There are certainly drawbacks. I don’t exactly know many truck drivers and the very few I’m acquainted with are over 50, well, actually in their 60s now. None of them are particularly well educated but their vocation allowed them to enjoy a decent standard of living. Though, as others have pointed out, the bulk of their career was spent in a different era which may have afforded them better opportunities back then.
One thing they have in common is that they all live in small towns or out in the county where $60,000 a year is a lot of money even today. The average household income in Arkansas is about $66,000 a year and it’s typically less in smaller towns and rural areas. \
Anyway, I’m not arguing that people are lazy for not taking these jobs. Just that in some areas these are seen as decent jobs. A lot of truck drivers just end up bouncing from company-to-company chasing a few more cents per mile which is partially the reason for the high turnover rate. But as you pointed out, there are difficulties associated with the job as well that makes it less attractive. If you want truckers, pay them more and make the job more bearable.
Long haul truckers are subject to various Department of Transportation regulations are are forced into rest periods whether they want them or not. I think drivers are limited to working no more than 60 hours over a seven day period and you can only drive so many hours during the day without resting.
In the UK and EU Trucks are often fitted with a device called a ‘Tachograph’ installed that records the hours a driver has spend driving. Sometimes drivers operate in pairs or meet up with another driver at truck stop so they can take over.
The UK operated under EU rules until the beginning of this year and now has its own rules. In response to this crisis the UK government has increased the number of hours a driver can drive between rests.
There have been some protests from unions and road safety organisations that this is compromising safety, but the government claims this is a temporary measure.
It gets complicated mixing EU and UK rules for cross border traffic. There are inspection stops and big fines for drivers that break the rules.
Under current rules, drivers can clock up a maximum of four nine-hour driving periods per week with a 45-minute break after each 4.5 hours spent driving. This can be extended twice a week to 10 hours behind the wheel, provided drivers take two 45-minute breaks.
They must not exceed 90 hours of driving over a two-week period. When loading, unloading and waiting in depots is accounted for, many drivers can end up working 60 to 70 hours every week.
From next week, the daily driving limit will go up to 10 hours, and 11 hours twice a week. Alternatively, bosses will be allowed to change drivers’ weekly rest patterns.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea, we already work very long hours,” said Andrew Watson, 50, from Bury.
There’s also a difference between US Interstate trucking and local trucking as well.
Let me tell you about my friend “Bill”. Bill used to be an airline pilot, another job known for travel being part of the job, long hours, stressful situations, being away from home, etc., etc. When Bill’s airline career came to a close he wasn’t ready to simply sit back and do nothing, he still wanted to work. Aha, he says, I’ll get a CDL and drive a truck! How different could it be? And hey, no annoying passengers to deal with anymore!
So Bill got his CDL and got a job driving a big truck.
Three months later he calls me, sobbing and ashamed that he can’t hack it. The guy he was partnered with was threatening him with physical violence and/or threatening to leave him stranded alongside the road in Wyoming, and he just never felt like he could get rested even with other less scary partners.
Dude could fly airlines for decades but couldn’t hack interstate trucking for more than three months.
Sure, part of it might have been being with a bad carrier, or bad luck, but it also illustrates that there aspects of this job that people either don’t know about or don’t understand how difficult it can be. Bill still has his CDL and he still occasionally drives big rigs - locally. Only locally. No more on the road for weeks at a time for him. Not because he has a problem with traveling for work - after all, he did it for decades, and still travels for his own pleasure - but because of the work conditions.
Now, sure, obviously some people DO cope with it all - on the other hand, there are lot of people either retiring from the business, or dropping out of it. Which, between that, and what Bill has told me, and what a half dozen other guys I know who drive trucks have told me, is rooted as much, if not more so, in working conditions that strictly gripes about wages or even all that traveling.
Yes, but do that get actual rest during those periods?
One of the problems Bill had was that the company he was working for partnered drivers up and expected that one would sleep while the other drove, to keep the truck moving as much as possible and Bill just never got good sleep in a moving vehicle. Not a problem that ever came up during his airline days as no one in the US expect pilots to sleep on a moving airplane. Quite the contrary. Bill, however, was expected to do most of his sleep in a moving truck. Apparently that was a problem for him, and you can see how that’s not compatible with the sort of conditions on that job. Someone who could sleep soundly in a moving truck would not have that problem. You can see why by the end of a week Bill was in a state of chronic exhaustion. Probably just as well he stopped pursuing that line of work.
