but I disagree that the system was not 'stable' before. It's like saying the Dinosaurs' way of life wasn't 'stable' before the meteorite hit.
It really wasn't, though; IIRC, the current reading of the evidence is that the mass extinction started about 10 million years before the impact delivered the coup de grace.
But I think you were assuming the somewhat popular fiction where things were stable, but then the meteorite wiped them out.
Yes, a nightmare.
But, if this were to come to pass, rich people would just speed and pay the fines as the cost of running the business. It's why fines to pick up late from the daycare backfired badly.
> ICC is a checking on down the line
> Well I'm a little overweight and my logbook's way behind
The give-and-take between making a living and obeying the law in truck driving is well established in our culture.
Anyone who's interested I'd encourage to check out Dave Dudley's music. It's all there: racing time, avoiding the law, fatigue, loneliness, bodily harm, drug abuse, etc.
In some cases it's just pulling a fuse or the right connector.
In other systems you can literally tell the e-logger that you're doing a kind of driving that 'doesn't count' and the system goes "oh okay" and that's that.
Reportedly a lot of state police commercial vehicle cops don't bother to check e-loggers because they're lazy and it's not as easy as flipping open a paper book.
From a macroeconomic perspective these guys are heroes.
It is dangerous, it will test the nerves of the driver. You will be bullied, it is the culture. The price pressure on wages, for a fully qualified and competent driver, were relentlessly downward in the USA.
The ports here are full of refugees sleeping in the cabs of their leased trucks. The callousness and stupid-on-stupid business practices are a cacophony. Civilized people need not apply to either end of it.
Lower paid, younger, less experienced, more exhausted, and passed off truck drivers are an increased danger to other drivers.
That is an externality, to say it’s just life is pretty much saying it’s acceptable to underpay people as longing as the only risk is to others…
If we want to abandon that and go back to the centuries of fiefdom where we barely made progress, by all means do it somewhere else.
If your job is essential to the functio of society you should
1) have a living wage
2) have a group advocating and bargaining in Your interests
3) have a say in the corporate management
Essential employees are essential to society, not to corporations. Society (I.e., government) should assure they are treated in a functional way
In an anarchy it boils down to who's got a bigger gun. Under feudalism, it's about what class you were born to. For a brief moment in human history in a bunch of Western countries it was about who managed to create something of value and sell it to others. But that would also mean bankrupting inefficient behemoths to make room for the next generation, but we stopped doing that in 2008.
So now, if you have bought a couple of Walmart shares back in 1970s, you're good. If you have purchased a house prior to 2010s, you are great. But if you are younger, you're screwed. The media tells you that living in a box and having no family is OK, and if you are ambitious - go play a victim and get forced non-monetary recognition from others. The incentive to create things is gone, so the society is inevitably converging to some weird corporate feudalism, and that only means further degradation for those except the hereditary elites.
I never did understand why people keep up with their 9/5 5 days a week (and in Europe a month holiday ) when they could save more, spend less (on heating) by heading south in the winter... in a way the most important thing people from the west have is their passport which (unfairly) allows them pretty much freedom to travel anywhere...and a basic salary which would cover a years expenses for a couple months of work...
I'm of the opinion that we are more animal than we remember, and the human animal thrives in a participatory community. I reject that casualness of your point.
That's a big part of the problem. We are gradually transforming our economy so that bigger and bigger chunks of it are run by people living in miserable conditions, driven there out of desperation. The media cheers it as giving another chance to disadvantaged, and goes out of their way to redirect the average person's ambitions away from accumulating wealth. And if you oppose it, they will just claim that you hate all those poor people, rather than disagreeing with the lowering of the average living standard. The end game is slums for everyone (except the ruling class of course).
What are they going to do about it? It's no coincidence robot dogs are now being outfitted with guns.
The amount of sitting a software dev does is comparable if not more to most truck drivers, I'd guess.
What do you think about this YouTube video that has over 4m views? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQXVgniI-hw
Basically, this guy says take it on the chin for a year or two and keep a clean record. Then you can easily change companies and earn a solid middle class salary. Do you believe it or think his wages are bit "bubbly"? Honestly, I'm not involved in the logistic industry, but his video looks "no-BS" and straight forward. If was looking for solid working class / middle class job, I would be watching this video for tips!
It's not impossible that anyone could drive well for a while and land in a good place, but that's not the industry I see. I don't see people suddenly getting paid well after 30 months.
I don't have first hand experience with the Walmart example, but I've heard from others they get their pick of the most experienced drivers / don't pay poorly, but they're not the industry and the idea of just meeting their minimum to be considered and magically getting a job sounds a bit silly.
To me that's a YouTube video that implies a lot, isn't impossible, but doesn't say much about the odds of any of it being true for a given person either ...
The industry I know has demand for drivers, but the outcome of that isn't what you might think. There's "demand" where they demand folks who aren't paid well, and then there's real demand.
I felt that. This video makes it seem pretty cool actually, minus the packaged foods and microwaved meals.
>If was looking for solid working class / middle class job, I would be watching this video for tips!
You might want to watch more videos, move over to his youtube channel... because he quits trucking earlier this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8AnMzhZZE
The downsides caught up to him after ~3 years. He also worked his salary out to roughly $8/hr (see video for details) considering time spent "on the job".
So, perhaps this isn't the solid advertisement for the industry you were thinking it is.
He mentioned the intensity was simply too high. It's an "all or nothing" job. Honestly, when I first posted, I wasn't aware how griding the job is. I'm glad I watched this follow-up video.
What if trucking companies offered to allow two truckers to split the schedule? Then, it is up the pair to work it out. I feel the same about people who quit their office careers early for emotional labour -- family care. Many of them could easy return to their old role in 50% capacity, and split with another person. I know it could be done, but management has no interest.
