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Why trucking can’t deliver the goods

93 points by lxm 5y ago

akira2501 5y ago
"Why trucking can't deliver the goods?" Sounds more like "Why government can't effectively improve markets by simply deregulating them."
- verisimi 5y ago
  Or decrease fuel duties to decrease the cost of deliveries - surely an obvious answer in inflationary times, as it will decrease costs everywhere.
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    Did you read the article? The issue is cost of labor being too cheap and not being compensated for waiting time which leads to huge turnover rate. How’s reducing fuel duties helping the workers?
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      The extra profits from increased consumption will trickle down in the form of new jobs that don't pay a living wage either
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Or people reduce consumption and adjust their expectations as they reduce their above average consumption relative to the rest of their own city, state, country, world’s population.
  - ekidd 5y ago
    While that's certainly an excellent idea, it doesn't directly address any of the serious problems discussed in the article. Long-haul truckers appear to be independent contractors with zero market power relative to trucking firms. They're exempt from minimum wages and benefits, and they're required to lease their trucks from the trucking companies, then pay to maintain them. Under these circumstances, reducing fuel duties might slightly reduce costs to consumers. But it doesn't look like it would help the truckers one bit, because they have no negotiating leverage. Any new money injected into the system would just be extracted by the shipping companies. Or that's my understanding of the article. I'm not saying you're doing this, but I am frankly tired of knee-jerk, simple answers to tricky problems. If someone tells me the answer is always deregulation or lower taxes or whatever, and their advice never changes depending on the situation at hand, I'm increasingly assuming that they're pushing a simplistic, abstract theory. Given the state of the world today, we need to stop repeating slogans and start thinking hard about how to solve the problems we face.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      > I'm not saying you're doing this, but I am frankly tired of knee-jerk, simple answers to tricky problems. This one does have a knee jerk simple answer. Increase pay to attract and retain sufficient talent. The root problem is are consumers willing to pay extra for the end goods so that enough truckers will be willing to do the job under current parameters, or are they willing to forego consumption, which is exactly what is playing out. Of course, the problem of insufficient supply of truck drivers can also be solved by reducing demand for truck drivers, by using automation/trains/reducing regulations/etc. The reducing regulations one is cheapest, of course.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        > The root problem is are consumers willing to pay extra for the end goods so that enough truckers will be willing to do the job under current parameters, there's no evidence whatsoever that any price increases seen in the last 20 months are attributable to paying truckers any more, nor is there much evidence that consumption is being foregone. so, i am not really sure what your point is or how this can be the "root problem".
    - UncleEntity 5y ago
      > Long-haul truckers appear to be independent contractors with zero market power relative to trucking firms. Some are, most drive for a company. Its not like they are forcing them to go out and spend $140,000+ on a truck to make less than minimum wage as TFA asserts but people are choosing to buy (or lease) a truck on their own volition. Maybe they make money, maybe they lose money, either way it’s what they chose to do and business is hard.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    The oil companies could reduce their record profits a bit to help the country.
    - splitstud 5y ago
- bicx 5y ago
  Despite capitalism being lauded by many, I don't think a lot of people can actually stomach the harsh realities of how capitalism is expected to work. If reality allowed for seamless rebalancing of labor during times of shifting supply and demand, these truckers could simply move on to a better career until shipping companies realize they need to increase their compensation and benefits. That would be ideal capitalism. However, the reality is that around 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (probably much higher for truckers), and taking the time and effort to find a better industry and seek training is extremely difficult. It could hurt their families and send them into a predatory debt cycle.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    It's also worth noting that even Adam Smith himself didn't seem to think that capitalism could work well without strong and effective labor unions. It's, at best, unwise to oppose workers banding together to protect their interest, and at the same time turn a blind eye to business owners colluding. Which they will always be able to do. At the very least, in the US their right to fund think tanks that run anti labor union publicity campaigns is constitutionally protected.
  - sdb0 5y ago
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    Your ideal capitalism would also imply that labor gets rapidly rewarded for increases in productivity, efficiency, output, and restricted supply/excess demand for their skills. Everything about America is quite the opposite. It is cartel suppression of rewarding labor, and has been for centuries now. Control of labor "costs" and hostile labor relations is openly discussed in business schools and the management community for just as long. All you have to do is watch a CEO immediately demand increased compensation for some arbitrary increase in the stock price, perhaps due to overall all boats rising, fortuitous market conditions, etc. But if you're a worker bee that saves the company a million dollars a year, or bring in 10 million dollars of sales by improving the product, what do you get? A plaque. You can also tell with the classic news story: "there's not enough available people for X job". This is literally first day of microeconomics: well, increase wages (prices) in order to spur supply increase to meet demand. Which is heresy in oligarchical and management circles, the same "laissez faire" "economics is god-science" cult. The theory and academics of economics have truths and pursue the same goals of any field of study. But the sad fact is that economics as an institution of civilization is not, it exists to server the oligarch/management class, provide the tools of their continued and expanded influence, and suppress the people. It professorships are funded and sponsored by the rich and powerful. Think tanks, elite positions in central banks and regulatory agencies, and the like implicitly and explicitly reward those "thought leaders" that serve the rich and powerful, and exert a negative career influence on economists that do not. This is not just squabbling over the share of the pie. The institution of economics is complicit in the decades-long denialism of impending environmental dangers that will threaten us collectively in the coming decades.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  It worked like it did for airlines: lower prices and generally worse service unless you want to pay for it (and most people don't).
