The Trucking Industry Needs More Drivers. Maybe It Needs to Pay More
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Most Truckers are paid by the mile... So if your sitting in traffic no pay (next time your stopped in traffic look around, how many semi's are sitting with you, most of those drivers are doing it for free)
Then there is load and unload time, which for some companies is non-paid, other is a nominal flat rate of like $35 that could take up hours of your day.
Then there is the "hours of service" which many companies require their drivers go "off duty" when they arrive at warehouse, but the warehouse required them to monitor the CB Radio to be called to pull into a dock, so their "sleep" time is taken up waiting to be unloaded, and they do this waiting for free.
Trucking companies need to end the practice of per mile pay, and start paying drivers Per Hour or a Salary (non-exempt) like every other company.
I know a driver who spends 2-6 hours waiting to be unloaded. He doesn't get paid for that time but isn't free to leave the truck because when the loading dock is ready for him he needs to be there to move the truck. How is that not being "on call"? If he wasn't working he could go catch a movie or dinner, sleep or whatever, but for some reason the law says it is OK to make him sit without pay to do his job.
They are afraid to log as 'on duty not driving', which is how they legally should be doing it. Sure, they make less that one day but the sheer number of hours wasted at the shipper or consignee will have a knock-on effect which will make on-time delivery less likely. I drove tractor-trailers in the US for eight years and I would tell other drivers 'this system is broken, allow it to fail and cover your ass by documenting everything'.
I refused to falsify my logs and would rigidly log everything 100% accurately, even logging Hours of Service violations (e.g. difficulty finding parking & going 30-45 min over on drive time) which could have cost me a ticket. Once in a while I'd get hauled into a weigh station for an inspection and they'd notice the hours violation. I explained about refusing to falsify and they'd see this was true. I'd get a funny look but never a ticket.
The outcome here was that I was very predictable to the 'trip planners', who were one grade above the lowly dispatchers. The trip planners always knew exactly where I stood from the truck's telemetry data, plus I would always communicate delays. They were better able to predict how to use my time and their company truck. I was never out of pocket for reimbursable expenses because time/date stamps on receipts always matched. I was making more than most of our company-employed drivers and even some of the owner-operators who struggled with fuel costs, etc.
The dispatchers hated me because they constantly had to explain to management why my loads were late and how I could not be blamed for the delays as I had documented everything and communicated the delays well in advance. Every other driver would have gone over their hours illegally to compensate, but I always stopped when I ran out of driving hours and therefore missed appointments.
They all caught on after a while and learned to use my time more wisely. I reliably made $50-55K/year which was exceptional for trucking and enjoyed the very low tax rate Hours of Service workers get (9%, taking the standard deduction x days worked, typically). It was an interesting job overall because of all the sights you see, but I can't recommend it to anyone looking for a career change. Stick with the tech sector as it is much safer and you can go home every night.
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/3/5775482/why-trucks-will-drive-th...
Snow is another issue. Sometimes you can safely drive through snowdrifts at speed and keep going. Sometimes it isn't a snowdrift at all, but a car covered in snow and abandoned on the highway, and the only way to tell is to approach slowly and look for an antenna sticking up or something like that. Not an everyday occurrence but it illustrates a scenario where human intelligence keeps you moving ahead when an automated system would probably need to stop and wait for human intervention.
Trucking is a huge industry with well over 100% annual turnover, and many individual drivers taking liability for accidents that were preventable. With automated trucks, that liability burden may shift back to the companies who would no longer be able to plead ignorance. It's one more issue to deal with in addition to getting the technology right.
This advice is sound in more industries than trucking.
"and enjoyed the very low tax rate Hours of Service workers get (9%, taking the standard deduction x days worked, typically)."
I'm sorry, but I don't understand this part. Would you mind explaining it a bit more?
Not all jobs are hourly. Why should this change for truckers and no one else? Are you proposing that all jobs should pay for every minute of work? I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but I'm interested in your reasoning.
Whereas, if you're a trucker, you don't know any more than the company does about whether the gods of traffic are going to take a dump on you that day - and there's not a whole bunch you can do about it. In that context it doesn't seem to me to make much sense to pay on that sort of basis.
The point of paying with a target is - at least when you're not trying to screw people out of money - to tie reward to the risks that they can control. If they can't control the risk, it becomes little more than a way of concealing from people what the take-home is going to be.
True Contract Jobs, i.e owner operators, should be paid based on however they draw up their contracts, that is one business employing another business and it outside the conversation of employment law
An hourly wage is a very special payment system which requires some kind of foreman to be sustainable. Otherwise, the labour industry tends to drift towards inefficiencies that allow them to claim money for less work. This is classic agency risk, where the incentives are not aligned, and heading down this path often entails major bureaucracies to try and keep everyone honest (like time clocks and punch cards, a "boss" looking over you, etc).
