Worries Over Driver Shortage Outweigh Improving Market

This story appears in the March 31 print edition of Transport Topics.

GRAPEVINE, Texas — The truck driver shortage dominated the discussion here at the Truckload Carriers Association’s annual meeting, tempering an otherwise mostly positive outlook for the industry and the overall economy.

The industry is doing well on most fronts, except for the seat in the truck cab, outgoing TCA Chairman Tom Kretsinger Jr. said March 24.

“This is the year of the driver,” Kretsinger, president of American Central Transport, said in his farewell speech. “A couple years ago, we would all say customer is No. 1. Well, today, driver is No. 1, driver No. 2, driver No 3, customer No. 4.”

Besides the driver shortage, executives met to develop potential solutions to the highway-funding crisis that could curb the trucking industry’s ability to grow and to meet shippers’ demands.

To attract and retain drivers, Shepard Dunn, the new TCA chairman and president of Bestway Express Inc. of Vincennes, Ind., said carriers are starting to pay higher wages and are talking to shippers about how they can become more driver-friendly.

“We’ve just got to do a better job of really getting the shippers onboard with this problem — and some shippers understand that, but many of them don’t and don’t care,” he said.

Shippers need to help create lanes where drivers can run enough hours to make a living but not so many hours that they’re exhausted, he said. They also need to avoid long detention times for drivers and do simple things like clean their yards so truck tires don’t blow out and delay drivers for hours.

TCA President Chris Burruss said that, given the difficulty in finding drivers, the industry is looking at how it can raise wages and increase home time.

“If we can’t find people who want to do the job, then what’s wrong with the job?” Burruss asked. “And if we have to think about changing some things to make it more desirable, then I think we have to start having those discussions.”

TCA board member Gary Salisbury, CEO of Fikes Truck Line in Hope, Ark., said he believes the rapid adoption of telematics has cost trucking its older drivers, who are fearful that they cannot learn to use such things as electronic logging devices.

For instance, all interstate truck drivers will be required to use electronic logging devices if a proposed rule that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration recently published becomes final.

“The shortfall in this industry is that we’ve caused part of it,” Salisbury said. “We haven’t educated those guys and tried to disperse that fear of the unknown.”

A study released at the conference underscored the driver-retention issue.

Sylectus, a business unit of Omnitracs Canada Inc., said an eight-year analysis found an increase in driver age and also a decrease in tenure for both male and female drivers.

The study said the average age of male drivers rose to 48 years from 46 years, and the average age of the females increased by three years to 51.

In the analysis, the tenure of male drivers decreased since the recession to less than two years at a carrier, and the tenure of female drivers has decreased to about one year and three months.

The driver pool is 92% male and only 8% female, according to the study.

One expert at the convention said the industry has failed to find younger drivers because it is not making use of the social media that younger people, especially veterans, use in their job searches.

“Seventy-two percent of the military [personnel] have one or more social media profiles,” said Christy Woynar, media strategist for Military.com, which advises trucking firms on hiring veterans. “Seventy percent of the job seekers on Facebook are male, and 63% of those are under 40.”

To tap the pool of veterans looking for work, carriers are going to have to retool their recruiting and hiring departments, she said.

“If you don’t have a person dedicated to hiring veterans, it’s time to get one now,” Woynar said, stressing that the person in that job will have to work largely on an online, social media strategy to find prospective hires.

In November, FMCSA said it planned to revise regulations in an effort to help veterans and military personnel more easily obtain their commercial driver licenses.

Military personnel who operate heavy vehicles often are qualified to operate similar vehicles as civilians, but they still must obtain CDLs.

Current law allows states to waive the skills test for military personnel who operated a similar vehicle for two years with a safe driving record. But military members must apply for the waiver within 90 days of leaving their branch of service, which “can be overly restrictive as military personnel consider future career choices,” according to the study, requested by Congress and published by the agency Nov. 8.

The FMCSA study recommends extending the waiver period to one year.