An excerpt from Gord Magill’s End of the Road in Reason Magazine.
“Hi there. So we are prepared to offer you $18 an hour as our special summer seasonal rate, but if you stick around and go full-time in the fall, that drops to $15.”
Again, I had to fight back laughter.
“Ma’am, it’s awfully difficult to raise a family on the money you guys are offering.”
“It is what it is. We usually hire old guys who are retired from driving snowplows or construction for the county or [New York State Department of Transportation] who already have a pension and are just trying to keep busy and out of the house.”
Something about my experiences here didn’t make sense.
For years we have been told that the American economy is at risk of total collapse if the American Trucking Associations (ATA) can’t find another 60,000 or 70,000 or 160,000 truckers. If there were an actual shortage of truckers, trucking companies wouldn’t get away with barely paying minimum wage, would they? If the market for drivers were this hot and this desperate, maybe a guy with two decades of experience and a near-perfect driving record would get offers more befitting his profile? In a properly functioning market economy, wouldn’t the shortage boost the price of truckers’ labor a little higher than what one might expect at a fast-food restaurant? What are we missing here?
After the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, under the pressure of increased competition, companies sliced driver salaries as a belt-tightening strategy. Many drivers chose greener pastures as a result, and for a brief period in the 1980s there may actually have been a shortage of truckers. But now?
The ATA is a corporate lobby that claims to represent the interests of massive trucking companies with thousands of trucks. It really represents the interests of the customers of those large carriers—nearly every corporation in America that produces material product. The ATA does not represent a single truck driver, anywhere.
When the ATA hit on the phrase truck driver shortage, it found a messaging tool that has helped them line their pockets with oodles of taxpayer money. In the process, it stymied wage growth—to the advantage of trucking-fleet owners and the Fortune 500 companies that are their customers.
