If anything good has come out of the supply chain crisis, it is a renewed appreciation for truckers, according to the U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and they should be compensated accordingly.
“Industry estimates that there is a gap of about 80,000 truck drivers right now relative to what we need,” Buttigieg said in a keynote address to the Transportation Research Board (TRB) annual meeting in Washington on Wednesday, citing data from the American Trucking Associations.
“However, my department estimates that 300,000 people leave that field each year.” So we must ensure that we are not only recruiting people for the field but that it is not a leaky bucket. Rather, we ensure that the working conditions and may reflect the fact that those jobs are absolutely necessary.”
To back up his claims, the Department of Transportation announced on Thursday that it is launching a series of initiatives aimed at strengthening the trucking industry’s labor force, including two studies examining truck driver pay and unpaid detention time. Some of the programs were mandated by President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which he signed into law in November, and were highlighted in Biden’s Trucking Action Plan, which he unveiled in December.
“Making sure truck drivers are paid and treated fairly is the right thing to do, and it will help with both recruiting new drivers and retaining experienced drivers,” Buttigieg said on Thursday.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is collaborating with TRB on the pay study, which will investigate how being paid by the load or per mile rather than hourly affects safety.
According to the DOT, “the study will also review the amount of time a truck driver spends away from home, driving, and detained to determine true working hours, and then determine true hourly wages.”
The FMCSA will use ELD data for the first time for the detention time study, “to provide a more detailed understanding of wait times for drivers across jurisdictions and industry sectors,” according to the DOT, with data aggregated and anonymized to protect driver privacy. The study will also look at how detention time affects the likelihood of crashes and violations of hours-of-service laws.
A Women of Trucking Advisory Board and a Truck Leasing Task Force are two of the other initiatives currently underway at DOT.
Women appointed to the advisory board will assist the administration in informing it about efforts to increase the number of women in trucking by reporting on current challenges faced by female drivers and those interested in becoming drivers. These include entry barriers, on-the-job safety risks, and opportunities for advancement.
FMCSA, the Department of Labor, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are collaborating to form the leasing task force (CFPB). It will investigate and report on:
- Common truck leasing agreements, with a particular emphasis on inequitable terms and transparency.
- Truck leasing arrangements for ports include a requirement that trucks be zero emissions.
- Loans and other arrangements between incoming driver trainees and training schools and/or trucking companies to determine the extent to which these result in unanticipated and large debt for incoming drivers.
- In the trucking industry, there is a risk of predatory leasing arrangements.
