Never has a recession-proof industry been more in demand than during a global pandemic, a pandemic that has resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs and livelihoods. Furthermore, this isn’t the first time in recent history that an economic crisis has resulted in the loss of jobs, professions, and earnings. You only have to go back to 2007 to remember The Great Recession, which was brought on by the financial and property crises. The economic consequences were disastrous, and it took years to recover. You’d be hard-pressed to identify a sector that was unaffected at the moment when the ripple ripped through the US economy and then the rest of the world.
However, some firms and sectors will always be able to endure a global economic downturn. They won’t be completely unscathed, but they’ll be intact and ready to battle again tomorrow. One such industry is trucking. While individual truckers and truck logistics companies have suffered the effects of the recession, the sector as a whole has held up well, and truckers’ employment are mainly secure. Due to a current shortage of truckers, hiring truck drivers is proving tough, which is unheard of during a recession.
If that isn’t enough to persuade you, consider the following reasons why driving a truck can be a recession-proof career.
Is trucking affected by the recession?
Consumer demand has slowed dramatically, devastating the nation’s trucking companies and causing employment losses to be higher than at any point since the series began in 1990.
Will there be employment losses among truck drivers?
According to Business Insider, Goldman Sachs forecasts a loss of 300,000 truck driver employment per year beginning in 2042 or sooner. Computers will eventually replace qualified drivers (and a small number of human handlers).
Is truck driving becoming extinct?
For present truck drivers, there is some good news. According to industry statistics, there is a shortage of around 48,000 truck drivers in the United States. That number will nearly double in the next seven years, to over 200,000 drivers. A significant shift in consumer purchasing habits is one of the causes for the high need for drivers.
People used to shop at malls and small stores in the past. Millions of people now shop online all year round. Those goods must be delivered, which necessitates the hiring of thousands of drivers. That implies genuine, human drivers for the time being.
Another difficulty confronting the transportation business is that many potential workers are hesitant to enter the field for fear of being replaced in the coming years. This view has contributed to the present driver shortage in the workforce.
Is it possible to make money driving a truck?
You Won’t Get Rich From Trucking According to the BLS, truckers earn a median annual pay of $37,930, which is $4,000 more than the national median wage. Only the top 10% of truck drivers earn more than $58,000 annually. You may believe that the time invested is profitable, but this is not always the case.
What industries are the most recession-proof?
Healthcare, food, consumer staples, and basic transportation are examples of generally inelastic industries that can thrive during economic downturns. During a public health emergency, they may also benefit from being classified as critical industries.
Why has the trucking industry slowed?
The most common request Mickey Weaver receives from potential truck drivers is to be able to return home every night. The second thing they want is money, but it’s odd, he continues, because many people are prepared to forego the money in order to remain at home every day. But that’s a tall order. “Weaver said, “I can get you money any way you want it.” “I’ve got 40 ways from Sunday to hook you up on that if money is all you care about and you don’t care where you’re driving or when you’re going out.”
Weaver, who is based in Arkansas, is the owner of two companies, We Hire Truckers and Truck Jobs 4 U, which, as the names suggest, recruit truck drivers for open employment. He began this work shortly before the epidemic; hiring halted in March 2020, but resumed in the fall of that year. There are plenty of job openings right now. “I have more tasks than drivers,” he explained.
According to the American Trucking Associations, there is a shortage of more than 80,000 truck drivers in the United States. The American Trucking Association estimates that trucks handle nearly 72 percent of all freight in the United States, demonstrating how reliant consumers are on the truckers who deliver turkeys to supermarkets, gas to pumps, and Christmas presents to your doorsteps.
This isn’t simply a problem in the United States. Trucks transport equal amounts of freight in areas like the European Union and China, and driver shortages are affecting governments and regions all around the world. In a survey of 800 transport businesses from more than 20 countries, the International Road Transport Union found shortages. According to the poll, roughly 20% of positions in Eurasia went empty last year.
This isn’t a new issue, either. For years, analysts and industry groups have warned of a global shortage of truck drivers. However, supply chain interruptions during the pandemic and surges in demand in places like the United States have exacerbated this long-running dilemma.
The outbreak of the pandemic “It’s like opening Pandora’s box on so many issues,” said Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a Hofstra University expert in transportation, logistics, and freight distribution.
