Oh boy can I speak to this! I was a long haul trucker for one year, and I actually didn't have a comparatively bad experience with it, but wow did I have to stack the deck in advance to make sure...
Exemplary
Oh boy can I speak to this! I was a long haul trucker for one year, and I actually didn't have a comparatively bad experience with it, but wow did I have to stack the deck in advance to make sure I didn't.
So first off, learning how to drive a truck is expensive--notably, more expensive than the people looking for relief from a high paying, low qualification job can afford at any given time. The cheapest route is to pay for your own training with an independent trucking school and only take a job once you have a CDL. In 2012, this cost me $4000, and I can only assume it's gone up since. If you don't have the money to front, though, starter companies are happy to take you with no CDL and put you through their private driver training programs for "free," though. By "free" I mean however much they want to charge for it--they'll let you pay it back out of your wages for the first year or two--so kind. That I heard runs as high as $12,000, and you better not quit or you're going straight to collections. So indentured servitude Part A gets started before you even sit in a semi.
Now, assuming you got through training or came with a CDL, starter companies basically operate like this: They pay low and expect high turnover, because no, there is no shortage of desperate people, and they know it. Now they need a core fleet to ensure loads actually get delivered and, importantly, recover abandoned equipment when other poor souls wash out, so this will be handled by low-but-steady-paid company drivers and reliable owner-operators. The bulk of the operation is what are called "lease-ops," though. This is indentured servitude Part B.
90% of the drivers in any intake are going straight to lease-op. The company I worked for pushed it hard. You'd be told of the vast amounts of money you could make, how company drivers were accepting a crap deal, how much more legitimate of work lease-op was, how you could be your own boss and make your own decisions about which loads to pull and when to take home time. How the truck would be yours. My company went so far as to give obviously preferential treatment to lease-ops, and even had actors around the training facility pretending to be lease op drivers stopping into the terminal whose whole job it seemed was to strike up conversations with new drivers and tell them how amazing lease-op was. Their strategies were incredibly effective. I was the only driver in my class of 20 or so to still insist on being a company driver by the end of it.
The great part (for the company) about lease-op drivers is they pay for their own equipment (which when they default on, comes back to you for another go, and they're still on the hook for the full price). They pay for their own insurance (which is high for beginning drivers), and they pay their own maintenance. When you get a lease-op truck back, you can basically re-issue it immediately to the next person. For their company drivers, they have to provide a truck to operate out of company funds, they have to pay the insurance, and they have to maintain it. Lease-op is a wildly good deal for the company... but you still have to have some company drivers because, well, enough drivers need to fail lease-op. Somebody's got to be the grim reaper and go collect the abandoned equipment, and somebody's got to deliver the loads that the lease-ops either refused or ran away from mid-load.
As a company driver it's really not too bad. The pay is low (I made $0.32/mile) but the work is steady. You do get the worst loads, but your pay isn't dependent on the load's payout--just the miles. And of course there are the recovery jobs where there is no load payout since you're just hopping in with another driver to go pick up an abandoned truck, but your pay is still the same. You do it for a year or two, get experience, and then leave debt-free for a job with a non-starter outfit that's actually doing trucking as opposed to financing with a side gig of trucking.
If you're thinking of going into trucking, go company at your starter. Yes, some lease-ops make it, and they will make way more money than you if they're successful. Somebody has to succeed to keep the story going. If it's clear nobody ever wins the lottery, people stop playing the lottery. You're not going to win. You're going to ditch your truck somewhere that a relative can come pick you up, then struggle with crushing debt and a nonexistent credit score for the next 20 years so that some company's profit margins look better. Someone like me is going to come with a spare set of keys and return your truck so they can do it all over again to the next person. Have patience, go company, and wait for your money at your next trucking job at a company that requires experience.
Now then! If you survive all that, you still have to deal with the near inhumane conditions of the industry as a whole! It's a classic question: "Where do birds go when it rains?" But let's reformulate it as "Where do truckers go when they're not driving?"