But that’s the sort of thing that no only can lead people to drop out of a profession but can also contribute to accidents. Sure, a driver isn’t driving during his rest hours, and he’s trying to get some sleep, but if he doesn’t get [i]actual rest[/], for whatever reason, then it’s a serious problem. Deliberately depriving someone of sleep is torture. Chronic lack of sleep is damn awful.
That’s just one example of how a job that doesn’t require a lot of education can still be difficult, and difficult to fill. Traits that make a good long-haul truck driver aren’t universal, and not all of them can be taught or learned.
Which has nothing to do with keeping up with inflation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Outlook Handbook), in 1978, Long Haul Truck Drivers earned 29,000 a year (about double the average wages for non-supervisory work in the nation). Adjusted for inflation, that would be 92k to 258k today, depending on measure (using measuringworth.com inflation calculator, and depending on what measure you use - acknowledge long-term inflation is a strange beast to measure). For the labor value measure, it would be 121k-122l (unskilled v. production labor). But that was long ago, and many jobs haven’t kept up with inflation - just the way it is. But the average wage relative to other jobs has changed, too. According to Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private (AHETPI) | FRED | St. Louis Fed the average non-supervisory production wage is over $25 an hour now. Truckers used to get significantly higher pay for the unpleasant work conditions (so long away form home, long hours, etc.) and now they don’t get that much more than everyone else, so why not take that job that lets them be home with their kids at night, sleep in their own beds, go out to clubs or whatnot?
Now, this isn’t just production workers, so not as fair a comparison, but the national wage index for social security - it was 10,556.03 in 1978 and was 54,099.99 in 2019. Relative to other jobs, truck driving does not pay as well as it used too.
I know that’s too long ago. I see some articles saying it’s declined relative to other jobs, even since the early 2000s, but I don’t have sources on their numbers.
It’s also a bit unnerving that — while each thing you said makes sense on its own — the result is us selecting for drivers with the trait of “has an easy time falling asleep while a truck is moving.”
While I have always been able to fall asleep in a moving car I have NEVER, EVER been able to fall asleep on a moving airplane - which, no doubt, is a relieving fact for both my passengers and those I fly over.
Nor have I ever fallen asleep while driving a car.
Anyhow - if Bill had been in a trucking situation where the truck could stop at night he probably could have slept decently on it. Just not while it was moving. And some long-haul routes/situations do have that, a stopped truck at night but that isn’t universal and is probably more rare than in the past because our current society wants cargo to moving fast and constantly.
There is also the contradiction that regulations require a certain level of fitness for truck drivers - but work conditions are largely sedentary which can lead to truckers not maintaining that fitness due to lack of exercise and crappy food. One trucker I know got around the crappy food problem by enrolling in Jenny Craig - he got all his meals for the road in portion controlled boxes and that solved his weight problem. Then again, he isn’t doing coast-to-coast runs, he does “Michigan Trains” - he drives the big steel coils out of the steel mills in Indiana to the auto industry in Michigan (hence, “Michigan Trains”. And, oh yes, one instance I know of a collision between a train and one of those trucks the truck won. Or rather, the steel coil did.) That’s a 2-3 day turn-around, not weeks at a time, and I think he owns his own cab so if he wants to put a fridge/cooler and a microwave in it he can. Guys who don’t own their rigs - who knows what they get? It may not be consistent from one run to another.
A lot of industries look simple from the outside but look deeper and there are complexities and details there.
I suspect the lack of truckers, like a lot of worker shortages these days, is NOT due to just one factor but multiple things happening (or not happening).
This is the biggest problem. Military drones in Afghanistan being operated by US-based pilots are connected by a satellite link that incurs a latency of a couple of seconds. This isn’t a problem when cruising at altitude, where there’s nothing nearby to hit, but for takeoff and landing, control is handed off to a local operator in Afghanistan that has a direct radio link to the aircraft, providing near-instantaneous response.
A lag of a couple of seconds when controlling a road-going vehicle in dense traffic is not going to work.
Taking a step back here, the crisis shortage of drivers in the haulage business in the UK seems to be a symptom of a greater economic problem.
The UK government thinks that a lot of companies have grown accustomed to a business model based on low wages. Brexit gave the UK government a political mandate to control immigration and work visas without deferring the business lobby. Johnson was famously dismissive of the concerns of business about the effects of withdrawing from the EU, the countries biggest customer and source of cheap labour,
The government has decided to give the UK business a challenge to change their business model and adapt to a new economic reality: no more cheap workers instead train the locals and incentivise them with higher wages.
