Truckers Are Aging Out. Who Will Replace Them?

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Late this past summer, Bloomberg retail reporter Jaywon Kang flew to Anchorage, Alaska, got in a truck and headed south toward Kenai.

You're surrounded by these really majestic mountains, and it was summer, but you could still kind of see like snow on the tip of the mountains. It was sort of the calm before the storm, because you know, a few months after that trip, the weather would have started getting pretty harsh.

Yes, hair will turn into pig cheeks of mines.

Jaywan was riding Shaka and the driver's seat next to her there was a trucker named Leslie Scott.

Do you see those mountains.

It's pretty mellow right now, but sometimes it could be pretty treacherous.

Leslie has been driving trucks for nearly a decade. For the past few years, she's driven with a partner, Michelle Saliki. They call themselves Belma and Luise. They even have a shared TikTok account.

Okay, Michelle making video does a breakfast good I'd go there are you? Even though Lesslie makes me walk a mile.

Leslie and Michelle don't fit the typical truck driver profile. More than ninety percent of truck drivers in the US are met, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A lot of drivers still will say, oh, are you driving with your husband? They're shocked to the Seer team women out here, especially.

Right Leslie is fifty eight, Michelle is sixty nine. The median age for a truck driver in the US is about forty five. Leslie and Michelle drive for Walmart, and right now the company is making an effort to recruit more drivers because the trucking industry is at a critical juncture and the decisions its biggest players make now could affect their ability to meet the increasingly insatiable demand of American shoppers in the years to come.

The current workforce a lot of people will probably start retiring within the next ten years or so roughly, and so the big question is do we have enough people who can replace those people who are going to be leaving the workforce.

I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today on the show, the US trucking industry at a crossroads. An aging workforce, chronically high turnover, long hours, and inconsistent pay. How Walmart is trying to change trucking to appeal to people who might not otherwise find themselves

The job of being a truck driver is really important in this country. I mean, you know, it's estimated that about seventy percent of freight is handled by commercial truck drivers.

According to the shipping firm Pitney Boats, eleven and a half billion parcels were shipped in the US back in twenty sixteen. By twenty twenty four, that had nearly doubled to more than twenty two billion parcels. And moving all those packages across the country isn't easy.

It's a really tough job. I mean, generally speaking, you're spending hours every day driving. You're spending days away from your loved ones, sometimes spending weeks away from your home. Depending on who you work for, you might be asked to help unload and load all the goods in that truck. So that's physically demanding.

It's one of the hottest jobs I've evid done in my life.

That's Dean Krok. Today he works as an animals at DAT Freight and Analytics, but before that he spent years as a driver in Australia before moving to the US in nineteen ninety eight.

You've got to be able to handle being on your own, so there's the mental aspect of it, and as you get older, you become less tolerant to the extreme cold or the extreme physical activity.

And the trucking industry can be volatile. It's prone to booms and busts. One of the booms came during the pandemic. Online sales shot up and the number of trucking carriers rose to fill that.

Need, and then demand fell away, so those trucks had to do something. I created this over supply of trucks on the road and they competed for less freight and it drove freight rates down.

Dean says, we've been in a freight recession for the last three to four years.

And now we're starting to see bankruptcy start to rise and turnover levels start to increase, driver pay levels of starting to decline, so we're at the bottom of the market.

There's a lot of people who operate this when it's economically viable, and otherwise they'll just park it and do something else.

Chris Kaplis runs the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT and founded MIT's Freight Lab, which.

Looks specifically how companies, shippers, truckers, transportation providers, carriers, and brokers can all work together.

Chris says that for all these industry players, driver retention is a big issue.

Turnover is pretty high. Sometimes for a lot of carriers it's one hundred percent. Doesn't mean that every driver leaves, but you have some that leave in much shorter periods of time.

That means you might be going through multiple drivers in one position, even if others stay on. That's expensive for carriers. Chris says one reason for the high turnover is how drivers are paid.

Drivers typically only get paid when they're hauling loaded miles. The empty miles are when they're going to position to pick up a load, and so if you get delayed for loading, you might get pushed two or three hours. That pushes off everything that you have down the line. So the real challenge is that the driver pays that price because they can't make up that time.

In twenty thirteen, the government capped how long drivers can be on the clock during an average week at seventy hours each day. They can work fourteen hours, only eleven of which can be spent driving, and most drivers don't get paid for the time they spend on the loading dock, So if drivers spend too many hours waiting around without pay, that means fewer paid hours on the road.

