The driver shortage is dead, long live the driver shortage.
That’s fairly close to the message you get digging into a recent truck driver compensation study and the “driver shortage” narrative’s longest proponent’s response to it. The compensation study was conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) at the request of FMCSA. FMCSA itself was tasked to commission the study by Congress in the 2021 Infrastructre Investment and Jobs Act, the early Biden-era highway infrastructure legislation. The report examined truck driver pay and compensation methods and their impacts on retention and safety, and along the way called the American Trucking Associations’ and others’ long-posited notion of a driver shortage “spurious.” Fundamental labor economics principles cast doubt on what the ATA has long held out as persistent shortages, as reported Friday by Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole.
ATA, though, countered that the NAS study report’s authors “fail to account for several important points and distinctions that are critical to understanding the market for professional truck drivers.”
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[Related: Driver shortage: Readers weigh in on turnover, rates, pay, working conditions and more]
Today on the podcast, hear parts of Cole’s conversation about the study’s conclusions with OOIDA President Todd Spencer, who reiterated the association’s long-held view about persistent driver shortages.
On the driver-retention front, Spencer felt putting real value on a driver’s time, furthermore, could well be the single biggest improvement truckload carriers could make to build a base of longer-tenured pros over-the-road where delay at the docks or via an emergency “certainly isn’t predictable,” he said. “You can’t plan for it, and again the common thread with detention time is that the prevailing rate for that is zero” dollars.
Our own Executive Editor Alex Lockie, too, joins the podcast to break down last week’s Broker-Carrier Summit conference in Texas, where fraud prevention in brokered-freight markets was front and center. Also, too, plenty subjects that played directly to carriers in attendance, offering insights into opportunities that just don’t exist for brokers, as it were.
As Lockie quipped, “Carriers … had this lab on how to land direct freight, which is essentially how to cut brokers out of your life. Of course, you could not have a panel on how brokers could cut out carriers.”
More of Lockie’s dry sense of humor in this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio, likewise a highlight moment near the end of a fraud-prevention panel discussion with Anchor Reliable Transport’s Brian Woodring. Take a listen:
Also noted in the podcast:
**Owner-operator Ilya Denisenko’s thoughts on value in the Broker-Carrier Summit event.
**Lockie’s reporting on changes to Carrier411’s FreightGuard system.
**Email contact for the Truckstop load board’s look into potentially building a broker-vetting service for carriers.
[Related: How to beat brokers at their own game and win direct freight]