Is the myth of a truck driver shortage over and done with? Has the truckload industry’s longest-running controversy finally been settled?
Since the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued its study of driver pay and working conditions in October, more trucking and logistics media folks have been asking the question. That’s a big change. Not that long ago, we trucking editors rarely questioned the American Trucking Associations’ line that the industry is short a large number of drivers. The number ATA seems to be most fond of is 60,000.
Back in the frantic economic resurgence following the COVID shutdown in 2020, a near-hysterical ATA raised the shortage figure to 80,000. President and CEO Chris Spear spoke ominously of a cliff the entire trucking industry was approaching. The driver shortage was about to seize up the entire U.S. economy.
The surging demand for trucking didn’t last, of course, and things settled down – way, way down, unfortunately. But Spear caught his breath, and his dreaded cliff drifted off into the mists of some future fight with the truth. ATA’s driver shortage estimate fell back to 60,000.
To take a step further back: The driver shortage conversation actually took a subtle turn in March 2019, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics asked in a Monthly Labor Review headline, “Is the U.S. labor market for truck drivers broken?” The article concluded that “the labor market for truck drivers works about as well as the labor markets for other blue-collar occupations.”
In other words, there was no driver shortage.
ATA struck back with a news release quoting its chief economist, Bob Costello.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t understand trucking, Costello said. (Oh, but it did.) The researchers didn’t realize the difference between truckload drivers and drivers in other trucking sectors. (There isn’t one. They all drive trucks.) Costello then noted the study did not take into account the large number of applicants who failed to qualify for the job. (The study dealt only with hired drivers. The washouts were irrelevant.) These ATA arguments felt half-hearted, as though Costello would rather have been doing anything else.
Four years later, Craig Fuller, FreightWaves CEO and son of U.S. Xpress co-founder Max Fuller, published a 2023 piece under the headline, “The perpetual truck driver shortage is not real.” Fuller backed up his conclusion with industry data from the logistics-information side of his FreightWaves enterprise. He struck a nerve at ATA.
Fuller was no bureaucrat. He was a serious player in the industry, and his FreightWaves piece was too big to hand off to Costello. So ATA’s Spear responded himself with an outraged, largely irrelevant and disturbingly personal rebuttal. It may have satisfied ATA’s membership, but it did not have the same effect on everyone else.
Even among those who did buy into Spear’s reasoning, some had second thoughts after business media giant Bloomberg proposed a debate on the shortage issue between Fuller and an ATA representative. ATA ghosted the debate invitation.
Then came this year’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study on the effects of pay and working conditions. Unfortunately, much of the data needed is proprietary and unavailable to researchers. As a result, the study said, the “available data and empirical research are insufficient to determine whether driver working conditions and compensation methods … affect the driving behavior and safety performance of drivers in the long-distance (truckload) sector.”
From this, it seems the industry thwarted the researchers – perhaps in an attempt to prevent what happened anyway. Using available data, the researchers came to conclude that ATA’s forever driver shortage in fact did not exist, even though ATA and big carriers argue otherwise.
“Although these claims do not hold up to economic scrutiny, carriers in the long-distance (truckload) sector may have come to believe them because of the constant need to replace drivers,” the report explained.
Here was yet another credible claim that there is no truck driver shortage, but this time around, ATA kept quiet – very quiet.
You won’t find a rebuttal on the ATA website. You won’t find any mention of the study there at all. Even more interesting, you won’t find it in Transport Topics, ATA’s industry weekly – not even a short item on the study. I guess Spear realized a combative response would only draw more attention to the report.
ATA’s driver shortage claim has become harder to believe, even among industry people who otherwise support the organization. With the latest study, the trucking trades began asking if the so-called driver shortage had finally been resolved.
It hasn’t, of course. Not even close – at least as far as perception goes. While there is no shortage of living, breathing and fully licensed truck drivers, the general public and mainstream media believe there is. And it’s ATA’s job to keep it that way.
With the name American Trucking Associations, ATA is the first – and too often the only – stop for journalists looking for trucking information who then spread the shortage tale to the public.
Ask Google if there is a truck driver shortage, and it will answer, “Yes, the United States is experiencing a truck driver shortage.” Quoting ATA, Google estimates the industry “is short 80,000 drivers, and that number could increase to 160,000 by 2030.” Ask the same question of the artificial intelligence tools ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, and you’ll get the same answer. ATA’s booming message simply drowns out reality.
Accordingly, many politicians are willing to give the trucking industry what it wants – money and laws to help produce more driver recruits. That’s exactly what the truckload industry needs to keep the new-driver pipeline full and wages down.
However, the real story appears to be leaking slowly into the general media.
More and more mainstream writers know the truth. One in particular summed up truckload’s driver problem as well as anyone I’ve heard or read.
Peter Goodman, an economics writer for The New York Times, was being interviewed on the radio show Fresh Air about his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain.”
Goodman’s book is about the days of the COVID crisis, when ships waited for weeks to drop containers at the ports of Los Angeles or Long Beach and when some critical items – toilet paper, for example – vanished from store shelves.
Dave Davies, the show’s host, echoed ATA’s propaganda when the subject of trucking came up in the interview. He asked about “the shortage of truck drivers” – a problem, he said, “that’s been building for years.”
I was surprised by Goodman’s confident, knowledgeable response.
“I put ‘shortage’ in air quotes,” he said, “because if something is short for more than a decade and the industry is complaining about it while demanding that the federal government subsidize the pipeline of people willing to become truck drivers, you’ve got to say there’s a structural problem here.”
The structural problem, he explained, is that truck driving has been downgraded to the point that few people want the job and many who try it don’t stay.
“You wake up and discover that you’ve been had by a predatory leasing scheme or you’ve agreed to drive for a company that treats you poorly to pay back the inflated training program they fed you – too often with federal or state subsidies,” Goodman said.
“We’re told again and again there aren’t enough truck drivers to do the job, never mind that we’ve got roughly 10 million people with commercial driver’s licenses in the United States. That’s roughly three times as many as we need,” he added. “We’ve got the people. What we’ve run out of is people willing to sign off on the miserable deal that is driving a truck in America.” LL
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