“The capacity has been pushed thin as a result of the heavy pressure, and as a result, there are delays and a slowdown,” he continued. “All of this has a cascade effect, making the driver shortage much more acute than before.”
The reason why everyone seems to require more truck drivers is a little more difficult, and it differs by country, where legislation, wages, labor conditions, and infrastructure all have an impact on the job. The labor scarcity is also a reflection of broader economic developments, as worker demand is outstripping supply, particularly in the United States.
People constantly want to get out on the road, according to Weaver. They are, however, more picky these days, as they can be. “There are so many employers out there that basically much call you and say, ‘I want ABCDEFG, and if you can’t hit all of those, then I’m not interested in that one,” Weaver explained.
All of this combines to make less and fewer individuals desire to be truck drivers or stay in the industry long enough to replace an aging workforce around the world. Long-haul driving, in particular, can be taxing, with long wait times that aren’t compensated and other expenses associated with being on the road for long periods of time. “Why aren’t more people interested in becoming truck drivers? That is the scenario, or the problem’s source. “And the reason for that is that it’s a dreadful work,” Hanno Friedrich, associate professor of freight transportation at Khne Logistics University, explained.
Dynamics are different around the world, but the difficulty of being a truck driver (especially in the Covid era) is universal
Experts say the first thing to understand about the truck driver shortage is that there isn’t really a shortage. “It’s a recruitment and retention issue,” said Michael Belzer, a Wayne State University trucking industry expert.
In the United States, “There are millions of truck drivers with commercial driver’s licenses who aren’t driving trucks and aren’t using their commercial driver’s licenses, far more than we need,” Belzer stated. “That’s because people have been recruited for this position, and possibly paid to be taught for it, only to conclude, “This is not for me.” This isn’t going to cut it for what I’m doing.’
It’s difficult to bring individuals into the industry, especially young people, when it comes to recruitment. There’s usually a gap between when people graduate from high school (say, at age 18) and when they can legally drive a truck across state lines (usually at age 21), which means those people may already have jobs and won’t be wooed away to become truckers.
Other barriers to admission include the need for schooling (which can be costly) and the ability to earn a particular class of driver’s license. Covid-19 lockdowns caused training and testing for truck drivers all across the world to come to a halt. Because of safety issues and limited accommodations along routes and at rest breaks, the sector has a hard time attracting women to work in it.
However, truck driving is no longer the same job it once was. For example, in the United States, trucker earnings have been declining for years due to deregulation of the sector, which began in the 1980s and intensified in the 1990s, coupled with the loss of unions. However, the work itself hasn’t changed much. It entails long hours, with a significant portion of that time being unpaid. “You may wait all day or all night at a port site to get a shipment offloaded and loaded up, and you’re not getting compensated for any of that time,” said Matthew Hockenberry, a Fordham University professor who studies global production media.
This not only contributes to the recruitment issue, but also to the retention issue. Truck drivers are exhausted. Great-haul truckers, in particular those who transport freight over long distances or between states are often paid by the trip, and they must go where the cargo needs to go, with little flexibility over when and where. “As Weaver phrased it, “the path is the road.”
Anything that happens along the road a flat tire, an accident, a traffic jam can derail the process, and the truck driver is generally the one to figure it out. This puts additional strain on owner-operators (truckers who also own their cars) or those who get into lease-purchase agreements in areas like the United States (paying toward eventually owning a truck). Drivers’ capacity to pay off their truck, let alone generate a reasonable salary, may be limited as a result of these difficulties.
Some of these developments were amplified by the epidemic. According to a 2018 report, the typical truck driver used to wait approximately 2.5 hours at warehouses, but closures during Covid-19 and supply chain delays have made that even more unpredictable.
The transportation workforce is aging all across the world. According to a 2019 research from the American Trucking Associations, the average age of a truck driver in the United States is 46. It’s 44 all over Europe. Heavy-goods vehicle drivers in the United Kingdom are on average 53 years old. Some of these people are nearing retirement, and the fear of being ill, as well as the uncertainties and early slowdowns of the epidemic, hastened their exit from the industry.
“Consider the start of Covid, when everything was turned off. Because those sites were shut down, an over-the-road truck driver couldn’t even take a bath, have a meal, or do a lot of other things,” said Martin Garsee, executive director of the National Association of Publicly Funded Truck Driving Schools. “So, if you’re on the verge of deciding how you’re going to retire, what would you say if you could? Or if you could find something else to do?”
