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).
Why are trucking businesses going out of business?
More than 3,000 trucking businesses went out of business in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, up from around 1,000 the year before, as the early months of the worldwide health catastrophe proved too much for some in the industry to bear.
According to a survey by transportation industry data provider Broughton Capital, 3,140 trucking companies terminated operations in 2018, up from 1,100 in 2019. And of those that went down last year, slightly more than half 1,580 did so in the months of April, May, and June, when freight volumes plummeted amid broad economic turmoil, forcing businesses to close and putting millions of people out of work. 760 transportation companies closed their doors in May alone.
Having an independent work environment.
Pros: The flexibility to be your own boss is one of the most significant differences between a trucking career and any other office or manufacturing work. You don’t have someone telling you what to do from behind your back.
Cons: When you’re 1,500 miles away from home and on your own with a freight load worth half a million dollars, you’re in charge. To someone considering a career as a truck driver, this may appear daunting.
Solutions to the disadvantages:Most trucking businesses have resources accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week to assist its drivers with whatever issues they’re having. Otherwise, if you prefer to have someone in the truck with you, a team driving job would be the best option.
Traveling the country.
Pros: Many people like to travel but are unable to do so due to a lack of time or funds. Truck driving, on the other hand, pays you to spend your time going across the country!
Cons: For many people, traveling across the country means spending less time at home, which is one of the most significant downsides of becoming a truck driver. Being away from home so much can be challenging if you’re a homebody or have a family.
Solutions to the disadvantages:Many trucking companies now provide a wide range of home time choices, allowing you to choose the amount of time you want to spend at home. Driving locally and returning every day, travelling regionally and returning weekly, or driving over-the-road and returning every few weeks are all options.
Living the truck driver lifestyle.
Pros: Living in a semi-truck gives you the freedom to go wherever you choose. It allows you to go across the country like you’ve never seen it before.
Cons: Not having easy access to a kitchen is one of the most difficult aspects of being a long-haul truck driver. Because most meals are purchased from a restaurant or truck stop, this frequently leads to drivers establishing unhealthy and expensive eating habits.
Solutions to the disadvantages:A growing number of modern trucks are fitted with mini-fridges, allowing truck drivers to prepare meals at home and reheat on the road, or purchase food from grocery stores and keep it cold. For drivers who do not have a refrigerator in their truck, there are a variety of terrific electric cooler solutions.
Abiding by industry regulations.
Pros: While a trucking profession allows you to be completely self-sufficient, you must still adhere to some norms and rules. Hours of service rules, CDL classes, cargo securement, and drug testing are just a few of the rules. While these rules may seem inconvenient at first, they ultimately keep you safer on the road. Hours of service laws, for example, ban truck drivers from working an excessive and unhealthy number of hours.
Cons: You risk losing your commercial driver’s license and your truck driving employment if you do not follow FMCSA standards.
Cons: Make sure you follow all requirements by performing pre-trip inspections, travel planning, and properly filling out your electronic record, among other things. You can always go to your leader if you have any issues or concerns about not following the rules properly.
Receiving CDL training.
Pros: CDL training is very short three to five weeks at a truck driving school or six weeks at a community college and comprises of both classroom and behind-the-wheel instruction. It may appear like learning to drive a truck is difficult, but if you enroll in a high-quality school, such as Southwest Truck Driver Training, you will obtain the knowledge you need to be prepared for your first driving job.
Cons: Obtaining a CDL will almost certainly not be free, so you’ll have to figure out how to pay for truck driving school.
Solutions to the drawbacks include: The good news is that truck driving training can be paid for in a variety of ways. Some corporations, such as Schneider, pay for truck driving school tuition for its employees. If you are a veteran, though, the Military Apprenticeship Program may be able to cover the cost of your education.
Doing the work that drivers are responsible for.
Pros: Many people enjoy being behind the wheel all day and find great satisfaction in transporting the freight that they use every day. This sense of accomplishment makes truck driving worthwhile.
Cons: Many aspiring truck drivers wonder, “Is truck driving difficult?” and the response they receive is highly dependent on who they are asking. The tension, according to many seasoned drivers, is what makes the job difficult. Truck drivers have a lot to manage, from dealing with the general public to keeping track of hours of service to bringing it to a customer on time.
Solutions to the drawbacks: Being a healthy truck driver requires learning how to manage the stress that comes with the work. Every driver should discover out what their best stress reliever is, whether it’s picking up a new pastime to enjoy while driving, finding methods to exercise inside or outside the truck, or listening to their favorite podcast.
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 traveling, in particular, can be taxing, with long wait times that aren’t rewarded and additional 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?”
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Is trucking a promising future career?
The trucking business is expected to continue growing for the foreseeable future, and drivers will be in more demand. As previously said, customer demand is constantly expanding, which means new drivers are always in great demand.
Is the future of semi trucks self-driving?
One issue stands in the way of businesses investing in self-driving technology: time. Most analysts agree that autonomous trucks will transform the shipping industry in the long run, benefiting shippers while displacing the majority of America’s 3.5 million truck driver employment. Because technology does not advance in a linear fashion, the number of truck driver jobs will gradually decline over time. The first self-driving cars to hit the streets will not necessarily be driverless.
The first generation of self-driving trucks will require a driver to be present in the truck’s cab, though he or she will not be driving.
If the technology fails or for any other reason, the driver will be available to take control.
Some start-ups envision a fleet of self-driving trucks led by a few human-driven trucks.
Peloton Technology is a startup working on automated vehicles that can interact with one another and follow a lead truck driven by a human.
Each vehicle can have a driver, but they will not be required to put their feet on the pedals or their hands on the steering wheel.
They could be catching up on sleep, completing papers, or working on a laptop.
When it comes to building self-driving trucks, highway driving isn’t much of a challenge.
When trucks enter densely populated areas with greater traffic and narrower roadways, self-driving technology encounters several challenges.
Starsky Robotics, a startup, has developed a solution for this form of driving, which does contain a driver, but not in the traditional sense.
“Drivers” would be stationed behind a desk in a central location, with the capacity to manage the truck from afar.
Rather than having a driver at the wheel, the vehicle may be operated like something out of a video game.
While some companies developing self-driving technology will require drivers in some capacity, the number of drivers required will drop dramatically.
According to Goldman Sachs, the driving sectors could lose up to 300,000 jobs every year as automation advances.
Companies like Uber, Tesla, and Google are getting closer to their goal of self-driving trucks every day, which means America’s truckers are one day closer to being replaced by technology.
Are trucking firms doomed to fail?
When the aftermath from the pandemic intensified pressure on smaller operators, well-capitalized larger truckers clung on and found greater financial footing as the economy recovered, the number of trucking company failures in the United States nearly tripled in 2020 compared to the previous year.
According to transportation industry analytics firm Broughton Capital LLC, 3,140 fleets closed last year, up 185 percent from 2019. Approximately half of the 2020 failures occurred in the second quarter, when freight volumes decreased as a result of widespread Covid-19 shutdowns.