| | | Truck or Treat! A “Labor Shortage” Vanishes Into Thin Air
by Oren Cass
Positive results continue to emerge from the Trump administration’s ongoing experiment in tightening the labor market for truck drivers. As we highlighted last week, trucking spot rates are rising for legal American drivers. Now, in an especially stunning turn of events (and an entertaining one, for industry watchers), the American Trucking Association is admitting that, actually, there never was a labor shortage. “What we have in the United States is a quality problem around drivers, much more so than an absolute number,” says one official. “There’s never been a lack of people with [licenses]... what we lack is the number of qualified drivers who meet our high standards of professionalism and safety,” says another. You know what might help with that? Hiring and retaining qualified drivers.
As Gord Magill explained last year in an American Compass essay, “Crash and Churn”: “There is, in fact, an oversupply of truck drivers in the United States. The problem for trucking companies is retaining drivers, but doing something about this problem costs them more than ignoring it and using government funds to paper it over.” Time to let the market rip!
commonplace.org
Tom |
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