You don't go home. You don't go to a motel. You stay in the back of the truck on 3-4 week shifts. You're either in the truck, in a shipper/receiver for a few minutes, or picking up food and fuel at a truck stop. Now, the back of the truck isn't bad. You've got a bed, AC and heat even when the truck's off, probably mobile internet (my cell phone bill used to run $400/mo in 2012). You may even have a mini fridge. It's not a sustainable way to live, though. There is nowhere safe to exercise. There is no supply of nutritious food. And then, your sleep schedule... oh boy.
Truckers' hours of service are not based around a 24 hour clock. There are 14-hour on-duty shifts, 11 of which may be spent driving, paired with 10-hour rest shifts theoretically, and the rules I'm sure have changed since I was in, but in practice you'll drive 10 hours, get 7 hours off, then drive 10 hours again, repeat until you run up against log book regulations and need to reset your time. Hope you're good at working, falling asleep instantly, then working again. You may sleep during the day one day, night the next, or sleep during evenings or mornings. Also you're getting fatter because there's no physical activity and your food supply is garbage, so unless you've won the genetic lottery, you're going to develop sleep apnea. I'd never even heard of a CPAP machine until trucking, but holy crap are they common among drivers.
So you're at work nonstop for weeks, stuck in a box, can't get decent food, and are developing at least one disease... then I guess there's the whole piss bottle issue...
Anyway that's enough ranting for now. This article comes as no surprise to me. There is no driver shortage. There's an excess of workers this system regularly chews up and spits out--that's all. What's funny is it wasn't even the worst job I ever had. Teaching K-12 was worlds worse than that.
Just curious, what gave away that they were actors? That's incredibly sleazy, but it doesn't surprise me.
even had actors around the training facility pretending to be lease op drivers stopping into the terminal whose whole job it seemed was to strike up conversations with new drivers and tell them how amazing lease-op was.
Just curious, what gave away that they were actors? That's incredibly sleazy, but it doesn't surprise me.
They were always at the terminal. No matter when you'd show up, you'd see those same faces around. Actual drivers didnt pop into our terminal but once every few months maybe, so to always run into...
They were always at the terminal. No matter when you'd show up, you'd see those same faces around. Actual drivers didnt pop into our terminal but once every few months maybe, so to always run into those same people gave away that they were fakes. Someone just coming in and meeting them for the first time wouldn't have that context, though.
The government estimates that there are between 300,000 and 500,000 long-haul truckers in America. And according to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, state governments issue more than 450,000 new commercial driver's licenses every year. A large fraction of those drivers enter the long-haul trucking industry.
"It's just simple math," Spencer says. "If every year there are an excess of over 400,000 brand-new drivers created, how could there possibly be a shortage?"
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. That means, for example, if a company has 10 truckers, nine will be gone within a year or, equivalently, three of their driver positions will have to each be refilled three times in a single year because so many new drivers leave within a few months.
"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.
[…]
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.
Just to anecdotally reinforce this, a previous employer of mine provided services to trucking companies. Some of their clients had greater than 100% annual turnover—they literally hired more...
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.
Just to anecdotally reinforce this, a previous employer of mine provided services to trucking companies. Some of their clients had greater than 100% annual turnover—they literally hired more drivers in the course of a year than they had total drivers on staff, because so many people quit.
These jobs are mostly garbage, and the pay is terrible. I suspect people go into it because there's a bit of glamor to it, and then reality hits like, well, a truck. It doesn't help that shipping is incredibly commoditized; if a company tries to pay their drivers a living wage, and has to raise prices to support that, their customers will switch to a cheaper, less humane competitor in a heartbeat.
The pay may have been terrible, but it has been skyrocketing and contributing to some really serious increases in the cost of shipping logistics (in the USA), not unlike some other industries,...