Simply paying more within the existing structure makes perfect sense. It will actually have a disproportionate effect on recruitment when some of the most efficient drivers start bragging about making $160,000 a year driving trucks (this is one of the big drivers of immigration by the way. Compared to poorer nations, the streets are paved in gold in the USA, and some lucky immigrants find shovels to dig it up. Unfortunately, most people who come never get a shovel so it remains but a dream...).
Paying more by the mile absorbs the costs of refuelling and traffic, without giving any driver an incentive to waste time when, for example refuelling the truck. So rational truckers will go to gas stations that are more efficient and will get out of there as soon as they can.
Where the trucker has no agency, however, it could make sense to pay by the hour. For example, since loading is in the hands of another group as soon as the truck docks in, and since it can vary quite a bit based on warehouse, better that the driver is paid for time sitting around. You could argue that the driver's incentive is to rush the loaders, but I doubt they have any coercion in that process. So better that the shipping company have an incentive to make loadings as fast possible through influence over choice of warehouse, penalties to warehouses for slow loadings, etc.
I've never really thought about this industry before, but thinking about it now makes it sound very interesting!
Paying by the mile is even worse. How much incentive does the company have to make unloading and loading more efficient when they get it for free?
The employer knows how much value the driver's gonna contribute for the money they pay, but the potential drivers aren't at all sure how much income they'll get paid for their time/effort. They basically only have hearsay from other drivers/ex-drivers to go on. Furthermore, some are getting burned and leaving the industry (I know personally of one; and there's another in this very thread), and telling others about their experiences.
The number of confounding variables and risks (including but not limited to loading/unloading) are simply too high for them to be able to make an accurate judgment about their potential income.
The natural effect of a lemon market is that the market dries up because the buyers/sellers simply stop transacting when the problems caused by the information asymmetry are too much.
That actually seems to be exactly the situation we're getting here. The wages don't seem to be that bad actually, but the risk is all piled on to the driver, so new recruits are very reluctant to enter the industry after hearing a few horror stories.
Lots of startups have gone down for similar reasons - pricing that is too complex makes potential customers go 'fuck it' and go with the devil they know.
In an ideal world good firms would increase their market share, but doing that requires satisfying trucking consumers and they want their goods shipped as cheaply and quickly as possible. So the interests of consumers and suppliers (of trucking services, ie drivers) are not very well aligned. I don't know what can be done about this; as a consumer I have absolutely no clue which hauling companies handle the goods I purchase, nor do I have any clue how much of a good's price consists of shipping costs. So I can't really vote with my dollars to let store owners know that I'm willing to pay a little more to support trucking companies that treat their employees well.
Experienced truckers will have less information asymmetry, but experienced truckers need to be replenished as they retire. Apparently that's not happening.
In real life, in the case of coal miners and their "dead work" (necessary work that wasn't getting paid), it took bloody strikes and fights to get those rises, the amounts paid weren't automatically upgraded.
The "money required to attract X workers" only plays a role when those X workers are not destitute and starving to begin with. If they are, and the company can pay them less and still have a huge profit from their work, it'll do that.
Actually, logic would indicate that it has already happened. Every industry pays people the least amount that it can reliably obtain labor and/or reliably profit from their employment. Trucking is no different.
Industries that do that sort of thing tend to suffer in aggregate because you get a 'bad money drives out the good' effect, similar to used cars.
The same thing happened in finance (nobody touches the CDO market now - it would have disappeared entirely were it not for government life support).
1. Most companies use what is called "Book Miles" for payment and these books I believe were published in the 1940's or something, because most companies "Book Miles" are vastly different than the actual miles driven
2. "Foreman" problem can be solved with Technology, the DOT is planning on requiring all electronic logs in the near future, like 2015 I believe, most trucking outfits already have realtime GPS monitoring of their trucks, you can monitor these employees in a far more accurate manner than one can monitor factory workers.
3. Most company truckers do not have a choice of where they fuel, this is planned as part of the trip, and they are provided a fleet card that is only accepted at a chain the company has a contract with.
this is just a start but I think you believe truckers have more freedom then they do in reality. The technology and logistics that goes in to trucking does not allow for any independent thought, they are given a route, with preplanned fuel and rest stops, if they deviate from this route they must explain why (i.e mechanical failure, stopped by police, etc)
While they may not have a human foreman monitoring their time clock, they have electronic foreman's and government regulators acting as foreman's
It also gives the driver incentives to drive too long, too fast, to reduce maintenance, and to take other shortcuts that cause longer-term and safety problems. (Fortunately, the industry has done pretty well at pushing liability onto the drivers.)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm
(I'm adding some paragraph breaks to Smith's text, this is a single paragraph in the original. Emphasis added as well.)
"The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days, perhaps, in ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low; in England, for example, than in Scotland; in the neighbourhood of great towns, than in remote country places.
