The OOIDA Foundation was quick to poke holes in a new report that alleges a truck driver shortage is costing the freight industry billions of dollars.
The report from the factoring company altLine used data from Google For Jobs and other online job sites to suggest that there is a shortage of 24,043 truck drivers. According to the report, that shortage causes the U.S. freight industry to miss out on $95.5 million every week.
Considering that the trucking industry has been in a freight recession since 2022 and has been suffering from a persistent overcapacity issue, the timing of the report is curious.
The OOIDA Foundation, which is the research arm of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, criticized the report’s methodology and assumptions.
“You can’t have a freight recession and a shortage of drivers at the same time,” said Andrew King, the OOIDA Foundation’s director of operations. “This flies in the face of supply and demand. There’s more than enough capacity to deliver the amount of goods. What causes upcycles is when demand outpaces supply. It’s absolutely ludicrous to suggest that freight isn’t being delivered because there’s not a driver to haul it. If that was the case, rates would never go down. They would always be increasing, and yet, rates have been down year-over-year for about 22 months.”
The report searched “Truck driver in (state), USA” for all 50 states in numerous public job websites to determine the number of driving vacancies.
“First, they’re making an assumption that just because a company is posting a position for a driver, it means that business is struggling to deliver freight. As if every week they don’t have that driver, they’ve lost $4,000,” King said.
He also noted that the report’s search doesn’t ensure that all of the job postings are for tractor-trailer drivers.
Driver shortage claims
The American Trucking Associations has claimed that the industry has been suffering a driver shortage for decades.
However, OOIDA has refuted those claims, pointing out that large carriers often have turnover rates of 90% or higher. OOIDA argues carriers are able to hire truckers but are unable to keep them due to low wages and poor working conditions.
Several recent studies have sided with OOIDA’s take.
Assertions of a driver shortage conflict with the basic economic principles of supply and demand, a 2024 study from the National Academies of Sciences said.
“Notably, labor economists maintain that when demand for workers in an occupation increases, the normal response is to increase wages,” the study said. “The implication is that, in the absence of significant lag-caused friction in the process, higher wages should promptly yield a higher supply of labor. If there is friction, such as lengthy time required to train and credential workers, a labor shortage may result that extends beyond the short-term.”
In 2023, economics professor Stephen V. Burks and colleagues published a study showing that there is not a driver shortage. A few years before that, the U.S. Department of Labor also published a study that found there wasn’t a shortage. Instead, the department said that any issues in the labor supply could be corrected by increasing wages.
Additionally, a “driver shortage debate” held this past November ended with both parties agreeing that there is not a shortage. LL
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