A LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF TRUCK DRIVER SHORTAGES BY: Danny Schnautz, President, Clark Freight lines Inc. THE TRUCK DRIVER SHORTAGE: are we seeing a problem, or a symptom? One longstanding claim in supply chain discussions is that there is a truck driver shortage. That is not the case and a look at the facts will show the reasons why. Truck drivers are thought of as spending their day driving on the roadways. Moving goods is the purpose of truck drivers, trucks, and trucking companies. But America’s truck drivers know that a big part of their job is waiting. Like the age-old military expression “hurry-up-and-wait,” drivers are experts in getting there and then waiting. Actually, they are usually told to “wait patiently.” Even though they are not receiving full pay (often no pay!), and frequently without restrooms, a waiting area, and realistic updates on their progress (or lack of it). Drivers are paid for moving the loads, but are not paid for their time. How much do truck drivers wait? Anywhere from 20-40 hours per week! Truckers wait as one of the core competencies of their jobs. While safety is always the top priority while driving, their minds are often also preoccupied with waiting – or avoiding waiting. Drivers skip meals, doctor appointments, and family time in order to move a load and then wait the least amount possible. Drivers sacrifice to try and minimize waiting at shippers and receivers, port facilities, repair shops, or in traffic congestion. This waiting creates stress and causes a shortage in their pay, resulting in a general bad morale in truck-driving as a career. Despite this, over 450,000 new commercial drivers licenses (CDLs) are issued each year. New drivers enter the industry with optimism that stems from the “earn up to” claims in trucking recruiting ads, and then soon leave when their paychecks fall far short. Usually these disillusioned and now-broke newbie drivers try different trucking companies on their way out – creating annual turnover rates of more than ninety percent for the long-haul forhire segment of trucking, mostly for very large fleets. Waiting is not new for truckers, but the supply chain gridlock has brought attention to this problem – sort of. Instead of seeing the bottleneck issue as truckers waiting, disengaged observers instead call for more trucks and more drivers - but to what end? To create longer lines of waiting drivers, backed up onto public roads? For decades in America, every load that needed to move each week did move. We did not have strawberries rotting in the fields for lack of trucks, nor empty shelves at Christmas. And still today, even while there are backlogs of loads in a global gridlock of cargo, more trucks and truck drivers is not the answer, neither for the short-term nor the long-term. The prior years of wasting drivers’ time did not worry most people in the supply chain. Market forces created an uneasy balance of trucks arriving at facilities of all sizes and expecting extended waits. The view for most parties has been that drivers’ time is free. Facilities and processes have been built expecting to optimize parts of the operations other than loading and unloading trucks – since the established norm is that truck drivers will wait. Now that loads are universally not moving optimally, the waste of driver’s time is getting more attention. But drivers are still waiting, with procedures and pay that commonly still do not value drivers’ time. This brings us to the point; we are not short on truck drivers, we are short on using truck drivers’ time wisely. The fixes for this are many, but not all are without cost. The way that federal truck regulator FMCSA and the civil courts treat drivers, there may be a driver shortage someday. Increasing regulations and excessive legal liabilities create burdens that limit a driver’s freedom and productivity with little or negative improvement for safety.
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