"Some workmen, indeed, when they can earn in four days what will maintain them through the week, will be idle the other three. This, however, is by no means the case with the greater part. Workmen, on the contrary, when they are liberally paid by the piece, are very apt to overwork themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years. A carpenter in London, and in some other places, is not supposed to last in his utmost vigour above eight years. Something of the same kind happens in many other trades, in which the workmen are paid by the piece; as they generally are in manufactures, and even in country labour, wherever wages are higher than ordinary. Almost every class of artificers is subject to some peculiar infirmity occasioned by excessive application to their peculiar species of work. Ramuzzini, an eminent Italian physician, has written a particular book concerning such diseases.
"We do not reckon our soldiers the most industrious set of people among us; yet when soldiers have been employed in some particular sorts of work, and liberally paid by the piece, their officers have frequently been obliged to stipulate with the undertaker, that they should not be allowed to earn above a certain sum every day, according to the rate at which they were paid. Till this stipulation was made, mutual emulation, and the desire of greater gain, frequently prompted them to overwork themselves, and to hurt their health by excessive labour.
"Excessive application, during four days of the week, is frequently the real cause of the idleness of the other three, so much and so loudly complained of. Great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together is, in most men, naturally followed by a great desire of relaxation, which, if not restrained by force, or by some strong necessity, is almost irresistible. It is the call of nature, which requires to be relieved by some indulgence, sometimes of ease only, but sometimes too of dissipation and diversion. If it is not complied with, the consequences are often dangerous and sometimes fatal, and such as almost always, sooner or later, bring on the peculiar infirmity of the trade.
"If masters would always listen to the dictates of reason and humanity, they have frequently occasion rather to moderate, than to animate the application of many of their workmen. It will be found, I believe, in every sort of trade, that the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work."
He had to step down 10 years ago due to insider trading with Swift shares. Now he's back after a they brought it private and then to a second IPO.
The stock tanked, in my opinion, because investors know they can't trust Jerry Moyes and Swift's board.
More fun stuff.
http://teamster.org/content/teamsters-warn-swift-transportat... http://espn.go.com/nhl/story/_/id/9796076/nhl-lawsuit-jerry-...
There are exceptions to everything though, if you've been on the road long enough you make more money per mile as you build up a reputation, or you can make money money working for fedex or doing hazardous materials shipping, but it takes years of toiling in shit conditions for low pay to get to that point.
They also told me that they met a lot of people who clearly hadn't done the math, and were losing money instead of making it despite working very hard. The cost of the truck alone puts you in massive debt with no guarantee of work to pay it off.
As far as automating it, maybe in 20 years it will be viable. It's not useful to talk about that today.
I think trained people might still handle the parking though for a while :P
And then there's the value of the fuel in the vehicle.
Whether there is someone in the truck at all times is a hard prediction. I also think that these trucks will have remote operation override, which was mentioned elsewhere on this thread (even as an alternative to / cultural introduction to / slippery slope for - full automation). Remote operation is the ideal solution for any kind of exception, short of failure of the remote operation system :P
There is also the liability issue, I mentioned that things are rigged to dump the hassles on the drivers and this is one of them. You're economically pressured to falsify log data, so when you nod off and accidentally kill some people, your employer is off the hook. A nice working self-driving truck would reduce fatalities caused by gross driver error, but I guess it would put the trucking company back on the hook in the cases where a catastrophe did happen. In the short term self-driving vehicles might be undesirable to some companies because it might eliminate their ability to shove negative externalities onto a third party (the drivers.)
self-driving commercial trucks will happen, I just think 5-8 years is not likely.
Whatever system does it, it will have to be able to handle a bunch of wild situations autonomously. After thinking about it I don't think any sort of remote operation can be relied on as a technology to the degree that hypothetical laws would require.
You drive up the ramp, either in a truck or a car, and at some point the on board computer takes over, when you get to your preprogrammed exit number the car/truck gives the driver back control once it is on the exit ramp, if the driver does not acknowledge control the car automatically decelerates and pulls off the road way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_freight_transport
Lots of existing infrastructure for this, cheaper to use than to put AI in each truck.
On the plus side for rail, high speed automated container systems could significantly reduce delays, automate shunting yards, etc. The difference between automated docks like Rotterdam and the manual way trains are loaded is stark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXZQ7emHC0 http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/35955-extreme-engi...
The use of driver-less trains is feasible, but the rail network (especially signalling) in America is so antiquated. Perhaps outsource it to the Netherlands...
Automated rail container system fails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7I4wa1gpoc
It's harder than you'd think to do a perfect 90 degree backup of a full-size semi into a loading dock without jackknifing, or to develop the temperament to pay attention to a boring stretch of highway for 8 hours at a time. You're being trusted with a lot of valuable equipment and cargo, to say nothing of the insurance risk should you flatten someone's Mercedes.