  - pdonis 5y ago
    If most people aren't willing to pay more for better service, then the better service is not worth what it would cost and not providing it makes the economy more efficient--resources are freed up to be applied to things that are worth what they cost.
    - BigRedDog1669 5y ago
      But with airlines, the terms of service and what fees tacked on are constantly changing so it seems impossible to know ahead of time that you are actually getting better service with a higher cost. And the pricing that is constantly changing makes it seem like a higher price is because of demand on that flight, not because higher service. It just isn't possible to know what you are getting vs what you are paying unless you do a ton of research or fly all the time.
      - dehrmann 5y ago
        > constantly changing so it seems impossible to know ahead of time that you are actually getting better service with a higher cost The main variables are legroom, food, and bags. First class gives you all of them. Premium economy gets you legroom (and possibly food, but at $12 for a snack box, I don't stress over it). Offerings are pretty consistent across the legacy carriers. Free checked bags haven't been a thing for a long time. The budget carriers like Spirit nickel and dime you for literally everything, but that's their thing. Southwest is weird. Unless you're on a discount carrier, you'll get food and alcohol on all long-haul flights.
        BigRedDog1669 5y ago
        That's a good assessment on the choices you can pay for. I also think about how likely it is that the carrier will cancel or delay the flight, will it be a mess to get my money back if the flight gets cancelled or changed (even if the policies say it is allowed), and will the wifi work after I pay for it on long flights. Those things aren't covered by paying even more money and don't correlate with paying more for a flight.
rightbyte 5y ago
94% attrition rate for long haul truckers? That is insane. They are probably payed way too little for so many nights away. If they made more they could work less and still have a normal life.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  It's surprising to me it isn't in any company's interest to charge higher rates and offer an actually reliable service.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    Optimizing for short term profits has cause so many issues that could have been avoided over these past decades.
    - iudqnolq 5y ago
      Agreed. I used to be pretty libertarian, but the underlying premise companies and individuals act in their own interest is disproved again and again (see also how a company isn't actually profit maximizing if it discriminates in hiring).
      - postpawl 5y ago
        Or the company will grow to a point where they buy up all their competition and get to set higher prices.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    There are actually quite a few smaller companies that are like this...I drove for one to pay my way through college, although it was short haul LTL. You might be surprised at what types of companies are willing to pay 40-50% more for consistent and fast service. Our 2 biggest clients were John Deere and Caterpillar parts distributors, delivering parts to construction sites, mines, and farms. And we got a bunch of business through logistics consultants that used us to make up for cheaper carriers dropping the ball. But for the most part, businesses deal with the problems of cheap logistics because they can easily see the prices, but the actual costs are harder to measure.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
> He’s one of some 12,000 truckers who haul the containers from the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach (where 40 percent of all the ship-borne imports to the United States arrive) to the immense complex of warehouses 50 miles east of L.A., where the goods are unpacked, resorted, put back on other trucks, and sent to all the Walmarts, Targets, and the like within a thousand-mile radius. Sounds like a job for a train to me, and then local dispatch to the relevant warehouses.
- irrational 5y ago
  This was my thought too. All containers go from one port to one huge warehouse? Why is that not done by train? Also, where is this warehouse? I’m thinking that when society collapses, that might be a great place to pick up stuff.
  - vidanay 5y ago
    NIMBY. The hurdles to constructing a new rail line are practically insurmountable.
    - crubier 5y ago
      Yet people are fine with building / enlarging roads...
      - artificial 5y ago
        Why not in the middle of the freeway? Sacrifice 2-3 lanes or do it raised, one for freight another for metro. Last mile transportation still needs to be solved, light rail would be awesome to and you and down main streets.
        johnwalkr 5y ago
        That is not trivial at all. How do you go against status quo which is to add more lanes for cars? How do you get the train from the middle of the freeway or raised portion to outside/ground level? Where do you put railyards to break/make trains to deliver to/from local places? I'm all for freight trains, but there is no way they can simply piggyback on car infrastructure.
hinkley 5y ago
