In my local rag’s Employment pages, trucking jobs outnumber all other jobs by 5-1. On Craigslist it’s probably 30-1.
I don’t get it. I understand that being a long-haul trucker most likely sucks ass (who wants to be away from home for days/weeks at a time?), but damn do those guys make bank. Long-haul trucking seems like the perfect job for someone who may not be able to get a more traditional job- for example, people with felony convictions, or who just don’t do well working with others.
Of course, medium-haul and short-haul trucking jobs abound too.
It looks to me like if you have a CDL and a clean driving record, you can essentially name your own salary.
Is there something inherently distasteful about trucking that keeps employers so desperate for help?
We’re running a bunch of truck driving commercials. According to the AE it’s an aging profession with over 750,000 drivers retiring within the next couple of years. And the young ones who give it a whirl don’t realize the work involved quit.
Could be that there’s a high turnover, and they are just trying to collect warm bodies all the time regardless of actual need at the moment.
Seems like the kind of job a person would want to do for a short while, bank a lot of cash, then stop in favor of a more stable/settled life. The companies need people in the chute ready to drive when these folks hang it up.
Two more things to keep in mind. IIRC there’s a zero tolerance for alcohol if you have a CDL. In other words. If you’re driving your car, get pulled over and blow a .01. You lose your CDL. If you lose your CDL, you lose your job if your job is trucking. So a lot of people end up either losing their job that way OR just stay out of it because they don’t want to give up going to the bar. All the truckers I know (mostly short haul) won’t go anywhere near a car if they’ve had anything to drink since it’s just not worth it to them. They’ve also all been trucking (and with the same company) for 10-20 years.
Second, you mentioned that the salaries are really high. I’ve never looked at them, but you might want to take note if any of them are for owner/operators. If you own your own rig, you’ll get paid more due to all the extra expenses that you’ll have to cover instead of the person paying you.
My neighbor used to drive a truck. While some of the jobs do pay fairly well, the economics of it is what drove him (no pun intended) out of the business. If you drive someone else’s truck, you don’t make much money. If you drive your own truck, you make a lot more money, but the expenses can kill you. A popped tire costs a heck of a lot more to fix than your car tire does. Other repairs are expensive as well. Fuel costs can make or break you. He parked his truck a few times when the cost of fuel got to be too high. He just wasn’t able to make enough money to make it worthwhile.
A lot of the shorter hauls don’t make so much money, and that’s where a lot of the work is, hauling things from distribution centers to local stores and that sort of thing.
The ups and downs of it all drove him to seek other employment where his paycheck was a lot more steady and guaranteed.
If you’re a younger guy without a mortgage it might be worth riding through the ups and downs, but if you have bills to pay, there’s better jobs out there with a much more consistent paycheck.
In the UK, we have had years of increasing legislation, increasing supervision (tachographs, roadside checks, GPS tracking, in cab video etc) and reducing wages. This has been possible because of the combined effect of the recession and the influx of drivers from the poorer parts of the EU.
With many jobs offering little more than the minimum wage, even though the actual earnings, due to long hours, might be higher, young men do not see the investment (£3000 plus) required to get a licence, together with a fairly high risk of losing it, as well as their car licence, for minor infringements, as a worthwhile option. It is also recognised as the archetypical dead-end job. Who, these days, wants to spend the rest of their lives doing what is actually a pretty boring job, with close scrutiny, and obliged to spend several nights a week sleeping in a tin box in some God-forsaken Motorway Service Area.
Now, the economy is on the up and many East Europeans are going back home after discovering that the grass here is less green than they thought, hauliers are having a hard time recruiting replacements for the ones that retire and to fill the seats on the shiny new lorries they bought to cope with the increasing demand.
There is another factor here for the large number of driving jobs advertised - they do not actually exist. Driving agencies have boomed in recent times - for an employer they make sense as they can take on and lay off drivers without penalty. These agencies need as many drivers on their books as they can get, so that they can meet their customers needs - in fact they need many more, because of the rapid turnover and fluctuating demand. So they advertise as if they have real jobs, and when they take someone on, they say “sorry mate - we will ring you next week.”
There’s another catch. Getting a CDL costs a good chunk of money. Even taking the truck driving training at a local tech college can cost several thousand. I know of few trucking companies that offer on the job training/licensing. There are some that claim to do it but I’ve been told there are massive strings attached to it.
Another scam in the trucking industry is brokers selling or leasing trucks to drivers who agree to haul their freight. These poor guys are working their ases off and going broke trying to make the payments on these trucks at the rates the leasing company is paying them to haul. This has to be illegal but I think they have found a way around it somehow.