If there is a way for management to push a driver to cook the log book, they will. The best thing for drivers is the electronic log book that can't lie.
Not while they're getting paid by the mile... They aren't called comic books for nothing.
If the people they get in trucker school have a hard time learning these things, that's just another indicator that they need to put more money on the table to attract better students.
It take a hell of alot longer to become a proficient trucker. Long time truckers have nothing but disdain for these 6 week course drivers that are on the road.
I know when my father (who is a trucker) first become a driver I believe it was a 6mo or year long course with longer period as a "driver in training" with the company he was placed in, we was part of a driver team pair with an experienced driver. This was after being a driver for the US Army for 6 years driving a Deuce and half.
Today a Driver take a 6 weeks intro course and then it entrusted with 80,000 pounds going 65mph.... with no additional training.
What that should really tell you is Trucking companies is that paying a 6 week driver peanuts + the extra insurance is still less than paying an experienced driver an acceptable wage.
With the Raise of "No Fault" States many trucking companies are also Self Insuring, since they only ever have to pay for the damages of their own equipment, which if it does not effect the operation of the the truck they will not fix anyway.
But sure continue believing that a 6 week driver is just as good as a 15+ year driver
Why? Because in a corporate yard (where all teamsters terminate) its somebody else's job to drive it in the yard.
Last time I went to the US I found that supermarkets were stocked with food, gas stations with fuel, and lumber yards with lumber, so it seems that stuff is still getting from where it is to where it needs to be quite effectively.
How they're different: you may well have a situation where the short term supply of workers is highly inelastic. In that situation, paying more won't help any shortage. And some jobs that you would think are elastic in the long term aren't as much as you might think: the majority of people may simply be unable to perform the job, or uncertainties about the job's existence in four years might mean the expected return of training is very low or negative.
If people are not sanguine about the existence of trucking jobs 10 years from now, it's no surprise that the actual supply of labor is very low and not looking to expand soon. If you're an employer, you're probably best off using your monopsonist position to drive down wages of the current supply instead of paying handsome sums to coax people into taking big risks in preparing and dedicating themselves to your jobs. Especially if you're an executive rewarded on the timescales of a year or two, and not on timescales of a decade.
Anyway, Swift's annual report says that driver wages as a fraction of revenue have fallen in each of the last two years, so it's their own fault if they came up short on drivers.
My hypothesis of implicit or explicit collusion among the dwindling number of trucking firms to drive down wages instead of drawing on supposedly elastic supply manages to explain that, on the other hand. The only other possibility would be an industry wide miscalculation that just happens to look the same as widespread collusion.
It's funny; this story is a perfect analogy [1] for [2] something [3] but [4] I [5] just [6] can't [7] think [8] of [9] what [10]. Meanwhile, true story: a former employer not only completely lied to me about what I'd be doing, but then threw a fit when I quit two months in. And sent potential engineering recruits a python puzzle with a naked woman in it. It's a shock why employers have trouble hiring is all I'm saying...
[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB113210508287498432
[2] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/11/1201127/-Facebook-C...
[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ayoomojola/2013/07/15/the-shorta...
[4] http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/11/technology/zuckerberg-tech-p...
[5] http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/240163468/nice-work...
[6] http://www.infoworld.com/t/h-1b/silicon-valley-leaders-unite...
[7] http://thehill.com/policy/technology/258985-microsoft-lack-o...
[8] http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/Real-estate-...
[9] http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/08/07/gasp_sfs_housing_ma...
[10] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...
Sometimes its interesting from an alternative history perspective to think about what to do if you were born into a world without computers. Or if you don't have the "knack" for hard science-ish work. You could live a lot worse than driving a truck around all day.
Also depending on your risk tolerance there are higher level certs, if you want to drive tank cars full of liquid hydrogen or plutonium around all day or whatever. Less hazmat jobs, but marginally better pay and working conditions.
To some extent, more than most jobs, you choose what you want to do. My semi-retired uncle who took up trucking in the 90s simply refused to drive in snow and hated driving in big cities. So he didn't. It really was that simple. There are very few other jobs where the market is so flexible that you can simply do what you want, when you want. If you want, you can get a truck driving job where you carry two beer barrels at a time uphill both ways into bars, but as an old semi-disabled guy he chose to haul five ton machine tools so in his entire career he never personally lifted anything heavier than a bottled water. If he wanted to spend a week at the grand canyon instead of being paid, he simply did so.
Any chance you could hook me up with your uncle? I'm interested in changing careers and am moderately financially secure. :-)
From memory... don't work for large companies, because a place that doesn't do business in NYC or LA can't even think of sending you to the streets of NYC or LA, which according to him was no picnic for a truck and I'm sure is only worse now. If you don't want the office politics drama of not picking up a load to FL, don't do business with a place that has loads to FL, its that simple. I seem to recall hearing he had a deal with a franchise farm equipment dealer where by definition he never went out of the dealership territory other than occasional horse trading between dealerships. When he got sick of living in Iowa he moved on.
