Slashing benefits and wages. Making long hours and unpaid overtime the industry norm. Getting rid of whole departments and replacing them with third-party contr

Slashing benefits and wages. Making long hours and unpaid overtime the industry norm. Getting rid of whole departments and replacing them with third-party contractors. These all seem uncompetitive for businesses, but it must seem easy to do when your entire industry sector is doing it: truckers can't leave you if every other company is just as bad. The dependent part is where these slashes and cuts are accompanied by lowering prices in a race to the bottom within the industry, to the point where every business in the sector is operating on near-zero margins. Then, when wages overall start to go back up, the first business in the industry to flinch has to raise prices immediately as well, and ends up getting out-competed into oblivion. But if nobody flinches, the entire industry's labour pool dries up, harming everyone.