Finding Qualified Drivers

The trucking industry seems to operate primarily in a boom or bust cycle. Rarely, it seems, are things stable for very long.

Fuel seems to be forever skyrocketing or plunging; there’s either way too much freight or far too little; equipment is either impossible to find or there is so much around there’s no place to park the overflow.

Nowadays, with the economy seemingly on a slow but steady rise and with freight levels improving but hardly setting any records, a disturbing shortage of drivers is already occurring.

While freight loads so far this year are running only about 6.7% ahead of the dismal levels of last year, many fleets are reporting difficulty in hiring drivers.

And with nearly every analyst predicting that business will improve later this year and next, carriers are stepping up efforts to find qualified drivers (see story, p. 1).

Industry economist Noel Perry warned last week that the driver shortage could reach 350,000 when the economy is steaming along later in the recovery in 2011 or 2012.

The normal issues cited as recurring problems for driver recruitment — a shrinking overall labor pool, traffic congestion and pay levels — have been joined by some new issues, several involving government regulatory actions.

Some industry analysts expect the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s CSA safety program could eliminate up to 10% of the driver pool, namely drivers who have poor safety records.

And a new federal program that will require state motor vehicle departments to verify the citizenship of all new driver license applicants beginning next year also could hurt fleets. Perry said last week that estimates are that up to 5% of current commercial drivers are illegal aliens, who could now find themselves without licenses.

To attract qualified drivers, some fleets are beginning already to raise pay and offer substantial bonuses to new candidates.

Fleets report they are having trouble attracting the right applicants only a year after they were laying off qualified drivers because they didn’t have enough freight to deliver.

“Last year, we hardly had to recruit,” an executive at Groendyke Transport said, but now, “the big problem is that people have taken other jobs.”

It seems certain that to attract qualified applicants, driver pay rates are heading upward, as the economy improves and we enter the next phase of our up-and-down business.