Much like the computer biz, life is better if you're not in the middle of it. Not being in the middle of everything meant feast or famine, which was OK for him.
He was retired, sorta, but still needed 90s era health insurance premiums (which I'm sure was comically low compared to current costs) and he wanted to avoid 401K early withdrawal penalties, so he only worked for restaurant and bar money. That kind of personal financial position helps a lot when looking for quality of life. If you demand 10% more pay than everything else, they'll pay it, but take it right outta your hide, horrible working conditions and bad routes. Better to love life at 50% of income than to exhaustively minmax up to 110% of income and hate every millisecond of it.
Most "IT type positions" would not be amused if you decided not to work that month because you have enough cash for now. But trucking was (is?) flexible.
There is a bias in the truck driving biz that is the opposite of "IT type work" where its assumed that an old guy will naturally be more reliable, harder working, and more knowledgeable about trucks and routes and just generally a better overall trucker. In that way it can be a decent second career.
He claimed that once him and his wife saw the country, it got pretty boring. I imagine anything can become boring, eventually. So it might be super exciting for only a decade, after which "eh".
Some other advice is there are downsides of exotic travel. I live in a state with no known non-escaped pet poisonous snakes and only one species of venomous spider. You go trucking in the deep south and you'll inevitably meet some kind of swamp animal that can kill you. Also as a Midwestern boy, suddenly after decades of not caring, having to be really careful about hurricanes on coastal runs was weird. On the other hand, when he got fed up with visiting an area, in only a couple days he could be back in the western mountains. Thinking of geography in terms of time not distance was another anecdote he talked about. No matter how hot it was in Louisiana he could be back "home" so to speak in North Dakota in a couple days. His relatives (us) treated him like a sailor who could be gone for months and needs years of warning for a wedding, but crazily enough he could get around faster than people with "normal" desk jobs when he had to (sick relative, whatever).
He got tired of his truck after a decade or so just like you'd get tired of a house. Truck dealerships make some commission just on people getting tired of the layout and windows, just like houses.
I wasn't super close to him but there was some weirdness in the 90s such that his retirement fund was somehow available to him with lower (no?) penalties because he bought a truck with it. Or maybe it was accounting BS and he figured once he made 10% of the cost of the truck in profit (which didn't take long) that he "wasn't paying a penalty on his withdrawal" even though technically on paper he did. This is complicated and worthy of some research if you're serious. I wasn't close enough to him to talk taxes and accounting but I'm sure basically setting up a small business is an interesting topic. (Oh and edited to add he had some tax weirdness where he was basically homeless but it turns out renting an apartment in an income-tax-free state was cheaper than paying income tax in a income taxing state, I'd talk to a real tax accountant about that before renting anything or filing anything)
In other words for everyone saying "hell no" there is another that say "ok, i have no choice, i'll take it" well the business moves on.
I have also heard some East Europeans (Polish for ex) drivers come here (not sure on what kind of visa) and they are willing to work for much less, then send money home. Same patterns as farm workers from Latin America working here.
Which isn't to say that truckers don't need and deserve more pay; just that they're not presently getting screwed quite as hard as most of the working class. It's more of an indication of how fucked up things have gotten that a trucker's salary can look pretty good.
This feeds painfully into the "HN is an echo chamber of rich yuppie coastal urban programmers out of touch with reality". Its roughly a median income for Americans. About half of all jobs are worse and about half of all jobs are better.
"choose between keeping their jobs or obeying safety regulations"
Isn't this like every blue collar job, ever? In my limited student years experience working thru school its a blue collar mgmt technique. So in programming if there's a woman or a black guy we tell lies about "not a cultural fit" or whatever other BS. But in blue collar orgs if your boss wants to fire you, you'll get fired either for not using safety gear or taking too long aka fired for using safety gear. In both cases it doesn't really matter, if you're not the same gender / orientation / religion / race as your boss you're going to end up equally unemployed, although with different lies told if you're white collar or blue collar. It doesn't really mean anything at all on the surface.
One of the most important tips I found in an older driver training manual I saw once was to buy a device that plugs into your radio and to record every conversation with dispatchers. When the company gives the driver grief about not breaking the rules, playing those recordings for the company driver safety officer was an important tactic.
If instead he complains about a labor shortage, then maybe politicians will pass a law allowing more immigration and he will be able to lower his wages and increase his profit.
It's beneficial for business owners for there to be a general belief in a labor shortage but it is not beneficial for people to believe they are stingy.