This is the core truth in virtually every "<worker> shortage" story. It's true for every profession, every occupation, every market. Pay a market wage and the problem goes away.
What the headlines really should be is "Rapid change in wages causes headaches for employers".
I mean, it's true that short term shocks to wage levels (and covid has been one hell of a shock) cause disruption to markets. That's worth covering. But the root cause is not and never has been a "lack of people", it's that the population of people willing to work at the now-sub-market wage is smaller than employers want.
It's more like employers are feigning a labor shortage because they want access to the cheap and abusable visa labor they exploited before the pandemic.
Sounds like a lot of companies and industries these days, including mine for software devs.
Electronic logbooks are the main reason drivers lost wages recently. Turns out that the market had adjusted to an equilibrium that expected drivers to fudge their log books, and once the ability to fudge was removed, the absolute morons who fill the ranks of logistics companies wouldn't up their rates and the market equilibrium was broken. This caused drivers to leave the business. It can't be overstated how absolutely dumb the average desk jockey in the logistics space truly is. Having had to deal with a few different companies over the years (Hapag Lloyd, various CPG companies, Marten), there was no contest in offices with just straight up low-IQ but cocky jocks filling the desks. A brother-in-law is in the transportation industry, and he routinely uses fancy words he doesn't understand on calls (I hear them when I'm visiting) and nobody on the call is capable of calling him out. A recent example was when he was saying that "we need to work on improving the linear regressions on our deliveries"........ I tried to explain to him that the term wasn't what he thought it was, and he literally couldn't absorb what I said. He is in charge of hundreds of millions of throughput for a massive food corporation whose products are in every household in the country. Near as I can tell, the entire industry is a bunch of mediocrities with spreadsheets spending most of their days in meetings comparing their numbers and getting yelled at when they don't line up correctly.
Certain logistics companies have been pushing drivers into "owner-operator" scenarios, where they are responsible for gas, insurance, maintenance, and lease payments, while not being given the flexibility to drive for other companies. Leaving some drivers with negative paychecks (basically, their pay didn't cover expenses).
I'm betting they are going after 18 years olds specifically because they are kind of primed to into debt for a career because the college admissions process kind of primes them to think this is normal.
https://www.kcrw.com/news/articles/cargoland-a-brief-history...
Here's a site they created dedicated to it:
http://cargoland.kcrw.com/the-pirate/
Since listening to that, a lot of the recent news I've been seeing, including this article, haven't been a surprise to me.
I remember they talked specifically about how predatory the trucking industry is. They interviewed both the truckers and some of the representative from companies exploiting them. (Business model didn't sound all that different from Uber. Drivers pay for their own trucks, work as independent contractors, while large operating under control of companies.)
I can't actually locate it on this site so it may have been reported in some follow-up stories. Or perhaps in details of actual story audio.
This seems to me that the drivers should just file a self-written W-2 as a statutory employee and let the IRS figure it out. Not allowing an 'owner-operator' to work for other companies pretty clearly puts the 'owners' into the category of statutory employee.
Now if they are locked into some Uber-like scam where their employer financed "their" truck purchase it may be more complicated.
So basically the trucking industry looked at Uber and Lyft and said "Oh, hey. Neat."
I remember truck drivers, paramedics and others pushed into 'fake B2B' for years and there is quite a lot of regulation in EU that if you have a single customer as a single proprietor you might be checked if it is 'fake B2B'.
Being an "app company" just made it easier.
We call them food trucks now and some of them really are independent I think, like the ones that cluster in Portland. But what I refer to served food that was not nearly as good.
aka "gig economy".
And I wasn't driving anything near the size of the rigs being talked about here.
Also please give cyclists some space.
However, larger engines could be less efficient per pound than their smaller counterparts. My intuition is that the opposite is true, but I could definitely be wrong on that.
If you want to see what this looks like, google around for "hot shot trucking". It doesn't require a CDL under, I believe, 24k lbs. BUT it does require a special insurance since you're no longer a person, but a company.
Moar info https://www.ntea.com/NTEA/Member_benefits/Industry_leading_n...
You need to constantly look out for human squirrels driving econoboxes and trying to pass you on the right while you make a wide turn. Crowded gas stations truly suck. Bollards hide and try to eat your trailer. If you get into a corner and can't turn sharp enough you can get trapped by your trailer.
Then there are the additional laws, weight limits, fines and fees, logging requirements, hour limits, hazmat, double trailers and a hundred other things that a trucker needs to know.
I know someone who is a truck driver and recently retired. He saw the company he worked for replace the natives with Bulgarians and Romanians.
Wind affects you so much. You can feel big vehicles passing you. Every slight angle on a road makes you feel like you’re going to tip over. You need special navigation systems that know your vehicle size so you don’t get routed down a road where you can’t turn around or a bridge can’t support you.
Definitely learned to appreciate truck stops and rest areas though. Parking overnight fills up so many times you’ll end up in a Walmart parking lot because of all the cameras.
It’s an adventure. It could be fun and a lot of people love it. Some people especially get into long distance trucking.
But IMO it’s definitely a full time job with a lot of responsibilities. I’m shocked there aren’t more accidents which is really a credit to all of these drivers and their training.
I hope to high heavens that you didn't have a normal bumper pull with a length of 35 ft. That would be utterly crazy!
It is completely uneventful if you have a proper truck and hitch, even with a 30 mph crosswind, though I have never gone over 75 mph with this setup. If you EVER feel like you are not in control or the vehicle is unstable, your setup is fatally flawed, and you need to reconsider your hitch and truck setup.
Open source OSMAND has truck navigation with weight, width, and height restriction considerations.
Truck stops and rest areas should be your last resort. You need to make phone calls and strike deals with potential places to stay at discounted rates. Being nice over the phone goes a long way.
