Next week, FreightWaves will host its Future of Freight Festival in Chattanooga, Tenn. The three-day event from Tuesday through Thursday, Nov. 19-21 will include sessions from a variety of industry experts.
One of the sessions of interest will feature a long-awaited debate on whether there is a driver shortage in the trucking industry.
At 8:50 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, Nov. 21, OOIDA Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh is scheduled to debate Clarendon Capital’s strategic advisor, John Larkin.
Pugh will voice the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s perspective that there is not a shortage of truck drivers.
“Driver retention is a huge problem,” Pugh said at an event in August. “You hear about ‘driver shortage’ all the time. There’s not a shortage; there’s never been a shortage of (truck drivers). The shortage is people staying in this industry. They come in, they get used, they get abused, they don’t get paid right, they don’t get treated right and they leave.”
Larkin will debate from the perspective of the large fleets. The American Trucking Associations has driven the narrative of a driver shortage for decades. ATA has suggested that the trucking industry is currently short about 60,000 drivers and has previously projected that the shortage would increase to 160,000 by 2031.
Meanwhile, trucking has been suffering from an overcapacity problem, and large fleets often possess driver turnover rates of 90% or higher. Instead of accepting the idea of a driver shortage, OOIDA argues carriers are able to hire truckers but are unable to keep them due to low wages and poor working conditions.
Research sides with OOIDA
Although the “driver shortage” has been a hot topic for years, research agrees with OOIDA that there is no shortage.
The most recent report refuting ATA’s driver shortage claims can be found in the 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.
“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.”
ATA has been claiming a driver shortage since the 1980s. Instead of increasing pay to fill the supposed gap, however, ATA has advocated for lowering the interstate driving age to 18.
The report from the National Academies of Sciences isn’t the only research that says there isn’t a driver shortage. 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.
Other events
The Future of Freight Festival will kick off with remarks from FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller on Tuesday, Nov. 19.
David Brown, host of the podcast “Business Wars,” will be the keynote speaker on Tuesday, Nov. 19. David Parker of the Covenant Logistics Group and Doug Waggoner of Echo Global Logistics will be the keynote speakers on Wednesday, Nov. 20 and Thursday, Nov. 21, respectively.
A full list of sessions can be found here. LL
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