It's really unfortunate because the only reason most people are against immigration, deep down, is that they fear they will be usurped by cheap labor. And that is only a problem because we haven't allowed free-trade and free-flow of migrants around the world from the start. Instead, we built up barriers, and we've created dams. Of course people are now going to complain when the flood gates open and a valley gets washed out.
It has to get worse, before it gets better.
There's many good reasons to be against immigration apart from that:
1) It lets companies play third world workers off against first world workers. We know that they tell the first world workers to shape up (i.e. work overtime; accept abuse & wage theft) or have their job shipped to China, but they actually do the same to the 3rd world workers too with the threat of insourcing.
After all, there are MANY times when it's a trade-off between more expensive but higher productivity 1st world workers and lower productivity, lower paid 3rd world workers. BOTH wages are driven down (often to unbearable levels) by tearing down trade barriers, because they can simply pick the workforce that is more desperate.
2) 3rd world countries often spend outrageous amounts of money to educate their workforce, only to have the cream of the cream high tail it to a high income country which gets all of the benefits of that education. This is a direct subsidy from poorer countries to richer countries that goes largely unacknowledged.
Don't give the immigrants any welfare then, and only let them stay as long as they have any kind of job (plus a few weeks grace period) or can prove they have enough money and a return ticket.
It's even better for the business owner for citizens to believe that their government plays a key role in "providing" jobs; it's what allows businesses to lobby government to change the rules to "help job creators" instead of just paying more.
Government or market, it's our choice. Lately, we're more and more choosing government to solve market "problems" that exist only because we are willing to let the government act on those problems. If we didn't, the market wouldn't have said problem.
The trucking industry is about to tank hard. Mercedes demo'd its first driverless truck a couple of weeks ago (!). Yes, there will be specialists drivers sure and niche companies. But the day of the interstate road train will be done shortly.
The biggest new niche in my mind will be vehicle security. These trucks will be flying solo across the nation - unmanned. How will these trucks be fitted out against good ol' fashioned highway robbers in remote areas that are barely on the grid?
Fun times ahead.
(!). http://www.caradvice.com.au/295713/self-driving-mercedes-ben...
They would handle it the exact same way the ones with drivers do. They would do nothing while it is happening but contact the police and claim insurance. The only difference is no one is at risk of dying and they will likely have video evidence.
I'm sure that we'll make use of the tech we have but there is so much more to driving a truck than driving. Maybe the "drivers" will be able to climb in the back and sleep while the truck does they driving and they can take care of everything else.
Most people don't get tractor trailer deliveries to their door so a driverless truck wouldn't have an advantage there.
But sadly those tracks are bicycle trails or even roads now. Eminent domain space is problematical; rails always go interesting places; tracks have largely disappeared from the landscape by having their route repurposed.
[1]https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hs01/hm41.htm [2]http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/transportation/a_freig...
Why would the robot's pet be armed? Only the stupidest bandits would threaten the poor meatbag instead of paying them to cause the breakdown in the first place.
When I worked at a convenience store, you could get fired for not cooperating with robbers. No company wants to deal with the PR and liability nightmare of some poor schmuck getting gunned down trying to defend a truckload of Cheetos, or the $200 in the register. The policy everywhere is "keep your head down, do everything the bad guys tell you to, and call the police when they leave."
And, similarly, no robber wants the kind of police attention that murder brings. Certainly there's a risk of some fucked-up tweaker getting all trigger-happy, but 99 times out of a hundred they won't hurt you as long as you cooperate.
Plus Robocop will be hiding in the back and killing him with carbon monoxide will not be an option.
Of course, when thieves start using robots to do the stealing, it will get tough.
Even Mercedes says in that article, "the Highway Pilot system could be launched into production trucks 'as early as 2025 if conditions permit'." Which is basically corporate speak for, "we have no idea if this will ever launch, but it will get investors excited now."
Truck A: Can drive 24 hours a day and can cover the distance there and back in about 3 days
Truck B: Can drive 11 hours a day and can cover the distance in ~7 days.
The first Driver can do the trip twice in the same amount of time. Halving the number of drivers required for that route or freeing up drivers on that route for other jobs.
Full serve gas stations.
>How will they handle loading and unloading?
Do long haul drivers typically load/unload themselves these days? I would have thought that would have been the task of the warehouse staff on either end.
>How will they handle inclement weather?
Probably better than human driven trucks why would you think they couldn't?
>What is the insurance liability for putting them on public roads?
Probably less than human driven trucks since you don't have to worry about a lot of things that will cause problems for those such as tired/impared drivers.
>Who will be sued when a driverless truck crashes into another car (at fault or not)?
The trucks insurance company. Same as it would currently happen.
Now try the same thing in the middle of winter, the equivalent of visual noise is obstructing both the road and the surroundings. People are good at picking out patterns in this condition, especially if they've been driving for a while, computers notsomuch.
Sure, it's a matter of the tech advancing, but solving the second problem is harder than solving the first.