Generally, we hear that truck drivers won't be needed in the future: Trucks will drive themselves. But now we have less truck drivers than we need, and the future with self driving trucks hasn't quite arrived yet
Similarly, we hear that fossil fuels should be out phased. And now we have an energy crisis with not enough oil and gas. The future of renewable energy isn't quite there yet.
The hardest thing is finding people who won't take drugs _at that salary, with those working conditions_
The average salary for a truck driver is $70,363 per year in the United States.
So just my 2 cents from looking from the outside
Clearly not enough people are willing to make that tradeoff for the salary.
BLS does not incorporate these metrics, but there is an easy way to see if a job is low paid relative to quality of life at work (and outside of work). And that is to see people advise their kids to aspire to be. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, but not truck driver.
Say you're a trucker working 60 hours a week that's $22.55/hour.
Here's the day of a truck driver...
Most truck drivers are paid by the mile. If you're a long-haul truck driver you live in your truck. Driving all day, then sitting at a warehouse for 3 hours while you get unloaded. You're not getting paid while sitting there but you also can't leave. You have to stay with the truck at all times. Then it's 11pm when you're finally unloaded and you have to find a truck stop to park and sleep at. The closest truck stop is 10 miles away but it's 11pm, it might be full. You only have 20 minutes of legal driving time left on your log book. Do you risk going to the truck stop even though it might be full and you run out of driving hours or do you try to find a street to park on? Most cities don't allow trucks to park on the street so that's a gamble too.
If you run out of hours looking for a spot to park you risk getting a fine if you are inspected. State troopers and police can pull truck drivers over at any time for an inspection. If you are fined it's out of your own pocket, not the company.
So even if you were doing your job perfectly legally, you ran out of time because the warehouse took too long to unload. Now you might get fined and completely wipe out any income you made today. It also goes on your driving record and future companies won't hire you if you have too many incidents.
Now it's 6am and you're not feeling well and need to use the bathroom. The truck stop bathroom has a 15 minute wait but your next pickup is in 30 minutes and it's a 20 minute drive way.
Also your kids birthday is tomorrow but you might not make it back in time.
Now do this every day for less than $25/hour. All while every car on the road rages at you because your truck is limited to 65mph.
Anyways, if they wanna solve the shortage, pay them more. Simple as that.
At some point, companies will simply not purchase the goods if they can't truck it economically or will look for alternatives.
There are exceptions, but when it doesn't take much digging to discover rail doesn't care to get more of this business even though they could with a bit of customer service.
I don't know why you were downvoted. Maybe people assumed a political position, but AFAICT you're just stating facts.
If trucking in its current form becomes unsustainable then it'll evolve into leaner alternatives, or we'll simply pay more / consume less. Nothing wrong with that.
It's odd the way people understand that increased prices will lower demand, but not see that demand will also drive prices.
They had designed their whole shipping system around max capacity at a particular time. They started adding more shipping capacity to cover it. When they really needed to shift when the work was happening. Once they fixed that they actually found they had overstaffed on drivers. They quickly found those guys more work as they were putting off orders because of capacity.
The new rules are brutal on that sort of fix.
There's a lot of stuff to ship, but margins on those things are very thin + demand for said stuff is extremely elastic due to it not being super essential so there's also not a lot of room for increased driver wages.
It’s the same reason that buying a drink is independently transactional and competitive vs buying health insurance is very non competitive and very sticky.
Why should truck drivers subsidize these companies, then?
A company should not be in business if it isn't sustainable without screwing the workers.
Small businesses always complain about how they can’t afford to pay more. But if you need to pay less than a minimum wage to make your business viable then… it’s not viable.
Well..if there were laws to enforce a higher minimum wage, all of your competitors would have to do it too and the price of products across your industry would rise.
The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.
Over the years we’re in the same boat and the cycle begins again with a new minimum wage - that’s ok.
that is a myth. Only people on the bottom can afford to spend more. For the rest of us we don't get a raise.
With higher wages prices need to go up for the same profit. Supply and demand may or may not allow prices to go up. Some marginal products go off the market. Some prices go up. People adjust to buying less things because they can't afford them. Slowly inflation catches up and wages are back to "too low" - this is a bad thing.
So why don't you argue to make the minimum wage $10 million a year? Then everyone is rich. Hell, I wonder why the Sudan hasn't thought of that.
There is surely an upper-bound on the minimum wage in an economy? What if you are already at it?
What if people _think_ we're at it because they don't factor in food stamps, Medicaid, etc.
If the minimum was a _livable_ wage, maybe we could get more people off of so called "entitlements".
Nor do they want to be around vehicles that have skipped their brake maintenance because they pushing operational hours to the edge.
Though there is plenty of room for improvement in the regulations. They need to provide some leeway for drivers that have been stuck in traffic for hours and can’t complete a load that’s just a couple miles away.
Also, you have no idea how many truckers work around these regulations and go through insane hoops just so they can fudge the numbers. When you see that happening en masse, your regulations probably need some tuning.
I have been following oil news closely for a better part of a decade now, the oil industry did not reduce capacity due to renewables. They respond to price, especially higher cost productions like fracking and oil sand. Consistently low oil prices since 2014 crash has scared many investors away, and it'll take some time of consistently high oil price before investor confidence return.
Current high prices is a combination of inflation (primarily caused by money printing), OPEC+ not going full speed, and other high cost producers not ramping up due to lack of confidence.
(1) 'the last few miles' i.e dealing with local complexity at delivery points, and
(2) unexpected emergencies (flat tires, etc.) and general maintenance.
Something like a remote drone operator probably wouldn't work(for changing tires etc.) or be completely reliable (disconnecting in a snowstorm etc.).
