The next time you’re wheeling down I-35, and you steer around all of those big semi-trucks – Halvor Lines, Bison Transport and others – you may not realize it, but the country is in the midst of a massive shortage of truck drivers.
By some estimates, 80,000 drivers are needed nationally, a record high, Chris Spear, president and CEO of the American Trucking Association, recently told CNN.
That’s actually a 30% increase from before the pandemic, when the industry already faced a major labor shortage of more than 61,000 drivers.
Reasons for this shortage abound. Many drivers are retiring. Others are leaving the industry. There has been an increase in consumer demand. By some estimates, consumer spending is 15% above where it was in February 2020, just before the pandemic slammed the economy.
Meanwhile, the industry and the nature of the work is changing, as more technology emerges for drivers to contend with, more stringent safety standards have been added, and more technological advances are being made to the trucks themselves.
As a result, driver recruitment and retention efforts are prime challenges these days for the trucking industry, and include strategies such as pay increases, bonuses and, in some cases, carrier companies launching their own truck driver training programs.
A strained supply chain
For the companies, and individual drivers themselves, the top two issues facing the industry are driver shortages and retention, said Daniel Rust, associate professor of transportation and management in the School of Business and Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. He cited the latest annual survey by the American Transportation Research Institute.
“In the early days of the pandemic, demand for goods went way down, but then rebounded,” said Rust. “More recently, there has been a surge of goods to be hauled and so more drivers are needed.”
Consider the whole supply chain, Rust explained. The factories in Asia manufacture the goods, which are then shipped to the United States. Then the carriers – the trucks – deliver the goods inland to wholesale and retail centers. Normally, “the whole supply chain is pretty well balanced, working in lock step,” but this surge has strained or disrupted the balance.
As The Associated Press recently reported, the strain in the supply chain is seen at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where dozens of ships wait off the coast to be unloaded. The average wait is 17 days, and a lack of drivers at the ports and throughout the country just exacerbates the problem.
‘The driver shortage is real’
Several trucking companies that serve the region confirmed this labor shortage, though they wouldn’t cite specific numbers. Nearly all are looking for drivers who have commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs).
“We are hiring for CDL drivers, though we are not as extremely short as some others because we are more of a regional hauler and so drivers can be home more often,” said Vern Bryce, general manager of Superior-based Dave Evans Transports.
Halvor Lines, which covers 49 states and Canada, is also hiring, said Carl Svendsen, chief strategy officer for the Superior-based carrier. He said this latest shortage is a challenge, and it adds to an already existing labor shortfall. “Our industry has had a shortage for years.”
“The driver shortage is real,” said Jeff Pries, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Winnipeg-based Bison Transport, which serves all of North America. Bison trucks are frequently seen on Minnesota freeways and highways. He said the situation is especially acute “for cross-border (U.S. and Canada) drivers,” and the cross-border issue will be further complicated by the recent announcement by the United States that all travelers entering the country must be vaccinated, including truck drivers, beginning Jan. 22. “This will make an already challenging issue much worse.” On the upside, Pries said Bison has determined that it will have more than 95% of its current cross-border drivers vaccinated and ready to work when the mandate goes into effect.
‘A rapidly changing industry’
Along with the strained supply chain, other factors are at work that may also be influencing the industry’s labor challenges.
“There are more demands these days on drivers,” UWS’ Rust pointed out, citing new technology such as electronic logging devices (ELDs) that are required of drivers to track their driving time, and stricter safety mandates that came out in 2020 from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, relating to drug and alcohol consumption.
Trucking is “a rapidly changing industry,” said Svendsen of Halvor Lines, citing technology, data collection elements such as ELDs and global positioning systems (GPS), and regulatory actions and laws over the last few years that have made some drivers leave the industry “because they didn’t want to deal with the changes.”
On the other hand, most sources agree that the emergence of high tech for the industry has been beneficial. “The advancements that have occurred over the last decade have been astounding, and most of them are safety driven, which is great,” Svendsen said.
Bryce of Dave Evans Transports agreed. For example, on ELDs, “When drivers first got it, they didn’t really like it, but now they understand the value of it, which is they are not expected to go over hours.” Plus, Bryce said, ELDs also help with communicating with customers who want to track various deliveries.
Beyond ELDs, the list of high-tech components in the trucks themselves is long, said Steve Waller, who works in sales and leasing for the Duluth terminal of Rochester-based Nuss Truck & Equipment. He cited several examples: on-board video cameras that can be used for critical-event monitoring such as accidents, GPS technology, blind-spot monitoring, lane departure systems, roll stability and anti-rollover technology, collision avoidance systems, adaptive cruise control, predictive steering, disc brakes, automatic transmissions and more.
Electric vehicles (EVs) for the trucking industry may also soon be more common, according to Waller. “The technology is emerging. The physical infrastructure is in process of being put in place.”
Because of battery-range limitations, EVs may be less common for long-haul trucks but are well-suited for urban fleets such as buses, delivery vehicles and garbage trucks, “because they don’t drive very far and then are back to base every night to charge batteries,” said Mark Nygaard, general manager for Nuss in Duluth.
Recruiting and retaining drivers
Given the landscape of a strained supply chain and a changing industry triggering demand for more drivers, carrier companies are offering pay increases, bonuses, and, in at least one case locally, CDL training in order to recruit and retain drivers.
Raising wages is the biggest tool to attract drivers, said UWS’ Rust. “This is a major trend. It could be per hour or per mile, most typically it is per mile” because most drivers are paid by mileage.
Alongside raising wages, bonuses are also a key incentive to retain and attract drivers, Rust said. Three types of bonuses are generally offered: a new hire bonus; a retention bonus, if a driver stays with a company over a certain time period; and a safety bonus, in which safe drivers get rewarded. “These are all on the increase, rising across the board.”
Bison Transport, for example, has made “significant pay adjustments,” said the company’s Pries, “to ensure we retain and attract cross-border drivers.”
How much do drivers earn? Numbers vary. Bryce, of Dave Evans Transports, said an average driver starting out could make $60,000 annually, “and we do have drivers [earning] higher than that.”
These pay increases bode well for those interested in truck driving careers. However, as Rust wondered, the only question is whether the carrier companies “will be stuck with higher driver compensation, and will that be sustainable,” once demand returns to a more normal level.
Beyond pay, Halvor Lines has launched its own paid, entry-level driver training program, “to teach them all of the tools they need to help them get their CDLs,” said Halvor’s Svendsen.
Ultimately, it’s important for the industry to “step up and find ways to create more professional drivers,” Svendsen said. “It should be an industry investment,” mostly because trucking is so crucial to the supply chain. “Think about it. Everything around us comes on a truck. Most everything you see, everything you have, came on a truck. Boats, airplanes and trains are a critical part of this industry, but they cannot bring a package to your front door. Only a truck can do that.”
Iron Range native Angelo Gentile is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer.