If people were any good at it there would be no increase in crashes during winter, foggy or wet weather conditions.
Self driving vehicles will have the same issues with seeing in the visual spectrum in bad weather as humans but they will also have the advantage of IR for example in knowing if something is in the fog/snow in front of them and how to react to that.
You also remove the emotional component. Humans in really bad weather tend to either ignore it(which is risky) or drive scared(which leads to over reactions which leads to accidents). For the second case things like over correcting, slamming on breaks, swerving, etc all lead to tons of accidents that are easily avoidable.
This is further compounded by the fact that even if humans can see the patterns they rarely act on them perfectly and often do the exact opposite of what they should do.
What about "trains" of trucks, where the first truck is piloted and the rest follow? That'd be significantly easier to engineer, and there'd be a person on-site for miscellaneous needs like gassing them up.
First, having 2-5 trucks in an automatic convoy is still ENORMOUSLY different than a multi-locomotive train with 10+ or even 100+ wagons on fixed rails.
Second, even if you equalized their "sizes", a three-truck convoy is NOT magically equivalent to a three-wagon train, because they are running on fundamentally different infrastructures.
If a single company has trouble hiring, they can raise salaries. However, if the pool of workers remains finite, all you are really doing is switching which company has the hiring problem. If two people need an all day plumbing job done today, and there's only one plumber in time, one of them is not going to get it done, regardless of how much they pay.
So when we look industry-wide, what the salary increases do is make people change professions. If it takes the same effort to become a truck driver than a cab driver, but the truck driver makes 4 times as much, everything else being equal, we'll have more trouble finding people to be cabbies, as long as there's an opportunity trucking. People then decide which training they get to choose. But the real demand problem is not solved until the workers are trained.
We don't even need workers for this. Imagine that we suddenly need 60 million gallons of 25 year old scotch every day. It doesn't matter how much we want to pay: There isn't enough scotch to meet demand today. If we paid a million dollars a bottle, it'd not make a difference: We'd only get an increase in supply as time goes by, and people just put more scotch on casks, and don't open the casks at 15 years, because 25 makes more money: But nothing is going to make this demand shock get fixed earlier, no matter how much you pay.
So the harder it is to actually perform the job, and the longer it takes to train, the stronger the immigration argument gets.
You take an alternative. There may only be one plumber, but if he is bid up to a million I am going to spend a day doing it myself, buy an entirely new WHATEVER_WE_ARE_REPLACING or do without. If the price of scotchs go to 50 usd per centilitier I am going to buy rum. If programmers start charging 10000 usd/day I am going to continue doing my spreadsheets by hand.
Your analysis fails to take into account substitute goods. If a taxi gets too expensive I can rent a car (no driver cost), take public transportation (lot less driver cost) or stay the night and go home when I am sober.
This is funny for two reasons:
1. Programmers do earn $1000 USD/day—it's only $125/hour. My rate is $225 and has been for years.
2. Spreadsheets are a killer app precisely because you don't need to be a programmer to use them. Prior to spreadsheets, all computer-based accounting was done by hiring and paying programmers. Spreadsheets ended that which is why they are (and continue to be) so successful.
:)
You mean fixed, not finite.
Which it wouldn't, if you raised salaries. The pool of workers would increase in size because people like money.
We're not talking about a job that only a fixed number of people could do. Half the working population could probably be a trucker if they tried, and they would if you raised wages enough.
I'm not sure "we don't need that many engineers" is defensible. Who's to say how many are "needed" or not? I see no reason why the world couldn't have many more engineers (and scientists) working and still doing useful work.
Seriously. How do people look around at the world today and think: Yup, everything is peachy. Let's just sustain this, folks, we're good.
As long as there's a third world, we're nowhere close to having enough of anything, including engineers. There's still a shit ton of work to be done just to get the world to an acceptable level for all people.
I have worked with machine vision and currently I'm doing my PhD in computational logistics (mainly working on automating the deployment of Vehicle Routing Systems). With this background in mind have given some tought to this: What would be needed, at least in the transition phase, is technology that would allow remote drive-by-wire of trucks in difficult situations (platforms, urban traffic) and wheater conditions.
Imagine a system not entirely unlike the unmanned UAVs the US is using but for civilian use of remote controlling trucks. One driver could probably handle dowzen or so trucks because they would drive under full automation at least 90% of the time. In addition the truck driver could have a normal 9 to 5 job.
Of course there are technical challenges like communications delay etc., but I'd like to hear your opinion on feasibility of such system.
* Licensure (e.g. if you have a Hazmat endorsement) * Route type (Long haul pays a lot more) * Driver's safety record * Employment status - Independent contractors who own their own rig vs captive employees Etc.
> For example, new safety requirements mean that individual truckers drive fewer miles than a decade ago: An average long-haul truck can now cover 8,000 miles a month, down from almost 11,000 in 2007, according to the trade association.