However, this could be an attractive work situation for many people. If you have an 8-hour straight automated run with a truck cabin, the operator can sleep, study, write code... hopefully something more productive than online games, anyway. Supplemental earnings could be possible.
This also benefits the trucking companies as they can plausibly run trucks on much longer 20+ driving / day schedules, since operators can sleep on the automated streches of the freeways.
Citation required.
> The future of renewable energy isn't quite there yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
You were saying? Wind and solar, cheaper than all fossil fuel sources for almost ten years now.
The cost of solar has plunged by a factor of almost 6x
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/3-...
Offshore wind is the most expensive renewable and is surpassing the cheapest fossil fuel source.
Go look at the percent generated by source and you'll see how far off we are from phasing out fossil fuels. Couple this with the projected usage of electricity in the coming years and the outlook is that much bleaker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Ge... https://www.statista.com/statistics/192872/total-electricity...
These transitions will take place, but they will take place precisely because shortages like these force them to happen.
1. Insurance rates dictate the minimum age... which is often around 26.
2. Average age of a truck driver is 56. So 4 years from retirement.
3. Federal laws are now much stricter on disclosure, so drivers who would have just moved from company to company after an accident... are now not able to get jobs nearly as easily. This is for the best, but the short term effect is there are many drivers who will have to find a new profession.
4. Wages are going up quickly and many drivers are changing jobs once per year (sometimes more)
Many of the larger trucking companies are self insured, so this really does not apply to them
>>Average age of a truck driver is 56. So 4 years from retirement.
Where do you get that drivers will retire @ 60? For most of them their Social Security will not kick in until 67, and I do not know many drivers that have a fully funded individual retirement account.
>>Federal laws are now much stricter on disclosure, so drivers who would have just moved from company to company after an accident..
This is really not due to Federal laws, there is a company the name escapes me right now that is similar to Consumer Credit Agency that tracks all driver activity, companies self report accident, and other adverse load events to this reporting agency
Edit: DAX/DAC System I believe, or something like that
>>Wages are going up quickly and many drivers are changing jobs once per year (sometimes more)
They are still using the flawed Per Mile pay scheme which means drivers will still end up being screwed in the end. Further more companies are adopting the "Owner Operator" model where by the driver is leasing the truck from the company at an obscene rate far more than the truck is actually worth, and the driver then bares all the costs and if they do not get enough work the company takes back the truck, leases to a new sucker, and send the original driver into collections bankrupting him/her
You may be thinking of AAMVA?
Yes, and those in-house insurance policies dictate hiring practices, not the other way around.
> This is really not due to Federal laws, there is a company the name escapes me right now that is similar to Consumer Credit Agency that tracks all driver activity, companies self report accident, and other adverse load events to this reporting agency
Yes, and last year the DOT (federal agency) rolled out required background checks. Was a really big deal from January to March, as companies large and small had to say no to a lot of applicants. Most of the data came from state BMV records that were "linked" and surfaced a lot of surprises when companies background checked their existing employees.
> They are still using the flawed Per Mile pay scheme which means drivers will still end up being screwed in the end. Further more companies are adopting the "Owner Operator" model where by the driver is leasing the truck from the company
This practice has always been a bad thing.
My friend operates a truck. He owns his own and only with that is he able to earn 80k a year. And even he is looking to get out because 3 months on the road at a time means no family life.
Just maintaining a truck is crazy stressful. It might be ok for some time until something major breaks on your truck and you’re not working for a week and you’re out an additional $5k for repairs. Just hope you’re not stranded in the middle of nowhere and have to pay thousands to have your truck towed.
It’s also in the top 10 most dangerous jobs. It’s incredibly stressful. And all the latest regulations will put you on edge at all times. When you’re an owner-operator, you are constantly walking the line between pissing off customers and losing your license.
It’s such a demanding job nowadays.
What does he haul? It is specialized?
Does he cover his lease, insurance, gas, etc from his own pocket? Do you know about how much that is monthly?
How many miles does he drive on average?
I don't mean to bombard you with questions, but there's so much variation in pay you need more information than just salary to really understand that number.
Downside is 60 hour weeks for 30 years.
He is pretty high up in seniority, but there are so few drivers that he still gets called in on days he would normally have off because they don't have enough drivers under him.
He drives nights up to the legal number of hours/miles as required and sleeps in cheap hotels during the day. My understanding is that his carrier does not use sleeper cabs because they use the same trucks for both local and over the road deliveries.
Truck driver is certainly not a dream job, but salaries are fairly good compared to the median in the US. And its not more difficult to have a family than if you're in the military or a night nurse or any other job with unusual schedule.
Military has huge divorce rates. And it is not like women were super eager to date military guys seriously. In a lot of ways it is worst then being with truck driver even, due to forced relocations every couple of years.
Night nurse get to be present outside of shift. Night nurse gets to be present parent. That is impossible for a soldier on deployment.
My Guess that is eating about 50% of that revenue way, so then his pay is probably around 40-45K gross profit before taxes.
https://files.epi.org/2013/ib388-figurea.jpg
Or if you really like charts
also, comparing productivity to hourly compensation is a bad comparison because it entirely omits other forms of compensation (stocks, healthcare). if i try to compare total compensation to productivty using FRED, I get: https://i.imgur.com/ohabUFu.png, which seems to say the opposite? Total compensation seems to have outpaced productivity growth, at least starting from 2000.
what thesis? The first link is a chart, and the second link is a collection of charts with a bunch of arrows, and a quote at the end. Neither be plausibly called a thesis, unless you're already to primed to believe it.
The fact that you are bringing up stocks as compensation says a great deal.
Cool so I can have healthcare while I starve naked on the street cause I can't pay for food,clothing or housing with my insurance card.
FRED... oh man. You mean the private business that was created specificity to rob every person in the united states says nothing is wrong. In fact it is great? Cool....