There was a group at the end of the DotCom Boom that wanted to create an elevated rail system of sorts for autonomous vehicles. I found this an interesting concept because it essentially reduces the driving algorithm to a 2 dimensional problem (linear distance and time), which is not much more complicated than cruise-control with distance-keeping. They went beyond self parking to "drop me off at the front door and go park in the garage". That would have been a game changer for retail space in dense urban cores because you could consolidate parking blocks away and increase retail footage at ±1 floor from street level. Rail and water are so much more efficient than rubber on roads. Water especially. It still blows my mind when my friend with a boat told me how much the boat weighs, and yet I could still push it off the dock or 'catch' it if they come in too hot. I'm pushing tens of thousands of pounds. I can't even push my car without two other people to help. We can't build (many) new water systems, but we can build rails. In fact it's a shame we let them dismantle the old ones. As we're discovering, rubber is quickly rising as a PM2.5 source as ICEs are being more and more regulated. Michelin has been experimenting with biodegradable additives to their rubber (in fact they claim better performance at 50% tread wear in large part due to this new formulation) but I'm not sure how much that helps in the long term. Nor regenerative braking vis-a-vis brake pad dust. What's likely going to help more is that GenZ seems to have an aversion to driving. Cars and autonomy are no longer synonymous.
- mwint 5y ago
  > Nor regenerative braking vis-a-vis brake pad dust. Huh? To be clear, you’re claiming regen braking may not significantly reduce brake dust? I drive an EV with relatively weak regen (‘15 Leaf), and easily 95% of total energy goes to regen; the last few MPH go to the real brakes. The service manual lists _inspecting_ the brakes at 60k miles and again at 100k. I don’t expect to ever replace the pads in this, unless they rust off from lack of use. So if that pad is lasting that long, it must be making less dust.
  - smilekzs 5y ago
    I think they meant "regardless of what method of braking you use, the tire still has to do the same amount of work, therefore produce the same amount of tire emissions".
pg_bot 5y ago
My father is an owner operator of a trucking company. I helped him run his business after I graduated from college. The way we were able to differentiate was by being extraordinarily reliable with our pickups and deliveries. You can achieve this if you can communicate often with your clientele and have slack with your trailers. You can't have drivers sitting in a loading dock for 2+ hours waiting to load or unload goods without getting paid for that time. So we wrote into our contracts that you get paid overtime for sitting around if we showed up on time and you took too long to load or unload. Anyone who refused got cut, and we still had more than enough people willing to give us business to continually expand. We would also talk to them and work around production schedules by dropping off trailers and have them be loaded when the company had slack in their schedule if they wanted. This allowed us to keep great clients, and have predictable routes for our drivers. You can go even farther if you analyze traffic patterns and attempt to find clients who will minimize your deadhead miles. You can make a lot of money in trucking if you know what you're doing since the bar is so low for competence. Most of the big boys will churn out drivers and treat them like garbage.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  There was a book by I think Steven Covey or his father, a Latter Day Saint (aka Mormon) businessman who talked about entrepreneurship in the context of the early nineties. Didn't talk about tech, although that's always a part of the story, now it's tech, centered around AI. But that was always tied to entrepreneurship, it's just back then it was the inventor, not the founder. But it was more focussed on starting up a business by out-executing. He said 90% of businesses were not executing well, just execute well and live by American/Christian/Middle-class values and that's all you need. It seemed widely believed at the time, or he wouldn't address this, that to start a business you needed to hire all these executives at huge salaries, and lease cars for them, and rent office space. He countered no, just do it on your own, just BE PUNCTUAL which is worth gold, and the hack is if you can't be on time call ahead of time expressing sincere interest in respecting people's time. This, so people aren't left doing nothing while waiting for you. He said 90% of the time that solves the problem. It just has to be sincere, which does not mean figure out the magic words to sound sincere, it means express it if you feel it, and if you can't...hit the bricks, accepting you can't be a businessman if you don't have a problem being a burden. You could be a beggar instead. Just that part of being punctual, doing what you said you'd do, or figuring out how to be of help, really own your failures. Another move is talking about it if you have a strong excuse, courts absolutely want to hear mitigating factors, and actually people do too, it actually helps people feel like they weren't betrayed completely, like they do if you say there's no excuse for what you've done. Or say you'll examine the personal and external failures for some time, though for the moment it's on you, and explain in full in a week when cooler heads prevail and you did a true post-mortem, identifying all the lessons that failures are richly laden with. Like how personal and external factors interplayed, so you can do something about it being repeated.[1] I have a relative who was a very successful self-made man and the way you hacked him, was a good short haircut (like a 1940's haircut, this man was buttoned-down) and punctuality, that was literally all it took. [1]: On that note, some people are incapable of being punctual without using controlled substances. Attention Deficit Disorder. It's not something that can be addressed just by visiting a psychiatrist and saying you think you might have it, you might imagine that would be enough like it is with practically anything else. Ideally find a psychiatrist who is also a patient, that's the ideal.
mumblemumble 5y ago
> Over the past decade, dozens of lawsuits from misclassified drivers have resulted in judgments affirming that they’ve been misclassified and awarding them compensation from the companies that misclassified them. XPO recently paid a $30 million fine to a large number of its drivers. But neither XPO nor any of the other fined companies have stopped misclassification. It’s cheaper for them to pay a fine than to pay their drivers a living wage. This would seem to be the root cause of the problem.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tromp 5y ago
  Looks like a business opportunity for an enterprising law office to reach out to as many of these drivers as they can and file hundreds of such lawsuits. Until it's no longer cheaper for XPO to misclassify...
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Imagine how much money that law office could make when they're indirectly paid off by the trucking companies, then hired by the trucking companies.
    - 6510 5y ago
      Or it could take the indirect bribe and take them to court anyway.
      - mumblemumble 5y ago
