A CDL is a commercial driver’s license, and if you pay attention, you’ll find variations on the phrase cdl drivers wanted everywhere: across interstate billboards, in small-town newspapers, on diner bulletin boards, on TV, and, most often, on the backs of semitrucks. Each of us had come to the Changing Lanes CDL School to answer that call.
Johnny’s rosy pep talk was built on the belief that trucking is still a lucrative career in America. And despite the devastating shortage of truckers observed by media outlets, politicians, and trucking associations, the classroom was full of people who seemed willing to buy in. The founder of Changing Lanes, a charismatic veteran named Delbert, asked for a show of hands: How many people definitely wanted to do long-haul trucking? Three hands. How many people were from Texas? Nearly all. Who had child support to pay? Four or five. How many people were here in a workforce training program? Five or six. How many people had been to prison before? At least four hands went up, fast. (...)
The logistics industry has long sounded the alarm over the shortage of American truck drivers and the havoc it wreaks on supply chains, but just why that shortage exists gets less attention. Millions of Americans are trained to drive trucks and choose not to. Long-haulers, lauded as the backbone of our economy, live out of their trucks for weeks at a time, often working eighty-plus-hour weeks while earning little more than minimum wage. The economist Michael Belzer has equated commercial trucking to working in a “sweatshop on wheels.” The shortage is, in fact, a retention problem: annual turnover at large fleets in recent years has exceeded 90 percent. “It’s a self-inflicted wound,” Steve Viscelli, the sociologist, former trucker, and author of The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, told me, “because the jobs are so bad. We don’t really have a shortage of drivers. We just have a shortage of people willing to live that lifestyle.” (...)
Trucking is an industry steeped in some of the most stubborn of American aspirations: join the middle class; build a career you can count on; work without a boss looking over your shoulder. These are narratives whose centers do not hold, even in an industry that still takes place on the open road.
But they used to. After World War II, trucking became one of the highest-paying working-class jobs in America, backed by the Teamsters. Then, in 1980, in response to skyrocketing fuel rates, inflation, and nationwide strikes by drivers, Jimmy Carter deregulated the trucking industry, which meant that the government no longer had oversight of freight rates and routes. New low-cost carriers flooded the market, pushing union firms out of business. Prices for consumer goods stayed low, and drivers’ wages fell. The median annual pay for a trucker today is just shy of $50,000, which, according to Belzer, is less than half of what truckers were earning in 1980 when adjusting for inflation. Over the same span of time, union membership among truck drivers has fallen from around 60 percent to less than 10.
A classmate often wore a red T-shirt that said 'IF DIESEL AIN'T BURNIN', THEN I AIN'T EARNIN'. He saw the refrain as a motivator, but it also could be read as an admonition to the industry he was being trained to join. Drivers, particularly long-haulers, who make up about two million of the some 3.6 million truckers nationwide, are typically paid by the mile. Safety inspections, loading, unloading, fueling, and maintenance generally don’t count, nor does time spent waiting on loads. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 exempts truck drivers from the right to overtime.
This landscape makes the American trucker both essential and disposable. As Viscelli writes in The Big Rig, “It is more profitable to manage the problem than to fix it.” But when a record eighty-one thousand trucking jobs went unfilled in 2021, contributing to the supply chain crisis, shipping costs rose and store shelves sat empty. Suddenly, the driver shortage was everyone’s problem. The Biden Administration unveiled a plan for getting more drivers on the road and keeping them there, which included pathways for veterans and young people, funding to help states issue CDLs faster, and a joint compensation initiative between the Departments of Labor and Transportation. A flurry of proposed legislation followed: bills guaranteeing drivers’ right to overtime, one seeking to retain veteran drivers and attract newcomers through tax credits, and another cutting the red tape around CDL certification. It remains to be seen what will become law, but what does seem clear is that the structural issues plaguing truckers are too consequential to ignore. The shortage improved last year, with sixty thousand vacancies, but the American Trucking Associations has warned that the figure could more than double by 2030.
by Emily Gogolak, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Texas State Highway 130; Sandy Carson for Harper’s Magazine © The artist