Read https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserv... If you really want to know what is going on.
certainly not due to other factors, say NIMBYism or more urbanization (more people crammed into the same piece of land)
>The fact that you are bringing up stocks as compensation says a great deal.
Well? What does it say?
>Cool so I can have healthcare while I starve naked on the street cause I can't pay for food,clothing or housing with my insurance card.
I'm not sure what your point here is. Are you upset that employers are compensating employees on a non-cash basis?
>FRED... oh man. You mean the private business that was created specificity to rob every person in the united states says nothing is wrong. In fact it is great? Cool....
if you look more carefully you'll see the actual data is sourced from the BLS.
We can't complain about lack of people doing these jobs and then also be upset that young people are taking these jobs.
There is no lack of workers, only workers willing to tolerate poor working conditions and pay.
"This paper examines the forces that have reduced truck drivers' earnings. First, using 1973-91 Current Population Survey data, the authors find that deregulation accounted for one-third of the decline in drivers' wages, with a larger negative effect on non-union workers than on organized workers. Second, using unique survey data gathered in 1997, they explore the effects of three specific factors frequently cited as sources of blue-collar wage decline. This analysis indicates that only one new technology, satellite communication systems, had important effects on drivers' earnings, increasing them through improved efficiency and work intensification; education had no important influence; and union membership increased earnings by between 18% and 21%. They conclude that the two dominant and intertwined sources of wage decline and increased wage inequality among truck drivers have been deregulation and de-unionization. (Author's abstract.)"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5119434_The_Effects...
(can get the paper from SciHub, a family member is a truck driver)
This has nothing to do with unions and everything to do with regulation and better administrative technology making the "mega-fleet body shop" business model more viable and owner operators and small fleets less economically viable.
Swift has always paid crap and we've regulated everything else out of existence, same story as many other industries.
Edit: That was too easy.
https://truckingresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ATRI...
https://truckingresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ATRI...
From the 2018 report:
"driver wages were highest in the “Other” category at 67.7 cents per mile, reflecting the specialized skills and credentials that carriers in this group require. For instance, many Tank haulers are involved in the movement of hazardous materials, which require a special endorsement on a driver’s CDL."
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9932619/Jet-pilot-3...
Something tells me that being a truck driver isn't going to be much of a career by then.
Further -- we know that employment in a job trails off over decades, it doesn't fall off a cliff suddenly. Truck driving jobs are still increasing. I would wager that the average 18-year-old truck driver today could retire from that job when she's in her 60s.
Things have gotten a lot safer too. Many less people have nicknames like "stubby" or "lefty" because the automatic safety stops the machine when (not if - repetitive work leads to forgetting to be safe) body parts are in the way.
I had a feeling this would get raised. The obvious retort is that the US has been creating tons of manufacturing jobs, but that due to changes in our trade regime, those jobs are generally created overseas. One could very easily imagine modifications to our existing trade regime that create incentives to employ Americans in factories, if such an outcome was desired.
Yes, factories are more automated, but factory workers globally are still a huge and growing segment of the workforce.
Do you have a source to support this claim? It's obviously a huge workforce, but growing? Automation is happening all over the globe. I couldn't find exact numbers, but it feels like factory workers are going the way of the farmers.
https://www.bruegel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/RP-19-04-...
Page 12 details change in manufacturing employment 2001-2014. The US dropped 4 million manufacturing jobs over that period, but Vietnam and Indonesia each added nearly that many. Total employment in the sector increased by 56 million. That's over 4 million new jobs, annually, over the period.
Even the US has been adding manufacturing jobs the last 5-10 years. 2018 saw the addition of 300k manufacturing jobs in the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
If there were some automation on the near horizon that could slow that job growth, there's a 5-year addressable market of $50B for the jobs added in 2018 alone. I am skeptical such automation is on the near horizon in any state where it is ready to be widely deployed.
The dot-com crash overlapping with China entering the WTO slide in manufacturing employment was especially brutal. A third of US manufacturing jobs relocated in 10 years. ("Relocated" instead of "lost" because Americans are still buying those goods, and their production did not become completely automated in that timeframe.)
in 2060 there will still be a huge demand for drivers. Fully Automated driving is vaporware, even if they make the tech work which they are still decades away from, there is legal and political hurdles that will be even harder to over come.
For crying out loud we still build tanks that the military has not wanted for years because its a jobs program, and your telling me States and Federal government are just going to stand by and allow all of those primary, not to mention the thousands of secondary jobs just go poof, with no push back
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I love how people only talk about the technical problems here, the Technical problems with level 5 Freight Trucks are HUGE, and likely at least 20 years away from solved...
The political problems with it however are far far far far more daunting
We don't have a line like a traditional car factory final assembly because we need to be more flexible, but there are conveyors going all over. (interestingly final assembly is still pushed down the line by hand)
Even if you are in ostensibly the same role in 2060 as you are today, what that role looks like is going to be completely different. Unrecognizable even.
- Quite possibly you still used punch cards to enter your programs.
- Probably you had a degree in something other than computer science. Math, physics, electrical engineering, something like that.
- Probably you were the only one working on whatever application or system you worked on.
- Probably you didn't have any kind of internet or email access. If you needed help figuring out a problem, you went to books.
- Very likely you didn't have any kind of proper source control, automated testing, or bug tracking.
- Most likely you didn't have any software libraries to work with other than whatever came in your language core library.
(I learned to program in 1981, but I was only 9 years old at the time, so some of this is secondhand.)
Github: "You rang?"
[0] https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/07/china-is-buying-bil...
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-largest-landowners-i...
I live in a city where we have enough land, but the government wont let anyone build pretty much anywhere, and the housing prices are horrible.
