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Re: America’s trucking industry faces a shortage. Meet the immigrants helping fill the gap
Author: BOB2
Date: 04-27-2016 - 18:07
Trucking is facing the nations dirty little secret, there is a demographic shift, resulting in older "semi" retired "baby boomer" workers, reaching retirement age, and leaving the workforce, faster than they're being replaced....
This is not only true in trucking....there is a shortage of farm workers, there is a shortage of all types of engineers, there is even a shortage of school teachers (after 15 years on no hiring and budget cuts), and it is also the case in a dozen or so other fields, right now. The "baby bust" in combination with many years of hiring freezes, and limited career growth potential due to the "baby boomer" bulge in the way, has even been blamed for a lack of well qualified and "experienced" mid level management in industries from retail to RR's.
Even with a growing income "gap" between those in the top 10%, with higher education and more complex job skills, and those without, there has been a shortage, for the last ten years, even during the recession, of truck drivers. These trucking jobs work long hours, at all hours, often unrested, away from home, with added expenses, for what really turns out to be a fairly lousy overall "hourly" rate, and for all that, and aren't that desirable, despite the "higher" supposed hourly or mileage rates.
In addition, we eliminate about a quarter of those less educated in the "bottom 50%" of the income/education scale of workers, since about 1 in 4 can't pass a background check, and another quarter of those are so poorly educated they can't even pass the minimal tests required, even for the most basic requirements. So we have created a market "demand" for many of these "better qualified" (and easier to exploit?) immigrant workers, haven't we?
Higher pay, to attract more workers, enforcing rest requirements, so tired truck drivers don't needlessly murder several hundred innocent Americans every year, and fluctuating fuel prices (more likely up again in the future, from where we are now), will shift some traffic to rails. Better rail velocity, due to the reduction in slow, costly, and maintenance intensive coal traffic, may allow rails to compete better with some truck markets (especially in reliability) and attract some of that traffic, as well......
Vast conspiracy theories are not really required to explain any of that, are they?
But hey, fret not, we are actually testing the fully automated "driverless" truck in Nevada, as I write this........
This is not only true in trucking....there is a shortage of farm workers, there is a shortage of all types of engineers, there is even a shortage of school teachers (after 15 years on no hiring and budget cuts), and it is also the case in a dozen or so other fields, right now. The "baby bust" in combination with many years of hiring freezes, and limited career growth potential due to the "baby boomer" bulge in the way, has even been blamed for a lack of well qualified and "experienced" mid level management in industries from retail to RR's.
Even with a growing income "gap" between those in the top 10%, with higher education and more complex job skills, and those without, there has been a shortage, for the last ten years, even during the recession, of truck drivers. These trucking jobs work long hours, at all hours, often unrested, away from home, with added expenses, for what really turns out to be a fairly lousy overall "hourly" rate, and for all that, and aren't that desirable, despite the "higher" supposed hourly or mileage rates.
In addition, we eliminate about a quarter of those less educated in the "bottom 50%" of the income/education scale of workers, since about 1 in 4 can't pass a background check, and another quarter of those are so poorly educated they can't even pass the minimal tests required, even for the most basic requirements. So we have created a market "demand" for many of these "better qualified" (and easier to exploit?) immigrant workers, haven't we?
Higher pay, to attract more workers, enforcing rest requirements, so tired truck drivers don't needlessly murder several hundred innocent Americans every year, and fluctuating fuel prices (more likely up again in the future, from where we are now), will shift some traffic to rails. Better rail velocity, due to the reduction in slow, costly, and maintenance intensive coal traffic, may allow rails to compete better with some truck markets (especially in reliability) and attract some of that traffic, as well......
Vast conspiracy theories are not really required to explain any of that, are they?
But hey, fret not, we are actually testing the fully automated "driverless" truck in Nevada, as I write this........