This may be related to something I’ve noticed. I’m looking for teaching jobs, and every single district in the state of Ohio is hiring school bus drivers. This would be pulling from the same pool of CDLs as truckers, plus school bus drivers also have to pass the background checks to be allowed to work with children.
I would think that a school bus driving job would appeal to a very different demographic. You need to find somebody who wants to work a couple of hours in the morning, then go home or do something else for 5 or 6 hours, and come back to work a couple of hours in the afternoon. And then they are unemployed all summer.
I don’t want to make it sound like an undesirable schedule. Different strokes for different folks and all. It’s just that it seems like it would appeal to a different group of folks.
I did some reading on this a year or so ago. The conclusion I drew is that while some drivers end up not making any money, there are many drivers who lease their trucks and pull in a shitload.
It boiled down to being willing to take jobs and not being an asshole to the dispatchers so they’d GIVE you jobs.
Here in Australia (which I assume has a trucking culture more similar to that of the US than, say, the UK), a lot of owner-drivers are pretty hard up for money. There’s an ageing demographic here too, but often the ones who struggle are younger, and who go into debt to purchase a big rig, because they are taken by the romance of trucking long haul on the interstate runs. They find out about the hard work and expenses too late. Last I heard, a new prime mover costs about a quarter of a million dollars - and I heard that about ten years ago, so probably more now. Then fuel, etc…
On the other hand, the more pragmatic owner-drivers (in it for the business not the romantic notions of the lifestyle) can do quite well. I know two guys (one a former bank manager) who bought smaller 5 - 8 ton flat top trucks, and just drive about the one city on local courier runs. They’re both doing well financially. On top of that, they’re home for dinner each night with their wife and kids. No romantic lifestyle, but most jobs don’t have that anyway, and it probably beats working in a bank.
There are many differences between countries in the way drivers get paid. In the UK, most drivers are hourly paid - it used to be that weekends paid double and triple time, but that’s mostly gone. In Canada drivers seem to be paid by the mile - if they are rolling they are earning, but when they are parked up waiting for work - no pay. In the USA there used to be a majority of owner drivers, but I think that the big hauliers are gradually switching to hourly paid as well.
Whichever way you look at it, driving is not generally a great job - even those guys in Ice Road Truckers don’t really seem to be that well paid. In the UK - tanker drivers are the best paid, followed by the guys who haul oversize and overweight loads. But they are a small minority and most drivers work long hours for below average pay.
I first took up truck driving because it looked like an easy job, reasonable money, and away out of sight of the bosses. That was before all the modern technology when getting paid to drive all over our beautiful country seemed like a pretty good deal. Things are very different now.
In most states owner/operators are treated as independent contractors, rather than employees. Not sure how that impacts the language of advertisements.
I don’t know if the people thinking of getting in the industry are thinking about this but also, trucking is going to be one of the first industries disrupted by self driving vehicles. There’s a very good possibility that you might end up 10 - 15 years down the road out of work and with no other qualifications or experience which is a significant career risk.
Imagine at the fruit and vege markets in the morning that there is an auction…
Well if this auction occurred in the newspaper , you’d see lots of adverts in both directions.
Well thats the same with the trucks. Lots of companies wanting a cheaper truck…( but that does not meant that there is no expensive truck park outside the gate, waiting to be asked in… it ONLY means they want cheaper trucks to tender for the jobs! Who wouldn’t ? )
Lots trucks being advertised as readily available, free to drop their other jobs… at a price.
So the adverts are just asking for offers … " churn" not real vacancies.
Many, many, years ago when I was in grad school, I had a part time job driving truck.
Every morning, I and about a dozen other grad students would meet at a particular donut shop for breakfast.
For about an hour or so, the place was like a grad student seminar room. Then we would all buy a box of a dozen donuts, and hit the road.
Also, spending all day on the road dealing with idiots in cars, I learned to swear like a trooper. This habit did not go over very well when I forgot myself while driving a regular car, and had a hot passenger I was trying to impress.
This is they way it works for most long haul trucking in the US too. Do you like being stuck at work while making zero dollars? Then trucking might be just the job for you.
Waiting overnight for the loading dock to open up, stuck in traffic behind a wreck or in construction, waiting while that tire gets repaired, you are not making jack. The creative ways that drivers used to skirt the rules to drive longer hours, and thus more miles, are being eliminated by government regulations and GPS technology that limit your speed and driving hours for safety reasons.