And, for all of the reasons stated above, finding new recruits to replace them can be difficult. Employers in the United States and Europe have relied on immigrant labor, but as experts have pointed out, this does not address any of the structural concerns, and instead creates what Belzer refers to as “the migrant crisis.” “This never-ending race to the bottom.”
Parts of Western Europe, for example, used to rely on labor from poorer European countries to fill truck driving positions, but as those countries’ economies improved, those labor sources became scarcer. The shortage of truck drivers in the United Kingdom has been compounded by Brexit and the changes to immigration regulations that have accompanied it. Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered 5,000 short-term, temporary visas to select European truck drivers to help with holiday traffic congestion, but just a few accepted. Why come back for a few months merely to come back, a Polish motorist told a British publication “On the M25, pee in a bottle?”
Different issues face different places of the world. Stefan Pertz, who is located in Malaysia and heads Asian Trucker, a media company for the Southeast Asian commercial trucking industry, informed me that drivers in Malaysia earn around $800 to $900 per month, a figure that can stretch very far. But, yet again, at what price? Drivers are closely monitored and are only permitted to stop at designated rest locations. Poor infrastructure and roads can sometimes add to the difficulty. Other low-income countries face similar issues, which are exacerbated by another issue: there are people wanting to drive trucks, but corporations or businesses may not have enough cars. “It’s not a labor issue; it’s an asset, the truck,” Rodrigue explained.
These are long-standing issues, and the epidemic pushed the sector over the edge, even as the importance of truckers in the economy became obvious. However, the way the supply chain works may make it more difficult to address the global driver shortage.
Truck drivers and the human costs of our global supply chain
The hardships of being a truck driver the long hours, long journeys, and waiting for cargo at ports or warehouses aren’t by chance. It’s primarily a result of being caught up in the demands of the modern supply chain, which is currently under a lot of stress.
Despite the fact that trucker earnings are declining, shipping and logistics companies are boosting their rates, according to experts. However, none of this has made its way into the pockets of truck drivers. “The scraps are fought over by the trucking corporations. After the transportation corporations have fought over it, the drivers fight over the scraps left over. “It all flows down, and the most powerful party here always wins,” Belzer explained.
And, when it came to truckers, he added: “They are the least powerful people in the supply chain because of their position in the power relations.”
Wages for truckers have increased as a result of the labor demand in this stage of the epidemic, according to experts and those in the trucking sector, just as they have in other parts of the US labor market. There may also be attractive signing incentives available. Truckers, on the other hand, have no say over the routes they take or the time it takes for their product to be unloaded at a port. It’s still a demanding job, and it might not be enough.
“The Alaska Trucking Association’s executive director, Joe Michel, described it as “very basic.” “They’ll stay if you pay them more and treat them better.” The Biden administration in the United States established a trucker retention plan, which involves recruiting more veterans and researching working conditions in order to improve the sector. These, however, will not alter the business or provide a rapid answer for supply chain issues.
And these concerns are growing as the omicron strain of the coronavirus spreads, adding to the economy’s uncertainty. But it’s also a reminder that while we’re quarantining, we rely on truckers to provide surgical masks, Lysol, and food to prepare. They are the most important employees, and the question is whether they are treated as such.
During the lockdown, Pertz recalled, campaigns depicting truckers as heroes popped up all over the place. “All of that vanished the moment the lockdowns were lifted,” he explained. “And my problem is that these truck drivers continue to stock my supermarket; nothing has changed for them. Why aren’t they constantly portrayed as heroes, and only in the most desperate of circumstances?”
Why do truck drivers leave their jobs?
- Driver turnover is high. The main reason is due to the staggering driver turnover rates, which have been above 90% for quite some time.
The dearth of truck drivers is not due to a lack of people who want to drive trucks.
Many potential truck drivers are interested in pursuing a career as a truck driver, however once they learn:
Truck drivers who are already employed in the sector are leaving for employment that offer better income, perks, and working conditions when they feel underappreciated and underpaid.
- Wages are low. There was a time when truck drivers were compensated fairly for their efforts. Many truck driving occupations do not fall under this category.
The cost of living has risen dramatically, but salaries have not risen in lockstep.
Indeed, some trucking businesses’ wages are so low that the sacrifices drivers make for the work are no longer worth it.