The pay may have been terrible, but it has been skyrocketing and contributing to some really serious increases in the cost of shipping logistics (in the USA), not unlike some other industries, such as food service. Anecdotally, I've heard increases of 3x in the pay per mile for owner-operators, now sitting at as much as $6/mile. For hazmat drivers, I've heard reports of $10k per week to haul chemicals, which is even less than the $14k cited in the article for the oilfield jobs. And, crucially, I doubt most entry-level drivers are also owner-operators, which is who these jobs are open to. While this doesn't minimize the fact that so many trucking organizations treat their employees like trash, but there are serious needs to qualified drivers, and it's reasonable that better entry level jobs would lead to better retention. I think the worst option is what's cited in the article, which is that they're pushing for 18-year-olds to be able to haul interstate loads. There are other problems that affect the trucking industry, like the electronic driver logs, increasingly complicated trucks with stricter emissions regulations, and states with frustratingly high lawsuits and litigation against big trucks.
Some good stories about why anyone would haul and what some challenges facing drivers, there's a good podcast called Over the Road from Radiotopia.
Oh boy can I speak to this! I was a long haul trucker for one year, and I actually didn't have a comparatively bad experience with it, but wow did I have to stack the deck in advance to make sure I didn't.
So first off, learning how to drive a truck is expensive--notably, more expensive than the people looking for relief from a high paying, low qualification job can afford at any given time. The cheapest route is to pay for your own training with an independent trucking school and only take a job once you have a CDL. In 2012, this cost me $4000, and I can only assume it's gone up since. If you don't have the money to front, though, starter companies are happy to take you with no CDL and put you through their private driver training programs for "free," though. By "free" I mean however much they want to charge for it--they'll let you pay it back out of your wages for the first year or two--so kind. That I heard runs as high as $12,000, and you better not quit or you're going straight to collections. So indentured servitude Part A gets started before you even sit in a semi.
Now, assuming you got through training or came with a CDL, starter companies basically operate like this: They pay low and expect high turnover, because no, there is no shortage of desperate people, and they know it. Now they need a core fleet to ensure loads actually get delivered and, importantly, recover abandoned equipment when other poor souls wash out, so this will be handled by low-but-steady-paid company drivers and reliable owner-operators. The bulk of the operation is what are called "lease-ops," though. This is indentured servitude Part B.
90% of the drivers in any intake are going straight to lease-op. The company I worked for pushed it hard. You'd be told of the vast amounts of money you could make, how company drivers were accepting a crap deal, how much more legitimate of work lease-op was, how you could be your own boss and make your own decisions about which loads to pull and when to take home time. How the truck would be yours. My company went so far as to give obviously preferential treatment to lease-ops, and even had actors around the training facility pretending to be lease op drivers stopping into the terminal whose whole job it seemed was to strike up conversations with new drivers and tell them how amazing lease-op was. Their strategies were incredibly effective. I was the only driver in my class of 20 or so to still insist on being a company driver by the end of it.
The great part (for the company) about lease-op drivers is they pay for their own equipment (which when they default on, comes back to you for another go, and they're still on the hook for the full price). They pay for their own insurance (which is high for beginning drivers), and they pay their own maintenance. When you get a lease-op truck back, you can basically re-issue it immediately to the next person. For their company drivers, they have to provide a truck to operate out of company funds, they have to pay the insurance, and they have to maintain it. Lease-op is a wildly good deal for the company... but you still have to have some company drivers because, well, enough drivers need to fail lease-op. Somebody's got to be the grim reaper and go collect the abandoned equipment, and somebody's got to deliver the loads that the lease-ops either refused or ran away from mid-load.
As a company driver it's really not too bad. The pay is low (I made $0.32/mile) but the work is steady. You do get the worst loads, but your pay isn't dependent on the load's payout--just the miles. And of course there are the recovery jobs where there is no load payout since you're just hopping in with another driver to go pick up an abandoned truck, but your pay is still the same. You do it for a year or two, get experience, and then leave debt-free for a job with a non-starter outfit that's actually doing trucking as opposed to financing with a side gig of trucking.
If you're thinking of going into trucking, go company at your starter. Yes, some lease-ops make it, and they will make way more money than you if they're successful. Somebody has to succeed to keep the story going. If it's clear nobody ever wins the lottery, people stop playing the lottery. You're not going to win. You're going to ditch your truck somewhere that a relative can come pick you up, then struggle with crushing debt and a nonexistent credit score for the next 20 years so that some company's profit margins look better. Someone like me is going to come with a spare set of keys and return your truck so they can do it all over again to the next person. Have patience, go company, and wait for your money at your next trucking job at a company that requires experience.