The idea is to transform the UK economy to develop a high wage, high skills domestic workforce. The hope is that this will address the low productivity of economies dominated by the service sector rather than industry. This issue is acute in the UK, but affects many developed economies where the workforce has migrated from industry to services.
Now the problem with this is that it assumes that there are opportunities to increase the productivity of a driving job. Maybe if self driving vehicles technology matures enough. But that is not going to happen overnight. I looks like a long haul.
So if we professionalise truck driving, increasing training and pay…what gives? Costs go up and there is a risk of inflation.
They have decided to try to force through this change as the economy comes out of the Covid Lockdown recession. Just as demand starts going up and the economy gets going, the driver shortage creates a logistic crisis in that most sensitive area: fuel deliveries.
This kind of thing is going to happen in lots of other sectors. The next one seems to be the lack of skilled butchers and slaughterhouse workers, who have been largely recruited from Eastern Europe. the farmers are saying the will have to cull their herds simply because of a lack of meat process capacity. They either pay the feed bills and go bankrupt or cut their losses. The meat will then have to be imported from the EU, presumably having been processed by the same workers who have now gone back their EU countries.
The UK government is facing off a lot of challenges from different business sectors under pressure like this. There will a series of crises and it is a case of how far they will hold their nerve. But suddenly cutting off recruitment from low wage economies is a very blunt instrument. If businesses are obliged change their business model they should be helped to make that transition. There has been none of that kind of engagement from this government. From a political point of view, this is quite a turn around. This is Conservative government, the children of Thatcher and her wars with the labour unions. Now here they are throwing down the gauntlet to the business community.
The great ‘Get out of Jail’ card is, of course, Covid. Which will be used to absolve the government of any responsibility for a faultering economy when it is pointed out that this situation owes much to Brexit.
This is maverick politics and Boris Johnson is that maverick.
The truckers’ unions were very opposed to it when it came in, in the 1980s IIRC, ‘the spy in the cab’ they called it. But it was a Directive from Europe and so they had to get with the program. Now I doubt they would be without it.
Note one reason trucking pay took a hit after 1980 relative to other jobs is trucking became deregulated, before that it was tightly controlled and the Teamsters were a much bigger player, and frankly organized crime was as well. This had some issues no doubt, but the guys who could get into those jobs were generally well compensated. Deregulated trucking has meant more shit getting more places cheaper, but it also means trucking is not as good a blue-collar job, relative to other existing blue-collar jobs, in 2021 as it was in 1979. I don’t know if that really lines up at all with the UK situation, but that’s a decent part of why trucking jobs in the U.S. haven’t kept up with inflation.
Ha! Thanks for that info, explains the title and lyrics of a song I love, would not have said it came from that. I always assumed it was about Cold War spy stuff.
The average age of truckers is now 55. So the chance that some of them chose to retire a little early in the current conditions is pretty high.
Europe has a bigger problem than the US because moving goods is more labor intensive there. A combination of geography and the use of rail to move passengers has pushed a lot of freight onto the roads. And a lot of road freight is in smaller vehicles like transit vans instead of the big freight haulers more typical here.
Also, young people aren’t going into trucking, and it’s not because of the wages. I just read a story here in Canada about a kid who always wanted to be a trucker, so a friend of the family hired him. He gave him a day trucking job hauling goods to the U.S over the Peace bridge crossing. No overnight stays at all. The pay was 60,000-70,000 per year. For a young person just starting, that’s a pretty awesome salary in any field. Especially without a college degree.
The kid lasted four days, and quit. When asked why, he said it was boring and he hated crossing the border every day. I guess Truck Simulator was more fun.
I can’t understand this. He must have gone to the effort to get his class 1 license and all that, then just walked away from a dream trucking job after a few days.
The thing is, most of the problems with trucking as an industry and a lifestyle involve the long-distance aspects of it, which these days almost all involves driving on major interstate-style highways. That would be one of the easiest types of driving to automate, particularly if you limited the speeds at which the trucks can drive, so they wouldn’t be overtaking other drivers very often.
I can imagine a hybrid system in which a human driver takes a truck from the loading dock to a staging area just off the highway, at which point they get out, and let the autodrive system drive between cities. At the other end, another human driver is there to meet the truck, and do the more complicated in-city driving for the final drop off of the cargo. Scheduling things so there’s a driver where you need them when you need them would be the biggest problem, but that’s mostly just a management issue.
This minimizes the time the human needs to drive, lets them stay in one city, so they can go home after their shift, and lets both the humans and the robots do what each does best.