Decoding America’s truck driver shortage in 5 charts
From stagnant wages to the cities where drivers are most in demand.
With major companies like Tyson reporting shipping costs surging as much as $250 million this year, all eyes are on the links in the supply chain contributing to higher costs. For many freight carriers, however, a dearth of drivers has long been a leading risk factor for higher consumer prices.
“America has a massive truck driver shortage,” the Washington Post declared in March. “Truck driver shortage is raising prices, delaying deliveries,” USA Today added in April. In individual cities across the country, the same theme takes on a local flavor: “Shale country is out of workers,” the Los Angeles Times recently wrote of Midland, Texas. “That means $140,000 for a truck driver.”
Though job numbers notoriously vary based on of-the-moment market conditions, current industry estimates are that logistics companies need to fill more than 50,000 open jobs for drivers — a number that has ballooned in the decade since the 2008 economic crash. Earlier this year, job site Indeed even named trucking the occupation with the biggest number of active online listings, pushing some employers to offer incentives like signing bonuses.
Still, long-haul trucking in particular is a profession with unique physical and schedule demands. And the field’s future isn’t exactly crystal clear, given the rise of advanced and autonomous driving technologies that could dramatically change the hands-on duties of drivers.
As a trucking tech startup focused on the on-the-road communications needs of drivers and their back offices, our team at Vector decided to take a deeper dive into the data. Though various industry groups and job sites offer their own survey data and other estimates, we focused on federal job numbers available through the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Job growth
If jobs are a reflection of supply and demand for labor in a given industry, logistics businesses concerned about a driver shortage would logically be experiencing a serious imbalance between the two. That makes it all the more interesting, then, that the sheer number of new driving jobs being added doesn’t appear to tell the whole story.
Just look at this breakdown of the fastest- and slowest-growing occupations. As of last year, when the latest federal job projections were calculated, trucking was right on pace with other industries like carpenters, firefighters and lawyers expected to experience average growth between 6–8 percent from 2016–2026.
Wages
Since the trucking business isn’t necessarily creating brand new jobs at a breakneck pace, industry analysts have increasingly turned to other variables to help explain why job seekers aren’t clamoring for well-advertised openings in driver positions.
Suspect number one: pay. “What U.S. truckload executives call a driver shortage,” JOC.com recently explained, “is what existing drivers actually call a pay shortage.”
With carriers reporting double-digit increases in shipping rates through the first half of 2018, pressure is mounting for companies to share the newfound wealth with drivers. As the map below shows, industry-wide averages for driver pay are below the median income in many markets. As of 2016, the U.S. median income was $59,039.
That makes it crucial to parse the details of compensation for different types of drivers. The American Trucking Association notes, for instance, that private fleet drivers make a notably-higher average of $86,000 per year than their for-hire peers.
Geography
Just as pay varies widely, so, too, does geographic demand for drivers.
In sheer numbers of trucking jobs, big cities like Chicago, New York and Houston still dominate, usually offering slightly higher-than-average wages.
Taking a closer look, though, it’s suburban and rural markets that offer the highest concentrations of trucking jobs. Local economic dynamics in places like Midland, Texas, known for its shale oil reserves and related transportation needs, can present a more acute need for companies to raise wages or otherwise get creative to meet hiring needs.
Looking ahead, one key will be how the geography of trucking jobs evolves to match changing delivery patterns. With the rise of mega-shippers like Amazon vying to supply growing urban markets, the places most feeling the need for new drivers may also shift.
Job type
Across the country, one of the biggest open questions in the trucking industry — not to mention other large industries experiencing rapid technological change — is how demand for different types of jobs within the sector may change in the coming years.
As it stands, drivers make up the overwhelming majority (76 percent) of industry employment. How that might change if and when technologies like advanced driver controls gain widespread adoption is a big open question.
As the manufacturing industry is seeing now, it could be that more self-sufficient machinery requires more human support for technical functions like maintenance or IT — which, advocates of artificial intelligence and automation are quick to point out, usually come with higher salaries.
In an industry where unfilled jobs are already front and center, the big question for the trucking industry is how the combination of technology and human logic may change the math for the number of driving jobs available in the coming decades.
The answer is likely to be felt by many — the carriers who directly pay drivers, the shippers who foot the volatile bills, and the consumers asked to pay the resulting prices on goods.
Interested in the future of logistics? Check out the next-generation trucking tools we’re building at Vector, or drop us a line at info@withvector.com.