Now then! If you survive all that, you still have to deal with the near inhumane conditions of the industry as a whole! It's a classic question: "Where do birds go when it rains?" But let's reformulate it as "Where do truckers go when they're not driving?"
You don't go home. You don't go to a motel. You stay in the back of the truck on 3-4 week shifts. You're either in the truck, in a shipper/receiver for a few minutes, or picking up food and fuel at a truck stop. Now, the back of the truck isn't bad. You've got a bed, AC and heat even when the truck's off, probably mobile internet (my cell phone bill used to run $400/mo in 2012). You may even have a mini fridge. It's not a sustainable way to live, though. There is nowhere safe to exercise. There is no supply of nutritious food. And then, your sleep schedule... oh boy.
Truckers' hours of service are not based around a 24 hour clock. There are 14-hour on-duty shifts, 11 of which may be spent driving, paired with 10-hour rest shifts theoretically, and the rules I'm sure have changed since I was in, but in practice you'll drive 10 hours, get 7 hours off, then drive 10 hours again, repeat until you run up against log book regulations and need to reset your time. Hope you're good at working, falling asleep instantly, then working again. You may sleep during the day one day, night the next, or sleep during evenings or mornings. Also you're getting fatter because there's no physical activity and your food supply is garbage, so unless you've won the genetic lottery, you're going to develop sleep apnea. I'd never even heard of a CPAP machine until trucking, but holy crap are they common among drivers.
So you're at work nonstop for weeks, stuck in a box, can't get decent food, and are developing at least one disease... then I guess there's the whole piss bottle issue...
Anyway that's enough ranting for now. This article comes as no surprise to me. There is no driver shortage. There's an excess of workers this system regularly chews up and spits out--that's all. What's funny is it wasn't even the worst job I ever had. Teaching K-12 was worlds worse than that.
Just curious, what gave away that they were actors? That's incredibly sleazy, but it doesn't surprise me.
They were always at the terminal. No matter when you'd show up, you'd see those same faces around. Actual drivers didnt pop into our terminal but once every few months maybe, so to always run into those same people gave away that they were fakes. Someone just coming in and meeting them for the first time wouldn't have that context, though.
From an article posted in May:
[…]
Just to anecdotally reinforce this, a previous employer of mine provided services to trucking companies. Some of their clients had greater than 100% annual turnover—they literally hired more drivers in the course of a year than they had total drivers on staff, because so many people quit.
These jobs are mostly garbage, and the pay is terrible. I suspect people go into it because there's a bit of glamor to it, and then reality hits like, well, a truck. It doesn't help that shipping is incredibly commoditized; if a company tries to pay their drivers a living wage, and has to raise prices to support that, their customers will switch to a cheaper, less humane competitor in a heartbeat.
The pay may have been terrible, but it has been skyrocketing and contributing to some really serious increases in the cost of shipping logistics (in the USA), not unlike some other industries, such as food service. Anecdotally, I've heard increases of 3x in the pay per mile for owner-operators, now sitting at as much as $6/mile. For hazmat drivers, I've heard reports of $10k per week to haul chemicals, which is even less than the $14k cited in the article for the oilfield jobs. And, crucially, I doubt most entry-level drivers are also owner-operators, which is who these jobs are open to. While this doesn't minimize the fact that so many trucking organizations treat their employees like trash, but there are serious needs to qualified drivers, and it's reasonable that better entry level jobs would lead to better retention. I think the worst option is what's cited in the article, which is that they're pushing for 18-year-olds to be able to haul interstate loads. There are other problems that affect the trucking industry, like the electronic driver logs, increasingly complicated trucks with stricter emissions regulations, and states with frustratingly high lawsuits and litigation against big trucks.
Some good stories about why anyone would haul and what some challenges facing drivers, there's a good podcast called Over the Road from Radiotopia.
Sounds like they need a union.