> The average truck driver salary in the USA is $61,843 per year or $31.71 per hour. Entry level positions start at $45,970 per year while most experienced workers make up to $85,000 per year.
McDonald's is approaching $20/hr around here, which is getting close to those entry-level positions, no special training needed, and you get to live at home with family instead of being OTR all the time.
But considering the other comments, McDonalds-like jobs pay similar amounts of pay for a lot better working conditions (less responsibility, stay at home with family, less dangerous,...).
I bet if the trucking companies decide it to start all of their employees at 110k they'd have no shortage of people willing to drive.
This is like saying that there is no housing shortage, just a shortage of people willing to pay a fair price.
$4.75 is half the state minimum wage, and a fraction of what anywhere near me is starting people out at. No one pays minimum wage any more. Target is paying $15/hr to stock shelves.
One side of America has been celebrating a reduction of migrants entering the country for four years, and now suddenly business owners are seeing that resource pool run dry. Even if these business owners did not rely on immigrant laborers, their own workforce is finding more opportunities. In many ways, it seems like that particular populist administration has provided what was promised.
Unless there is some major shift back to the norm, I can see businesses shifting to leverage labor more productively. I don't think this is a bad thing - America has always been addicted to its cheap, exploitable labor and this trend has gotten worse over the last three decades. Hopefully, these changes can continue to be more equitable to both sides. I could also foresee a reduction in excessive consumption - maybe a reduction in the number of "fast casual dining trends" and other horizontal growth trends.
It would have to very efficient to compete with a pool of driver-owners who would be motivated/desperate to undercut the automated fleet owners. Those will have to own the vehicles, be responsible for maintenance, and of course, shoulder responsibility for insurance/safety.
Besides, what are you going to do when your expensive rig and its cargo drives to the shoulder in the middle of the desert with a software issue? Someone will have to get there and drive it home manually.
Edit for a classic look at long-haul transport of hazmats, I can recommend this piece by John McPhee from 2003: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/a-fleet-of-one
Same thing truckers do today: call a local towing/repair company to come fix it. There are mechanics everywhere who can deal with large trucks, all they need is a way to get paid.
But tech (and laws) aren't quite there yet.
"driverless trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory."
https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/25/the-driverless-truck-is-co...
University should be only suggested to the top 20% of each yearly cohort, and senior highschool to the top 50%.
that's going to be politically suicide to implement.
my father went to high school in rural Illinois in the late 60’s. He got a full ride “hardship grant” simply because he was a decent (not exceptional) student and came from a poor farming family.
But then, the UK fcked over a lot of its trades to become a "service economy", so who knows.
Then there's the drugs and prostitution.
Why is that what determines the age limit? The USA has very consistent signs and roads between states.
It's 21 in the EU [1], but it doesn't matter if you're crossing a border or not.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/vehicles/driving-licen...
The federal government runs a pretty impressive safety program by enforcing rules and targeting enforcement based on statistical analysis and national standards. Shady operators basically cannot operate interstate business for long.
At the state or local level, it varies. States usually have more lax standards. There’s a cat and mouse game around the regs which evolve over time - Chinatown busses being the most notorious example recently.
The regulations shape business. Usually something like a hotel minibus or senior services bus operates with state or local authority. Large limos often operate in a legal grey zone. As a consumer it sucks, as the less regulated carriers are often a nightmare — that hotel minibus may not have operating brakes or a qualified driver.
Same with be road crews, give them a bump too.
Edit: or just lay roads rather than tracks and call them trains. Keep the humans away like they do now.
Good, safe, stable coding is HARD which it’s not often done cuz hard = expensive. And weregild costs lots and lots of money.
I don't think they're worse, just that the damage they can cause is far wider, both because of the ease of spread and the increase in reliance on technology
Yes, because as Issac Newton said, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. In 1950 the first programmers didn't know a lot of the tricks to write good code that I do. (they also didn't have computers that could handle the multi-million line programs that I work on) Over years a lot of things have had to be discovered, and a lot of seemingly-good bad ideas had to be rejected the hard way.
Of course today there are a lot more "programmers" writing simple web apps that depend on complex back ends, but demand even less skill than the programmers of old (who had to worry about where on the drum their next instruction was - concepts that are lost on us today). Still, we have a lot more programmers who are better than the best of the old, than the sum total of all the old programmers.
Though I do have to be careful. I'm soon entering the category of a previous generation. I expect anyone still programming today - regardless of age - is of this generation. There is a lot of overlap of people who started out in older generations not knowing as much as todays, but have learned and now are todays generation.
You can read the summmary of the Supreme Court case called New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira to see some of the scummy tactics that large trucking firms pull on people:
"In the present case, Dominic Oliveira sought employment with New Prime Inc., an American trucking company. When he was hired, he first had to drive 10,000 miles as an unpaid "trainee", followed by 30,000 miles as an "apprentice" working at US$4 an hour. Oliveira was then brought into the company proper, he was given the option to be hired as an employee, or as an independent contractor, which the company asserted would be more economical for Oliveira. Oliveira opted to be hired as a contractor. However, because he was an independent contractor, this allowed New Prime to charge Oliveira and other drivers through leasing of the New Prime vehicles and to pay for their own fuel and equipment through deductions from their paychecks, items that the company would normally pay for if the person was an employee. Oliveira frequently found these costs exceeded his base rate, effectively paying New Prime for his employment. While the terms of his independent contract allow him to drive for other companies, Oliveira found that his schedule was heavily dictated by New Prime. Oliveira eventually dropped the independent contractor and was rehired as an employee of New Prime, where his work duties and commitment were essentially identical to what he had done as an independent contractor, but taking home much more from his paycheck."
My first job was at 12 years old; I drove a 6 wheeled grain truck for our family's farmer friend in the July heat to help with his wheat harvest.
