There Is No Truck Driver Shortage. The Truth Is More Complicated.

Heading into the holiday season, it seems almost everyone is worried about supply chain disruption. Consumers are doing holiday shopping early and retailers are panicking about their inventory. One element of this crisis that has received a fair amount of attention recently is the supposed shortage of truck drivers. The New York Times called it “the biggest kink in America’s supply chain.” And widely quoted research from the American Trucking Association suggests that the industry is short by 80,000 drivers today and the situation is likely to get worse.

Journalist Alana Samuels offers a different take. In her article, she suggests the conversation about a supposed driver shortage may be obscuring a bigger problem: driver retention. As she writes:

“There’s no trucker shortage; there’s a trucker retention problem created by the poor conditions that sprung up in the industry in the wake of 1980s deregulation. Turnover for truck drivers in fleets with more than $30 million of annual revenue was 92% at the end of 2020.”

The truth is, the trucking industry is seeing a historic influx of new drivers. Unfortunately, their expectations around pay and working conditions don’t match reality. One problem that got quite a bit of attention may be an inability for drivers to organize into a union to negotiate better conditions and pay. Late night comedian John Oliver explored the idea of “union busting” and suggested that notoriously greedy companies like Amazon have become brutally good at preventing their employees from organizing to demand basic rights such as a “living wage.”

Perhaps the biggest irony here is a parallel story about UPS and their highly paid union drivers and workers. It turns out their choice to prioritize their workers has been the secret to their high retention and why they are far outperforming rival FedEx.

The formula for success in the age of the “great resignation” seems fairly straightforward here. Treat your people better, don’t give them bullshit jobs, and let them have a union so they can collectively negotiate for themselves.