This is pretty grueling work requiring you to operate heavy machinery, be away from your family for days, and drive mundane hour after hour.
Why wouldn’t it be highly paid?
Why wouldn’t it be highly paid?
Also consider that minimal academic education and minimal specialized training is often sufficient to do the work. So the supply of those willing to do the work has often exceeded demand, so there's naturally downward pressure on pay.
All that said, I think the question isn't whether the pay is acceptable, but why Walmart pays so much relative to other companies, where the drivers do pretty much the same job.
Trucking is a hard job which affects the supply of drivers, but this is offset by the fairly low barrier to entry to trucking.
Just supply and demand. Demand is a function of that business value (among other attributes).
There's many jobs that are probably even worse and paid less. The only reason it's highly paid is because the competition for it is higher: "at the time it was because of a “shortage” of truck drivers."
To pass the training you need to be a competent driver. It isn't as easy as you make it out to be and the pool of people who can become truck drivers is smaller than you think it is.
Loads of drivers fret parallel parking. Imagine the difficulty of moving a 54' trailer perfectly straight into a bay at the bottom of a narrow ramp and not crushing anything in comparison to regular parallel parking.
These sorts of comments confuse me because they seem to be making an argument by explicitly confusing is from ought as an intentional rhetorical technique.
He'd be wrong if he thought anything else. Obviously supply and demand always determines price. There is no question on that front.
The only problem with the previous comment, perhaps, is thinking that this particular gruelling/isolating work leads to fewer people being willing to drive the trucks than actually happens. The reality is the average trucker running typical routes isn't really experiencing anything all that gruelling/isolating in the grand scheme of things, so it is a more attractive career than suggested. It's not a cushy programming job by any stretch, but it's still quite comfortable compared to a lot of work out there.
The general premise is valid, though. There are clear examples of other, albeit arguably more, gruelling/isolating work that can't get anyone to even consider the job without big dollar signs. He is just overestimating how undesirable trucking in particular is. For a lot of people, trucking is their ideal career.
But, in fairness, the comment was in reply to an article that suggests, at least for some routes, that there is trouble attracting drivers. So it wasn’t exactly off-base. The original article may be.
Driving as a profession does not require skill.
Now, is it possible that in the 1970s your dad had an unhinged boss who expected a 16 year old to reliably operate commercial trucks without any training? Is it possible your dad is an exceptional driver who managed to do this? Sure, both of those things are possible. Is it a reasonable thing to expect from any randomly selected teenager? No.
how can say this with a straight face?
I got stuck going round the first corner, then got lost, then gave up when I had to back the trailer into the loading bay.
Come back and tell us that that doesn't "require skill".
It turns out its one thing to do a thing for fun or small periods totally a different ball game when you have to do it at scale.
Im guessing a lot of people who can play a chord or two like to imagine it can't be that hard to be a concert musician either.
Everything changes at scale and when it has to be done seriously.
Miss me with the demanded respect for an industry that will be replaced in a couple decades.
Some might say the same about gluing together boilerplate in modern development frameworks.
At the end of the day, skill is only relevant for competition within a given industry. The pay scale for any given field is based on the value they provide the employers (which is why grown men playing children's games are paid millions of dollars)