        Or opt not to follow a course of action that could result in getting disbarred.
  - lostdog 5y ago
    The misclassification is supported by the courts. (Because of the political leanings of many judges).
randombits0 5y ago
Ok, I’m dumb. Could someone explain why free-market principles aren’t working here? If product isn’t moving, it seems that those who could move product would be worth more and could charge more.
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  Time mismatch between the underlying issue and the investment necessary to fix it. It costs $X to do the business expansion required to move the product, and you expect to get $Y from it until things return back to "normal", and relevant business management believes that $X >> $Y.
- deanputney 5y ago
  Part of it seems to be that the truckers have no negotiating power. They can't raise their prices without collective action.
- pastacacioepepe 5y ago
  Remember, when the market fails, it's NEVER a fault of the market. It's usually due to the stars alignment or some evil government's insane actions. Nevermind that governments are the puppets of the market. It must certainly be the stars alignment then. Perhaps the moon's gravitational pull??
  - pjscott 5y ago
    Market failure is real, but this is a situation where I wouldn't expect to see it happen naturally.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Does the driver charge for their services? Or does the trucking company decide what they can charge? The free market pretends everybody has agency, but reality shows that there is a natural imbalance of power dynamics which determines how the system operates. Regulated markets are one example of a response to unequal power dynamics. The article enumerates the ways that the trucking companies have more power than truckers and thus dictate terms.
throwaway984393 5y ago
I clicked the audio version of the story, and this "Trinity Audio" version is so much better than other automated readings I've heard.
UncleEntity 5y ago
I’m probably an average truck driver. Well, I’m lazy as hell but have enough experience from the ‘00s that I can get away with being lazy. I will easily take home over $50k this year with putting in the minimal effort to not get fired for ‘underproducing’. Makes me wonder where they’re finding these $20k-something long haul truckers they cite in TFA really. I also drive for an owner/operator and get to see the revenue that goes to the truck (even though I’m not supposed to be able to), know what I get paid, how much fuel goes into the truck and have a pretty good general idea what the other expenses are and know he isn’t losing money having me drive this truck around. If someone is making $28k/year driving a truck they’re doing something very, very wrong…if I cared enough I could easily find another job making more than I’m currently earning and be in another truck by the end of the week, done it before and will probably do it again if they irritate me enough though I’m trying to be good and want to buy a condo outright next year. So, yeah, there’s always been a driver shortage but it isn’t really over some imaginary low pay problem, mostly because it is easy enough to get a better job where you don’t have to live in a truck and deal with the annoying shippers and receivers (which is pretty bad right now due to COVID-19 staffing issues) after you get a year or so of over the road experience.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > I’m probably an average truck driver. As a truck driver who reads Hacker News and has done for several years, I suspect that "average" might not be the right adjective :) Not that I'm saying no truck driver would ever read Hacker News, just not the average truck driver.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  But that last paragraph is a low pay problem. Raise the pay and you'll get more people willing to put up with the downsides. In any job.
deleted 5y ago
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hash872 5y ago
Surprised to see this entire conversation and no mention of the Jones Act, which pushes the US towards using more truckers because it's unfeasible to transport goods by ship from one American port to another. Traveling by water being vastly more efficient
shoo 5y ago
tangential recommendation: if you enjoy reading longform articles about logistics, check out Marc Levinson's book "The Box" about the history of the shipping container. there's a bunch of interesting aspects: the shifting balance of power between unions and capital (breakbulk shipping is a lot more labour intensive, switching to containers permanently removes longshoremen jobs, longshoremen working conditions are frequently abysmal when capital gets the upper hand); regulation in the US artificially fixing prices that artificially prop-up one form of transport (e.g. rail) over another (intermodal sea + road); shipping companies forming cartels to fix prices; the engineering design and investment required in ships, cranes and trucks to support a particular design of container; the process of standardising containers for compatibility; different vested interests attempting to upgrade port infrastructure or to block it; which countries and ports were able to position themselves to benefit from the increasing adoption of the new container transport protocol, and which ones got left behind; the US army as an adopter of shipping containers & how winning a contract to ship supplies to the conflict in Vietnam created an opportunity to fill otherwise empty container ships with goods exported from Japan for the return leg back to the US. Also, the story of fortunes made and fortunes lost by Malcom Mclean.
kurthr 5y ago
According to Wells Fargo, the most common cause for drivers to be removed from driver rolls is marijuana testing, especially in states that have legalized (e.g. California, Oregon, Colorado, etc). "The law [FMCSA] has impacted nearly 110,000 truckers, about 56% of which were reported for marijuana use, according to government data from December 2021." https://www.businessinsider.com/marijuana-testing-leading-cause-trucker-shortage-wells-fargo-2022-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/marijuana-testing-leading-ca...
deleted 5y ago
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gruez 5y ago
off topic: one paragraph in and I already found what looks to be a grammatical error >[...] Alvarez promotes the general welfare to insure the domestic tranquility of manufacturers, shopkeepers, and consumers shouldn't it be "ensure"? I find it strange that a 32 year old magazine with over 31k subscribers can't afford a good copy editor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Prospect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Prospect

