Death of the Trucker? Charm Fades as Truck Driver Hiring Lags
‘Smokey and the Bandit’ Charm Fades as Truck Driver
Hiring Lags
Struggle recruiting millennials risks worsening U.S.
shortage
Autonomous truck technology threatens to shake up
industry
By Claire Ballentine August 17, 2017, 2:00 AM PDT August
17, 2017, 6:53 AM PDT
It’s been 40 years since Burt Reynolds starred in “Smokey
and the Bandit” and made driving a rig on the open highway seem like a cool way
to make a living. That same year, only “Star Wars” sold more tickets.
These days, “Star Wars” still fills theaters but trucking
no longer captures the imagination of movie goers or, it turns out, the young
and unemployed. Veteran drivers are leaving the profession, and young people
entering the workforce are put off by long hours away from home and the
profession’s low-brow image. The result is a U.S. trucking industry with high
turnover and a dwindling number of new recruits.
“The question is where we’ll be in five or 10 years,”
said Steve Viscelli, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and former
driver. “If e-commerce goes up a lot and the introduction of autonomous
vehicles is slow and the industry does not shift to millennials, we could see
actual shortages 10 years out.”
Most trucking companies have been able to make do so far,
but as older truckers retire and an online-buying boom leads to surging
deliveries, the fear is a driver shortage will spur delays and lost revenue.
Offering generous signing bonuses, new technology and cozier cabs hasn’t done
enough to overcome the aversion to lengthy times spent alone on the road. The
industry is running out of time, with the baby-boomer demographic nearing
retirement and millennials continuing to skirt the sector.
Not Glamorous
The annualized driver turnover rate at large truckload
fleets was 74 percent in the first quarter and the industry was short about
48,000 drivers at the end of 2015. That shortage is expected to balloon to
almost 175,000 by 2024, according to the American Trucking Associations.
“Every truckload carrier is always scrambling to fill
their trucks,” Stephen Burks, an economist at the University of Minnesota
Morris who used to be a driver, said in an interview.
Brick Kepler, a recruiter from the Professional Drivers
Academy in Milton, Pennsylvania, often gets the cold shoulder when visiting
high schools in search of potential workers. He said students have little
interest in the trucking industry, with many pressured to pursue college rather
than a blue-collar job. Young workers also know they might train for a career
only to be replaced by driverless semis in a decade.
“I don’t think people look at the trucking industry as
the easy, glamorous, high-paying job they want,” he said. “It doesn’t appeal to
the younger generation.”
When they do attract young recruits, operators often
encounter another snag: Drivers have to be 21 to take their trucks across state
lines, a law that many industry stakeholders are working to change.
Pay, Bonuses
To boost recruitment and keep drivers invested in their
jobs, Don Daseke, chief executive officer of specialized tucking operator
Daseke Inc., is giving them free stock in the company that vests over five
years. “It’s our way of showing our drivers that we respect them and they’re
really important to us,” he said.
Some companies offer hefty signing bonuses. According to
the American Trucking Associations’ 2014 Driver Compensation Study, 48 percent
of newly-signed drivers received a signing bonus averaging $1,500. Some drivers
have learned to cheat the system by signing up for a company just long enough
to get the bonus, then jumping ship for another one -- a practice operators are
trying to limit by withholding payouts until drivers hit certain milestones.
Timothy Judge, director of research at driver-retention
consultant Stay Metrics, called such payouts “an act of desperation” and a poor
long-term strategy. “What are you communicating to the drivers? That it’s all
about the short-term,” he said.
Raising salaries is another option, but it would cut into
profit margins. The University of Pennsylvania’s Viscelli said companies would
have to double driver pay -- now about $41,000 -- to reduce turnover. About 30
percent of new drivers quit in the first three months, according to Stay
Metrics.
Women Workers
Even if they can’t get millennials, shipping companies
would do well to reach a new audience. The average worker in the trucking
industry is 45 and nearly 75 percent of workers are white, according to the
U.S. Census Bureau. About 95 percent are men, according to Ellen Voie, chief
executive officer of Women in Trucking.
Truck drivers are “Donald Trump’s base in demographic
terms,” Burks said.
There’s been a growing push to make the job more
appealing to women, such as by designing cabs that accommodate shorter bodies
and hiring for regional routes that allow drivers to go home at night, Voie
said. They’re also adding features that women drivers request like
porta-potties, smoke alarms and additional cabinet space.
To boost retention, some companies like Prime Inc. offer
new female drivers a female mentor, she said. The industry also starts young,
hosting Girl Scouts who crawl into the truck cabs and receive a patch.
Work, Life
Trucking companies could attract more millennial and
women workers by improving work-life balance for drivers, Viscelli said.
Trading home-cooked meals for fast food pit stops and freshly-washed sheets for
a cot in a truck cab takes its toll, and for many would-be drivers, bonuses and
raises aren’t enough to compensate for the lifestyle.
“It doesn’t matter what you like in life; it’s going to
be affected by living out of a truck,” Viscelli said.
Judge said salary isn’t as important to drivers as
companies think. They place a greater value on home time, reasonable hours and
their relationship with their dispatcher.
“If you ask executives what is causing people to quit,
seven out of eight believe it’s pay,” he said. “For employees, one out of seven
say it’s pay.”
An Autonomous Future
Then there’s the threat from autonomous trucks. In the
long run, self-driving trucks that companies including Uber Technologies Inc.
and Tesla Inc. are working to develop will save freight companies money. But it
makes recruiting young people even tougher.
Last week, Tesla met with California and Nevada agencies
about testing its autonomous semi truck ahead of Chief Executive Officer Elon
Musk’s unveiling of the next addition to the electric-car maker’s lineup.
Bob Biesterfeld, president of North American
transportation at C.H. Robinson, said autonomous trucks may still need a driver
in the cab to make sure nothing goes wrong.
“Companies are not developing technology with a goal of
replacing drivers,” he said. “Their goal is creating safer highways.”
But not everyone buys that, and Viscelli says truckers
across the board are worried about their job stability -- a challenge for a
sector in search of new recruits.
“The hype might be a little more intense, but this is a
really big deal and provoking all kinds of uncertainty,” he said. “There are
people with a lot of skin in the game who are very nervous right now.”
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