The latest “driver shortage” debate broke out during a House Highways and Transit Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, March 26.
Although the debate is not a new one, it’s certainly significant as Congress begins to prepare the next highway bill. The American Trucking Associations and representatives of large fleets, who have claimed that there has been a perpetual shortage of truck drivers for decades, are again using the narrative to lobby for such initiatives as 18-year-old drivers and increased truck weights.
Meanwhile, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters point to multiple studies that determine there is not a driver shortage.
“It is our expectation that conversations surrounding the supply of truck drivers will be of significant interest as the legislation is drafted,” Cole Scandaglia, the Teamsters’ transportation policy advisor, wrote in his submitted testimony. “To that end, we reiterate our position that we reject the premise that we are suffering from a ‘driver shortage’ in the strongest possible terms.”
Multiple studies conducted in recent years have debunked the driver shortage claims. The most recent report refuting ATA’s stance can be found in the 2024 National Academies of Science’s driver pay study.
Assertions of a driver shortage conflict with the basic economic principles of supply and demand, the study said.
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, the trucking industry has been in a freight recession since 2022 and has been suffering from a persistent overcapacity issue. OOIDA and the Teamsters both cited large turnover rates among large carriers, suggesting that the root problem is low pay and poor working conditions rather than an inability to find people who would be interested in the profession.
OOIDA Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh told lawmakers that the driver shortage myth has led Congress to enact policies that have been detrimental to the truck driving profession.
“Large motor carriers have long peddled the thoroughly debunked myth of a driver shortage to promote policies allowing them to hire the cheapest labor possible in order to maximize their profits,” Pugh wrote.
For instance, OOIDA is pushing back against any further attempts to lower the interstate driving age from 21 to 18. Instead of allowing a kid barely out of high school to drive a tractor-trailer across the country, Pugh said the Association is open to intrastate drivers (who can be as young as 18) to be allowed to travel within a 150-mile radius.
“OOIDA agrees preventing younger drivers from crossing state lines doesn’t make sense in all circumstances,” Pugh said. “For example, it makes little sense for a young trucker in Kansas City, Kan., to be allowed to drive to the state’s border with Colorado but not deliver freight in neighboring Kansas City, Mo. But the solution to this problem is not suddenly permitting that inexperienced driver to cross the country without limitations, navigating terrain they find unfamiliar and have not been trained to handle safely. Instead, the committee should consider implementing an air-mile radius for younger drivers to operate within that would allow them to cross state lines.”
Ryan Lindsey, executive vice president of CRH who was testifying on behalf of the Shippers Coalition, represented the other side of the driver shortage debate.
“I can tell you firsthand that the driver shortage is real,” Lindsey said. “There is absolutely no question about it. Today, CRH alone needs to hire another 1,000 truck drivers just to maintain current demand.”
Although the hearing did not go into detail about the specifics of CRH’s operation or its turnover rates, the Teamsters and OOIDA maintained that the overall issue can be corrected by making the trucking industry more lucrative and attractive.
“While we have no doubt that individual or localized examples of difficulty in hiring drivers could be cited, the simple fact is that goods and commerce continue to move with more than acceptable efficiency and the nation is not broadly experiencing breakdowns of supply chains or bottlenecks due to a lack of drivers,” Scandaglia said. “We urge the subcommittee to consider the actual circumstances of the industry, as well as the root causes of some of the challenges in driver supply that may be presented to you.” LL
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