93 points by lxm 5y ago

"Why trucking can't deliver the goods?" Sounds more like "Why government can't effectively improve markets by simply deregulating them."

verisimi 5y ago
Or decrease fuel duties to decrease the cost of deliveries - surely an obvious answer in inflationary times, as it will decrease costs everywhere.
- jeromegv 5y ago
  Did you read the article? The issue is cost of labor being too cheap and not being compensated for waiting time which leads to huge turnover rate. How’s reducing fuel duties helping the workers?
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    The extra profits from increased consumption will trickle down in the form of new jobs that don't pay a living wage either
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Or people reduce consumption and adjust their expectations as they reduce their above average consumption relative to the rest of their own city, state, country, world’s population.
- ekidd 5y ago
  While that's certainly an excellent idea, it doesn't directly address any of the serious problems discussed in the article. Long-haul truckers appear to be independent contractors with zero market power relative to trucking firms. They're exempt from minimum wages and benefits, and they're required to lease their trucks from the trucking companies, then pay to maintain them. Under these circumstances, reducing fuel duties might slightly reduce costs to consumers. But it doesn't look like it would help the truckers one bit, because they have no negotiating leverage. Any new money injected into the system would just be extracted by the shipping companies. Or that's my understanding of the article. I'm not saying you're doing this, but I am frankly tired of knee-jerk, simple answers to tricky problems. If someone tells me the answer is always deregulation or lower taxes or whatever, and their advice never changes depending on the situation at hand, I'm increasingly assuming that they're pushing a simplistic, abstract theory. Given the state of the world today, we need to stop repeating slogans and start thinking hard about how to solve the problems we face.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > I'm not saying you're doing this, but I am frankly tired of knee-jerk, simple answers to tricky problems. This one does have a knee jerk simple answer. Increase pay to attract and retain sufficient talent. The root problem is are consumers willing to pay extra for the end goods so that enough truckers will be willing to do the job under current parameters, or are they willing to forego consumption, which is exactly what is playing out. Of course, the problem of insufficient supply of truck drivers can also be solved by reducing demand for truck drivers, by using automation/trains/reducing regulations/etc. The reducing regulations one is cheapest, of course.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      > The root problem is are consumers willing to pay extra for the end goods so that enough truckers will be willing to do the job under current parameters, there's no evidence whatsoever that any price increases seen in the last 20 months are attributable to paying truckers any more, nor is there much evidence that consumption is being foregone. so, i am not really sure what your point is or how this can be the "root problem".
  - UncleEntity 5y ago
    > Long-haul truckers appear to be independent contractors with zero market power relative to trucking firms. Some are, most drive for a company. Its not like they are forcing them to go out and spend $140,000+ on a truck to make less than minimum wage as TFA asserts but people are choosing to buy (or lease) a truck on their own volition. Maybe they make money, maybe they lose money, either way it’s what they chose to do and business is hard.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  The oil companies could reduce their record profits a bit to help the country.
  - splitstud 5y ago
bicx 5y ago
Despite capitalism being lauded by many, I don't think a lot of people can actually stomach the harsh realities of how capitalism is expected to work. If reality allowed for seamless rebalancing of labor during times of shifting supply and demand, these truckers could simply move on to a better career until shipping companies realize they need to increase their compensation and benefits. That would be ideal capitalism. However, the reality is that around 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (probably much higher for truckers), and taking the time and effort to find a better industry and seek training is extremely difficult. It could hurt their families and send them into a predatory debt cycle.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  It's also worth noting that even Adam Smith himself didn't seem to think that capitalism could work well without strong and effective labor unions. It's, at best, unwise to oppose workers banding together to protect their interest, and at the same time turn a blind eye to business owners colluding. Which they will always be able to do. At the very least, in the US their right to fund think tanks that run anti labor union publicity campaigns is constitutionally protected.
- sdb0 5y ago
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Your ideal capitalism would also imply that labor gets rapidly rewarded for increases in productivity, efficiency, output, and restricted supply/excess demand for their skills. Everything about America is quite the opposite. It is cartel suppression of rewarding labor, and has been for centuries now. Control of labor "costs" and hostile labor relations is openly discussed in business schools and the management community for just as long. All you have to do is watch a CEO immediately demand increased compensation for some arbitrary increase in the stock price, perhaps due to overall all boats rising, fortuitous market conditions, etc. But if you're a worker bee that saves the company a million dollars a year, or bring in 10 million dollars of sales by improving the product, what do you get? A plaque. You can also tell with the classic news story: "there's not enough available people for X job". This is literally first day of microeconomics: well, increase wages (prices) in order to spur supply increase to meet demand. Which is heresy in oligarchical and management circles, the same "laissez faire" "economics is god-science" cult. The theory and academics of economics have truths and pursue the same goals of any field of study. But the sad fact is that economics as an institution of civilization is not, it exists to server the oligarch/management class, provide the tools of their continued and expanded influence, and suppress the people. It professorships are funded and sponsored by the rich and powerful. Think tanks, elite positions in central banks and regulatory agencies, and the like implicitly and explicitly reward those "thought leaders" that serve the rich and powerful, and exert a negative career influence on economists that do not. This is not just squabbling over the share of the pie. The institution of economics is complicit in the decades-long denialism of impending environmental dangers that will threaten us collectively in the coming decades.
dehrmann 5y ago
It worked like it did for airlines: lower prices and generally worse service unless you want to pay for it (and most people don't).
- pdonis 5y ago
  If most people aren't willing to pay more for better service, then the better service is not worth what it would cost and not providing it makes the economy more efficient--resources are freed up to be applied to things that are worth what they cost.
  - BigRedDog1669 5y ago
    But with airlines, the terms of service and what fees tacked on are constantly changing so it seems impossible to know ahead of time that you are actually getting better service with a higher cost. And the pricing that is constantly changing makes it seem like a higher price is because of demand on that flight, not because higher service. It just isn't possible to know what you are getting vs what you are paying unless you do a ton of research or fly all the time.
    - dehrmann 5y ago
      > constantly changing so it seems impossible to know ahead of time that you are actually getting better service with a higher cost The main variables are legroom, food, and bags. First class gives you all of them. Premium economy gets you legroom (and possibly food, but at $12 for a snack box, I don't stress over it). Offerings are pretty consistent across the legacy carriers. Free checked bags haven't been a thing for a long time. The budget carriers like Spirit nickel and dime you for literally everything, but that's their thing. Southwest is weird. Unless you're on a discount carrier, you'll get food and alcohol on all long-haul flights.
      - BigRedDog1669 5y ago
        That's a good assessment on the choices you can pay for. I also think about how likely it is that the carrier will cancel or delay the flight, will it be a mess to get my money back if the flight gets cancelled or changed (even if the policies say it is allowed), and will the wifi work after I pay for it on long flights. Those things aren't covered by paying even more money and don't correlate with paying more for a flight.