No a/c, windows were stuck down, 3 speed. Bruce, the farmer, rigged up a pedal extension for me on the clutch.
Plenty of kids down here can drive a skid steer, tractor, truck, or loader.
And I assume you mean that navigating a farm truck in heavy traffic on a dirt road going into the co-op, sometimes waiting for 2 hours to dump the load, with tight busy traffic passing both ways on a narrow dirt road lined with ditches that could roll the vehicle is different than what you're saying.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/driver-shortage-ata-estima...
https://www.reutersevents.com/supplychain/3pl/12-key-facts-a...
https://www.fleetowner.com/operations/drivers/article/216917...
Even as early as 2005: http://www.iitr.edu/pdf/ATADriverShortageStudy05.pdf
All of which is true for the majority of drivers. If the industry wants to attract people they need to get off the "per mile driven" pay scheme where truckers can spend hours, or even days unpaid waiting at terminals, docks, etc...
Trucking today is a terrible job, with low pay if calculated on a per hour worked basis. Combined with most of the regulations being placed on the driver, not the company, with most of liability for violating the regulations born by driver not the company. There is a continual battle between doing what the company says, and doing what the law says. Drivers are stuck in the middle because it is perfectly legal for a company to have a driver break the law or drive an unsafe rig, the only person that has to pay the fine is the driver.
IANAL but i can guarantee it's not - whether or not it gets enforced on the other hand...
I know personally more than a few drivers that would pay out of their own pocket to buy parts to fix trucks themselves so they would not end up in this dispatch punishment.
https://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/thre...
Found the link: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1104630323217300...
He doesn’t even have employees. He coaches all of his drivers through the process of setting up their own LLC and becoming independent. They love it.
Also, California's AB5 law has outlawed owner operators, which is a very large chunk of how trucking has worked for decades, making trucking a less desirable career. This is also one of the big reasons for the large backlog at the CA ports.
But then again, it _is_ California so I'm not surprised.
I just hope that maybe whoever is making the laws comes to their senses, because they're not just hurting California with this legislation.
Seems likely that there will eventually be a care out for trucking since that industry was not really the target of AB5 in the first place.
AB5 which codified the existing ABC test, made it consistent so that people in one working relationship with an employer wouldn't be employees for some purposes and contractors for others, and carved out industry specific exceptions to the test—those exceptions were the specific “targets”, not every other industry in the state where the existing judicially-applied ABC test was merely codified. Trucking already got some exceptions in AB5 (so they kind of were a “target”); they might get more.
The gig-economy firm propaganda that they were targets of AB5, rather than just a particular moneyed interest that was out of compliance with the law before AB5, is inaccurate.
No, it didn't. One because as the FAQ you link notes, owner-operators of trucks are not categorically banned. Second, as your FAQ also obliquely indicates but fails to clearly and directly state, to the extent ant existing business process was banned, it was banned by the California Supreme Court decision in Dynamex applying the ABC test to determine employee vs. contractor status, which is why the lawsuit it refers to against the application of the ABC test was before AB5 was passed, and later amended to include claims challenging AB5, which codified the rule of Dynamex, added exceptions, and made some consistency changes in other law so that relationships that were employment for some purposes under Dynamex would not still be contractor relationships for purposes of other law.
No, it didn't. To the extent anything did, the application by the California Supreme Court of the ABC test in Dynamex (prior to AB5) did (which also isn't entirely true, owner-operators usually meet 2 of the 3 prongs of the test, and the third prong depends on the core business of the employing firm; some will pass and some won’t.) AB5 actually created an explicit time-limited exemption to the ABC test for certain owner-operators of trucks (notably, in construction.)
The impression I get being in the UK is that driving HGVs is a cruel and soul destroying activity.
That may be a factor, but there are others in place as well such as the tax regime changing for self-employed drivers (IR35) etc.
However, many UK truck drivers were foreign nationals that all got sent home or didn't believe in their job security after Brexit. Nothing in economics is ever the result of just one thing, but Brexit has made an existing problem much worse.
The difference can be seen all around the UK. Every European country has some kind of shortage in the logistics industry, but only in the UK are the problems bad enough that the army needs to step in.
For people on the fence about going back home, lockdowns were a major driver. Additionally, Poland has rejected vaccine mandates, whilst the UK seems on the cusp of implementing them, and requires them for re-entry to the UK.
For people who have experience living under totalitarianism, being forced by the Government to take a medical treatment (often for no purpose since many working-class people already survived COVID) is unacceptable.
The other big factor is that a lot of people who have worked in the UK for the last 5-10 years have now saved up enough money to buy a nice house in Poland. By contrast UK real estate remains continuously unaffordable due to the restrictions on development and continued population expansion from immigration (legal and otherwise).
These trends of de-migration would have played out slowly over the next 5 years but COVID rapidly accelerated them.
More opinions here: https://emerging-europe.com/news/the-poles-disappointed-by-b...
No, the first thing that comes to mind is another shit job that has limited future and should be automated so humans don't have to do it.
I work on diesel trucks for a living and ive also been a professional driver. I never had a problem driving, but like all jobs, you gotta find something that fits.
the highschool things nothing new really, as ive personally seen some young drivers in my time. trucking companies have paid for school for about 2 decades now so thats not really anything new. they pay you while you learn and in return you have offers like buying your own truck, setting your own hours, competitive pay rates and bonuses. you can even ditch your rent payments if you want, its not that hard to just live on the road.
you have typically 3 job types. local (the beer truck for example), regional (milk, eggs, poultry), and intermodal/interstate (IPhones and engine blocks.) wanna stay home more? pick local. wanna see literally the entire country? then interstate professional is your calling. Literally everything you own came on a truck, so i dont think "limited future" is a fair assessment. cities like NY would grind to a halt in a few hours if they didnt have trucks and drivers.
people have been calling out the death of trucking for 20 years now but its not technology thats killing it, its greedy profiteering logistics companies. the "shortage" has always been caused by this and few other things.