So the maximum miles driven per month is 73% of what it was in 2007, whereas the inflation-adjusted salary is 97% (based on eyeballing the graph) of what it was.
Now, if despite the higher maximum drivers were going, say 9000 miles a month before 2007, the difference would be less stark. Nevertheless, viewing from that perspective makes the situation seem much different.
Of course, that doesn't account for the 03-07 downward trend.
And while I do agree in theory that they should "just" raise wages if they need more drivers, we should be careful jumping to conclusions as outsiders. After all, it is possible, for instance, that paying new (and probably many existing) drivers more could eat up the revenues gained from the customers they're currently turning away. And moreover, said prospective customers could adapt so that by the time the trucking companies have enough drivers, the orders are no longer there.
Alas, the united states has a fairly poor cargo rail system, which in fairness is due to its spread out geography in many places.
"America's freight railways are one of the unsung transport successes of the past 30 years. They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world."
John McPhee has written some wonderful articles about modes of transport, and the people who work in them: http://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Carriers-John-McPhee/dp/08654...
Somewhat related, also great: Looking for a Ship.
It comes down to highway transportation being massively subsidized in the US, to the detriment of rail. So rail is cheaper but much higher latency than trucking, with the potential for long and unpredictable delays.
Most rest stops have also started installing "IdleAir service" which supplies Heat, AC, 120V electric and in some cases Cable TV, at the drivers expense of course.
We saw an exact corollary of this with automation in Chinese factories. As long as the cost of labor was lower than the cost of automation factories remained manual only shops, but the cost of labor has gone up, and with it have come robots. What I find particularly fascinating is that in the labor case the manufacturing went off shore first (it was cheaper to hire Chinese workers) and now it is being automated, in China. Since you cannot easily off shore truck driving that option doesn't exist.
I do however keep my eye out for 'teleoperated' trucks. Something which is a mix of robotic driving with supervision and command and control with a human. This is also possible today and would allow a trucking company to operate more trucks with fewer drivers, but it also requires some automation on refueling. The system has resisted this form for a while.
So what I took away from the NYT article was that the economics of trucking are entering the point where the system can support more dramatic changes than it has in the past. That means there are opportunities there.
There's no automated cross country trains and those move on a predictable path.
Although I would love to see it happen because of how incredibly efficient it would make the transportation industry.
Isn't that what the Alameda Corridor project did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alameda_Corridor
Planes are way ahead of trucks in this regard and could actually fly themselves from origin to destination most of the time, but we still keep a couple of highly-trained pilots sitting there to handle the rest of the cases.
A truck can kill nearly as many people as a plane, depending on its cargo and just how badly it screws up. In more common cases, though, I'm unconvinced by software's ability to figure out the best thing to do when it's travelling down the highway at 100 km/h and it sees something unexpected dash onto the road, with a better error rate than a human brain, which can at least immediately distinguish between humans and deer.
The funny thing is that at some companies, working some overtime (although under the safety limit), drivers can make ~$80k including benefits, which is pretty good considering the cost of living there.
If you know of a company driver making 80K a year let me know the name of that company
2. You have to be an experienced driver with spotless driving record for most companies, I would hope these companies are not hiring newly minted 6 week school drivers to haul HazMat.
3. this specialize area of trucking should be used to gauge the wider industry.
"In this environment, it may be easier to say 'There is a shortage of skilled workers' than 'We aren’t paying our workers enough,' even if, in economic terms, those come down to the same thing."
No, those aren't necessarily the same thing. Even if there was a surplus of licensed truck drivers to meet the new demand, it does not mean that the sole reason trucking companies don't wish to hire more workers is because it will cost too much in wages. I suspect the reason they don't hire more truckers to fill existing empty truck seats is for the following reasons:
1) Every truck runs with a huge damage liability (life insurance, lost goods, rebates to customers). A string of truck crashes from the increased volume would rapidly eat into the profits of more business.
2) Operating costs: gas, computer systems, dispatchers, parts, labor. It may be cheaper to raise prices on existing routes, and leave a few trucks empty.
Here's another snippit:
"It’s not an ideal job for everyone. There is no question that trucking is hard work, necessitating long hours and longer stretches away from family. But that’s why it is well compensated, at least in comparison to other jobs not requiring college degrees."
Nobody is paid because the job is hard and lonely. Oil workers in North Dakota aren't paid 250k a year because it's "5 times" harder than a desk job of 50k. Companies pay workers based on what the company expects its customers will pay. No matter how hard the job is, if the market doesn't want to pay higher prices to move goods via truck (which is what would happen if you rose trucker's salaries to 50k instead of 40k, for example), then the companies employing the truckers won't want to take on those higher wage costs.
So TLDR, if you feel you can run a more cost-efficient trucking company, then go fucking do it.