rightbyte 5y ago

94% attrition rate for long haul truckers? That is insane. They are probably payed way too little for so many nights away. If they made more they could work less and still have a normal life.

iudqnolq 5y ago
It's surprising to me it isn't in any company's interest to charge higher rates and offer an actually reliable service.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  Optimizing for short term profits has cause so many issues that could have been avoided over these past decades.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    Agreed. I used to be pretty libertarian, but the underlying premise companies and individuals act in their own interest is disproved again and again (see also how a company isn't actually profit maximizing if it discriminates in hiring).
    - postpawl 5y ago
      Or the company will grow to a point where they buy up all their competition and get to set higher prices.
- darksaints 5y ago
  There are actually quite a few smaller companies that are like this...I drove for one to pay my way through college, although it was short haul LTL. You might be surprised at what types of companies are willing to pay 40-50% more for consistent and fast service. Our 2 biggest clients were John Deere and Caterpillar parts distributors, delivering parts to construction sites, mines, and farms. And we got a bunch of business through logistics consultants that used us to make up for cheaper carriers dropping the ball. But for the most part, businesses deal with the problems of cheap logistics because they can easily see the prices, but the actual costs are harder to measure.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

> He’s one of some 12,000 truckers who haul the containers from the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach (where 40 percent of all the ship-borne imports to the United States arrive) to the immense complex of warehouses 50 miles east of L.A., where the goods are unpacked, resorted, put back on other trucks, and sent to all the Walmarts, Targets, and the like within a thousand-mile radius. Sounds like a job for a train to me, and then local dispatch to the relevant warehouses.

irrational 5y ago
This was my thought too. All containers go from one port to one huge warehouse? Why is that not done by train? Also, where is this warehouse? I’m thinking that when society collapses, that might be a great place to pick up stuff.
- vidanay 5y ago
  NIMBY. The hurdles to constructing a new rail line are practically insurmountable.
  - crubier 5y ago
    Yet people are fine with building / enlarging roads...
    - artificial 5y ago
      Why not in the middle of the freeway? Sacrifice 2-3 lanes or do it raised, one for freight another for metro. Last mile transportation still needs to be solved, light rail would be awesome to and you and down main streets.
      - johnwalkr 5y ago
        That is not trivial at all. How do you go against status quo which is to add more lanes for cars? How do you get the train from the middle of the freeway or raised portion to outside/ground level? Where do you put railyards to break/make trains to deliver to/from local places? I'm all for freight trains, but there is no way they can simply piggyback on car infrastructure.

hinkley 5y ago

There was a group at the end of the DotCom Boom that wanted to create an elevated rail system of sorts for autonomous vehicles. I found this an interesting concept because it essentially reduces the driving algorithm to a 2 dimensional problem (linear distance and time), which is not much more complicated than cruise-control with distance-keeping. They went beyond self parking to "drop me off at the front door and go park in the garage". That would have been a game changer for retail space in dense urban cores because you could consolidate parking blocks away and increase retail footage at ±1 floor from street level. Rail and water are so much more efficient than rubber on roads. Water especially. It still blows my mind when my friend with a boat told me how much the boat weighs, and yet I could still push it off the dock or 'catch' it if they come in too hot. I'm pushing tens of thousands of pounds. I can't even push my car without two other people to help. We can't build (many) new water systems, but we can build rails. In fact it's a shame we let them dismantle the old ones. As we're discovering, rubber is quickly rising as a PM2.5 source as ICEs are being more and more regulated. Michelin has been experimenting with biodegradable additives to their rubber (in fact they claim better performance at 50% tread wear in large part due to this new formulation) but I'm not sure how much that helps in the long term. Nor regenerative braking vis-a-vis brake pad dust. What's likely going to help more is that GenZ seems to have an aversion to driving. Cars and autonomy are no longer synonymous.