With low freight shipping rates, there isn’t much left over to adequately compensate the driver, resulting in poor wages.
Most companies compensate drivers for their mileage rather than for the time they spend driving or for their specific skills.
They frequently receive no compensation for the time they spend stalled in traffic, construction zones, severe weather, or any other road delays.
Paying employees based on mileage poses safety problems as well. Drivers may push themselves too hard and stay on the road when they need to rest. They understand that if they don’t, their income would be reduced even further.
To prove they follow these requirements, all drivers who keep a Duty Status Record must utilize an E.L.D. to track their Hours of Service.
The ELD informs the motorist when he is allowed to drive and when he should not.
A driver, on the other hand, loses miles and money if he is delayed for any reason during his permitted driving time, and there is nothing he can do about it.
- Fines that are too high. The order was issued by the FMCSA to guarantee that commercial trucking companies operate in a safe way and to penalize drivers who disobey the law.
However, revenue-based policing states may sometimes levy fines on drivers who do not deserve them.
- Uncertainty in the Future Some truck drivers are frightened of being replaced by autonomous vehicles since they rely on them.
- Drivers are being treated unfairly. While some trucking businesses appreciate their employees, others take advantage of them.
Companies that employ the mileage system, for example, may expect drivers to undertake additional tasks in between loads without paying them extra.
These responsibilities include things like doing safety checks, attending corporate meetings and seminars, loading and unloading the trailer, and waiting.
- Aside from the extended hours spent on the road, driving a truck is far more challenging than driving a smaller vehicle.
- Travelling in inclement weather, on difficult roads, delivering to dangerous regions, and driving for lengthy periods of time to meet deadlines all put the driver in danger.
- Some deliveries entail transporting hazardous chemicals and other hazardous materials, putting the driver’s health at risk.
- Time away from home and family. Truck drivers spend a lot of time away from their homes, loved ones, and friends because they live on the road for days at a time. They won’t be able to replace this time.
When this unappealing lifestyle is combined with low pay and minimal benefits, it’s enough to make anyone want to quit and hunt for a new job.
- Some businesses prey on drivers. Companies can easily defraud their drivers in a number of ways.
Another con involves providing large incentive schemes and bonuses to compensate for poor mileage rates.
Will robots take the role of truck drivers?
Robots/AI are quite likely to replace this occupation, according to our visitors. This is supported by the automation risk level we calculated, which indicates an 87 percent probability of automation.
Why are truckers protesting in Colorado?
Rogel Aguilera-Mederos’ 110-year prison sentence, which was handed down in the Jefferson County Courthouse last Thursday, sparked significant outrage. The 26-year-old truck driver was found guilty on 27 counts last Thursday in connection with a fatal accident on Interstate 70 in Denver, Colorado. The semi-brakes truck’s failed, and Aguilera-Mederos slammed into halted traffic, killing four people.
While the prosecution requested and received an unusually harsh mandatory sentence, the harshness has sparked considerable criticism, even from the court and the victims’ relatives.
Protests have taken place in metro Denver, including a huge one on December 20. Hundreds of thousands of people have weighed in on a trucker-led social media movement that has blossomed on TikTok. Truckers from throughout the country have announced that they will refuse to drive in Colorado unless Governor Jared Polis grants mercy or commutes part of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos’ sentence.
They are reportedly spreading videos at state borders depicting scenes of trucks parked on highway shoulders, seemingly for kilometers.
Protesters will caravan to the Jefferson County Courthouse for a second event on December 27 at 8:30 a.m. Nobody knows whether the outpouring of outrage on social media in response to the truck driver’s punishment will lead to a larger march next Monday.
Even the prosecuting attorneys have requested the judge to rethink the punitive sentence of what the public appears to feel was a terrible accident, either because of the outpouring of support on social media or because they are second-guessing the request. Of course, their request could have something to do with the fact that the prosecution attorneys were given a trophy for their efforts from their peers, which was fashioned out of a truck brake pad.
If truckers follow through on their threat to not drive in Colorado, it may have an immediate impact on the state’s supply chain, particularly in rural areas, where delivery timetables are normally at the tail end.
Is there a demand for truck drivers?
Heavy truck drivers are predicted to increase at a substantially greater rate than the average for all jobs in California. Between 2018 and 2028, jobs for heavy truck drivers are predicted to grow by 15.2 percent, or 24,400 jobs.