The article linked at "retention" seems much more interesting to me:
"Is There Really A Truck Driver Shortage?" https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/05/25/999784202/is-t...
> Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter.
> In a 2019 study[1] published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists Stephen V. Burks and Kristen Monaco investigated claims by industry leaders that the trucking labor market was somehow "broken" enough to create a decades-long shortage. ... A thorough investigation led them to conclude that the trucking labor market is ... not broken. Yes, they say, the trucking labor market is "tight" — meaning that companies are competing to fill open jobs — but it functions in the same way as any other labor market.
> "There is no shortage," says Todd Spencer, the president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. His organization represents more than 150,000 mostly self-employed truck drivers around the United States.
> The big trucking companies want to secure a steady supply of cheap labor, and the ATA [lobbying organization for the nation's big trucking employers, the American Trucking Associations] has spent years lobbying the federal government to loosen regulations in the industry. It's now pushing for the DRIVE-Safe Act[2] in Congress, which would allow 18-year-olds to begin driving trucks across state lines. Right now, drivers must be at least 21.
> The real problem, Spencer says, is not a shortage but retention. According to the ATA's own statistics, the average annual turnover rate for long-haul truckers at big trucking companies has been greater than 90% for decades.
> "We have millions of people who have been trained to be heavy-duty truck drivers who are currently not working as heavy-duty truck drivers because the entry-level jobs are terrible," says Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the trucking industry.
> Compared with other blue-collar occupations, the median annual income of trucking is actually pretty good: $47,130. But long-haul truckers commonly work extremely long hours, often 60 to 70 hours per week or more. And drivers are typically not paid by the hour. Instead, they are typically paid only for the number of miles they drive. The average truck driver gets paid 52.3 cents per mile, according to the Department of Transportation. Even if weather or traffic slows them down and extends their working day, they get paid the same. Moreover, they're not compensated for the significant time it takes to load or unload their trucks. And they're not compensated for their "off time," even though they're miles and miles away from home.
> Being a long-haul trucker also means living out of your truck, because motels are pretty expensive and often don't have parking for big rigs. Meanwhile, finding parking to rest anywhere is a growing problem. Truckers sacrifice their health, sitting on their butt for hours and hours and eating junk food on the road. And the job is dangerous: Truck drivers are 10 times more likely to be killed on the job than the average worker.
> But, Viscelli says, through political lobbying, legal activism and harsh business practices, big trucking companies have made a difficult job even harder, especially for entry-level truckers. He says the companies have been "systematically degrading trucker working conditions." Scholars have referred to trucks as "sweatshops on wheels." Viscelli says the industry is rife with minimum wage violations and what he calls "debt peonage." Basically, new drivers become indentured servants, going deep into debt to get training and to lease trucks from their employers
> The debate over whether to call this a retention problem or a shortage may seem like mincing words. But it matters for the solution. The ATA and its allies argue that the "shortage" means the government should further relax regulations and make it easier for anyone to become an interstate truck driver. Insurance and rental car companies know that teenagers are much more likely to get into an accident — which is why they charge them more. But the "shortage"! We need teenagers to do the job!
> Frame the issue as a retention crisis, however, and the onus falls on the industry to make long-haul trucking more attractive as a profession. After decades of stagnant wages and shriveling opportunities for blue-collar workers, this is the market working on their behalf for a change: forcing employers to pay workers enough to do a really hard but vital job.
[1] March 2019 "Is the U.S. labor market for truck drivers broken?" https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2019/article/is-the-us-labor-ma...
[2] https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator...
Now, that's not to say there aren't more difficult installations. But I imagine in a lot of cases in the U. S., where a lot of breaker boxes live in the garage, it shouldn't be anywhere near a four figure installation sum. My guess is a lot of contractors of any kind can pretty much name their price right now. Or they do I used to do when I didn't want anymore consulting work: jack up the quoted price enough that I would drop other clients to do the job at that rate should the potential client be desperate enough to pay it.
I did not say low. It was a middling number which is madness.
>seems about right for a 6-10 hour job plus transportation costs and a helper.
6-10 hours to install a dryer circuit, with a helper? The job was going to take two hours max, with wire, box, outlet only costing about $75.
Also, most electricians make more money doing new construction, especially condo or apartment buildings. You're getting charged that much because they could have made the same amount of money (or a bit less) putting those hours towards a bigger, longer term project. As someone who works in a skilled trade, I can guarantee they just didn't think your project was important or worth it (and they're right). They see someone who can afford an electric car, and they know what it's worth to you to charge it.
But hey, you could always just google it, do it yourself and hope the inspector doesn't notice. What's the worst that could happen?
Yes. I'm also aware of their average income in the Bay Area, and it absolutely did not justify the price.
>Also, most electricians make more money doing new construction, especially condo or apartment buildings.
Barely any of that in the Bay Area.
>I can guarantee they just didn't think your project was important or worth it (and they're right). They see someone who can afford an electric car, and they know what it's worth to you to charge it.
Market is white hot for them, not going to lie.
>But hey, you could always just google it, do it yourself and hope the inspector doesn't notice. What's the worst that could happen?
Not where I live, need a city permit and a licensed installer. I'm leasing so that's what the home owner requires.
Not $3600.
>i can't imagine it would cost less than $1000, even just running conduit inside the walls, instead of doing drywall.
No conduit required, no drywall required.
It's no different than software engineers charging $300/hour consulting fees. Sure, they're just typing on a keyboard (or running some wires in this case), but you're paying for more than just the marginal cost of that particular job. You're paying for the investment that the specialist had to make to gain the experience required to be able to do the job.