mwint 5y ago
> Nor regenerative braking vis-a-vis brake pad dust. Huh? To be clear, you’re claiming regen braking may not significantly reduce brake dust? I drive an EV with relatively weak regen (‘15 Leaf), and easily 95% of total energy goes to regen; the last few MPH go to the real brakes. The service manual lists _inspecting_ the brakes at 60k miles and again at 100k. I don’t expect to ever replace the pads in this, unless they rust off from lack of use. So if that pad is lasting that long, it must be making less dust.
- smilekzs 5y ago
  I think they meant "regardless of what method of braking you use, the tire still has to do the same amount of work, therefore produce the same amount of tire emissions".

pg_bot 5y ago

My father is an owner operator of a trucking company. I helped him run his business after I graduated from college. The way we were able to differentiate was by being extraordinarily reliable with our pickups and deliveries. You can achieve this if you can communicate often with your clientele and have slack with your trailers. You can't have drivers sitting in a loading dock for 2+ hours waiting to load or unload goods without getting paid for that time. So we wrote into our contracts that you get paid overtime for sitting around if we showed up on time and you took too long to load or unload. Anyone who refused got cut, and we still had more than enough people willing to give us business to continually expand. We would also talk to them and work around production schedules by dropping off trailers and have them be loaded when the company had slack in their schedule if they wanted. This allowed us to keep great clients, and have predictable routes for our drivers. You can go even farther if you analyze traffic patterns and attempt to find clients who will minimize your deadhead miles. You can make a lot of money in trucking if you know what you're doing since the bar is so low for competence. Most of the big boys will churn out drivers and treat them like garbage.

daniel-cussen 5y ago
There was a book by I think Steven Covey or his father, a Latter Day Saint (aka Mormon) businessman who talked about entrepreneurship in the context of the early nineties. Didn't talk about tech, although that's always a part of the story, now it's tech, centered around AI. But that was always tied to entrepreneurship, it's just back then it was the inventor, not the founder. But it was more focussed on starting up a business by out-executing. He said 90% of businesses were not executing well, just execute well and live by American/Christian/Middle-class values and that's all you need. It seemed widely believed at the time, or he wouldn't address this, that to start a business you needed to hire all these executives at huge salaries, and lease cars for them, and rent office space. He countered no, just do it on your own, just BE PUNCTUAL which is worth gold, and the hack is if you can't be on time call ahead of time expressing sincere interest in respecting people's time. This, so people aren't left doing nothing while waiting for you. He said 90% of the time that solves the problem. It just has to be sincere, which does not mean figure out the magic words to sound sincere, it means express it if you feel it, and if you can't...hit the bricks, accepting you can't be a businessman if you don't have a problem being a burden. You could be a beggar instead. Just that part of being punctual, doing what you said you'd do, or figuring out how to be of help, really own your failures. Another move is talking about it if you have a strong excuse, courts absolutely want to hear mitigating factors, and actually people do too, it actually helps people feel like they weren't betrayed completely, like they do if you say there's no excuse for what you've done. Or say you'll examine the personal and external failures for some time, though for the moment it's on you, and explain in full in a week when cooler heads prevail and you did a true post-mortem, identifying all the lessons that failures are richly laden with. Like how personal and external factors interplayed, so you can do something about it being repeated.[1] I have a relative who was a very successful self-made man and the way you hacked him, was a good short haircut (like a 1940's haircut, this man was buttoned-down) and punctuality, that was literally all it took. [1]: On that note, some people are incapable of being punctual without using controlled substances. Attention Deficit Disorder. It's not something that can be addressed just by visiting a psychiatrist and saying you think you might have it, you might imagine that would be enough like it is with practically anything else. Ideally find a psychiatrist who is also a patient, that's the ideal.

mumblemumble 5y ago

> Over the past decade, dozens of lawsuits from misclassified drivers have resulted in judgments affirming that they’ve been misclassified and awarding them compensation from the companies that misclassified them. XPO recently paid a $30 million fine to a large number of its drivers. But neither XPO nor any of the other fined companies have stopped misclassification. It’s cheaper for them to pay a fine than to pay their drivers a living wage. This would seem to be the root cause of the problem.

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tromp 5y ago
Looks like a business opportunity for an enterprising law office to reach out to as many of these drivers as they can and file hundreds of such lawsuits. Until it's no longer cheaper for XPO to misclassify...
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Imagine how much money that law office could make when they're indirectly paid off by the trucking companies, then hired by the trucking companies.
  - 6510 5y ago
    Or it could take the indirect bribe and take them to court anyway.
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      Or opt not to follow a course of action that could result in getting disbarred.
- lostdog 5y ago
  The misclassification is supported by the courts. (Because of the political leanings of many judges).

randombits0 5y ago

Ok, I’m dumb. Could someone explain why free-market principles aren’t working here? If product isn’t moving, it seems that those who could move product would be worth more and could charge more.

ThrustVectoring 5y ago
Time mismatch between the underlying issue and the investment necessary to fix it. It costs $X to do the business expansion required to move the product, and you expect to get $Y from it until things return back to "normal", and relevant business management believes that $X >> $Y.
deanputney 5y ago
Part of it seems to be that the truckers have no negotiating power. They can't raise their prices without collective action.
pastacacioepepe 5y ago
Remember, when the market fails, it's NEVER a fault of the market. It's usually due to the stars alignment or some evil government's insane actions. Nevermind that governments are the puppets of the market. It must certainly be the stars alignment then. Perhaps the moon's gravitational pull??
- pjscott 5y ago
  Market failure is real, but this is a situation where I wouldn't expect to see it happen naturally.
throwaway984393 5y ago
Does the driver charge for their services? Or does the trucking company decide what they can charge? The free market pretends everybody has agency, but reality shows that there is a natural imbalance of power dynamics which determines how the system operates. Regulated markets are one example of a response to unequal power dynamics. The article enumerates the ways that the trucking companies have more power than truckers and thus dictate terms.

throwaway984393 5y ago

I clicked the audio version of the story, and this "Trinity Audio" version is so much better than other automated readings I've heard.

UncleEntity 5y ago

I’m probably an average truck driver. Well, I’m lazy as hell but have enough experience from the ‘00s that I can get away with being lazy. I will easily take home over $50k this year with putting in the minimal effort to not get fired for ‘underproducing’. Makes me wonder where they’re finding these $20k-something long haul truckers they cite in TFA really. I also drive for an owner/operator and get to see the revenue that goes to the truck (even though I’m not supposed to be able to), know what I get paid, how much fuel goes into the truck and have a pretty good general idea what the other expenses are and know he isn’t losing money having me drive this truck around. If someone is making $28k/year driving a truck they’re doing something very, very wrong…if I cared enough I could easily find another job making more than I’m currently earning and be in another truck by the end of the week, done it before and will probably do it again if they irritate me enough though I’m trying to be good and want to buy a condo outright next year. So, yeah, there’s always been a driver shortage but it isn’t really over some imaginary low pay problem, mostly because it is easy enough to get a better job where you don’t have to live in a truck and deal with the annoying shippers and receivers (which is pretty bad right now due to COVID-19 staffing issues) after you get a year or so of over the road experience.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> I’m probably an average truck driver. As a truck driver who reads Hacker News and has done for several years, I suspect that "average" might not be the right adjective :) Not that I'm saying no truck driver would ever read Hacker News, just not the average truck driver.
vikingerik 5y ago
But that last paragraph is a low pay problem. Raise the pay and you'll get more people willing to put up with the downsides. In any job.

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hash872 5y ago

Surprised to see this entire conversation and no mention of the Jones Act, which pushes the US towards using more truckers because it's unfeasible to transport goods by ship from one American port to another. Traveling by water being vastly more efficient

shoo 5y ago

tangential recommendation: if you enjoy reading longform articles about logistics, check out Marc Levinson's book "The Box" about the history of the shipping container. there's a bunch of interesting aspects: the shifting balance of power between unions and capital (breakbulk shipping is a lot more labour intensive, switching to containers permanently removes longshoremen jobs, longshoremen working conditions are frequently abysmal when capital gets the upper hand); regulation in the US artificially fixing prices that artificially prop-up one form of transport (e.g. rail) over another (intermodal sea + road); shipping companies forming cartels to fix prices; the engineering design and investment required in ships, cranes and trucks to support a particular design of container; the process of standardising containers for compatibility; different vested interests attempting to upgrade port infrastructure or to block it; which countries and ports were able to position themselves to benefit from the increasing adoption of the new container transport protocol, and which ones got left behind; the US army as an adopter of shipping containers & how winning a contract to ship supplies to the conflict in Vietnam created an opportunity to fill otherwise empty container ships with goods exported from Japan for the return leg back to the US. Also, the story of fortunes made and fortunes lost by Malcom Mclean.

kurthr 5y ago

According to Wells Fargo, the most common cause for drivers to be removed from driver rolls is marijuana testing, especially in states that have legalized (e.g. California, Oregon, Colorado, etc). "The law [FMCSA] has impacted nearly 110,000 truckers, about 56% of which were reported for marijuana use, according to government data from December 2021." https://www.businessinsider.com/marijuana-testing-leading-cause-trucker-shortage-wells-fargo-2022-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/marijuana-testing-leading-ca...

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gruez 5y ago

off topic: one paragraph in and I already found what looks to be a grammatical error >[...] Alvarez promotes the general welfare to insure the domestic tranquility of manufacturers, shopkeepers, and consumers shouldn't it be "ensure"? I find it strange that a 32 year old magazine with over 31k subscribers can't afford a good copy editor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Prospect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Prospect