You have no idea how soul destroying sitting.

Around waiting is Dean crok Again.

I probably spend a third of my working life sitting on ship a loading docks, waiting to get loaded and unloaded, and losing thousands and thousands of dollars in the process.

All that leads to a really unpredictable schedule, which makes the job a tough sell, especially for people with families.

One of the things that drives drivers absolutely insane is not having consistent start and finish times like One of the things we found that increased driver turnover rates, like as in quitting, was when drivers didn't get home when they were promised. You could be stuck in traffic and not get home for an hour later, and that's very difficult if you've got childcare and you have to pick up someone at four PM. Really difficult industry to work around those fixed deadlines.

Even for truckers who do get more consistent hours, the days can get really long.

As a primary care a twelve hour day just doesn't work. I need someone to look after my children. Whether I'm male or female like that, It's a really difficult industry to work in, even if I'm going to be home every night.

Then there are the challenges that disproportionately affect women drivers. Here's Bloomberg's j One King.

There are dangers on the road if you're driving alone, you know, risks of sexual harassment, and so that's kind of deterred women from entering this job.

So how are companies like Walmart trying to recruit the next generation of drivers before the current workforce retires. That's coming up. When Leslie Scott decided to become a truck driver, she knew she wanted to drive for Walmart. They paid the best, They paid the best. Walmart started to anticipate a truck and crunch more than a decade ago, when those new caps on driver hours were introduced. To get ahead of it, the company ramped up its recruitment and

They're basically tapping their existing employees who you know, work at their stores or on the front lines and training them to become truck drivers by covering the costs associated with you know, learning and getting the you know, the commercial driver's licenses, which you know cost thousands of dollars. And already about half of their new drivers come through that program, and they, you know, that that's something that they want to keep investing in. To build their pipeline.

Walmart has given its drivers more predictable schedules and Wi Fi equipped trucks. For safety, it pairs up drivers on its most treacherous routes, like the one in Alaska that Leslie and Michelle drive. Leslie and Michelle both earn about one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars a year. That's about twice what a typical US trucker makes. Here's Leslie this kay.

Sliving w I can support my family capture with the amount of line that I've.

Man, Leslie says. The job still ha its challenges, especially on the Alaska route she's driving. She's encountered hungry bears on the road, faced extreme weather and dangerous winds, and had to deal with the constraints of her schedule.

It took me two years to get a mamogram.

The sedentary nature of the work has taken a toll too. Since she started driving, Leslie gained seventy pounds and had to have bariatric surgery last year. Still, having Michelle as her driving partner makes Leslie feel more secure on the road. Leslie also says she feels a lot of job security. This is the first job where she feels like if she were to quit, she'd have another offer in no time.

I think maybe.

Too enties for women to do this, especially in my age group, because we are the free ones. Most of us have rates for children, and we're also proven fact to be a safer once we're more cautious, you know, they say we.

Don't have big accidents. Get all the brands out here. That's my mom truck. Wellcome, thanks the world.

The real.

Today about eighteen percent of Walmart's truckers or women, according to an estimate from the data firm Revellia Lapse. That's nearly double the rate of competitors. But high pay isn't enough to combat some of the other factors keeping women out of the industry, like the long and often unusual hours. Leslie, for example, was actually always interested in becoming a trucker, but it took until her kids were out of the house for her to feel like she could make it work.

We are doing better. So the pandemic drove a lot more warehouses closer to urban populations. So when we were at home during the pandemic ordering things overnight, that drew a lot more warehouses that staged our freight closer to us. So what that created was a lot more deliveries in smaller vehicles closer to our homes. That created a whole new set of jobs.

Some of those are gig economy jobs. People using their own vehicles to drop packages on doorsteps in the middle of the night.

But there's been a whole new economy around small box trucks and straight trucks and smaller vehicles delivering freight in that sort of maybe one hundred mile radius. So there's a lot of growth in that particular market. There's also a lot of growth in what I called daycab work. So what the industry is doing a lot more of, and what it can do more of is make vehicles and jobs and routes and freight networks more conducive to jobs that get drivers home every night.

But at the end of the day, Dean says, making this job appeal to more people comes down to changing how a majority of drivers are paid, offering annual guaranteed salaries as opposed to the hourly per mile and activity rates that companies like Walmer use.

So it doesn't matter how long you spend on a loading dock, you're paid by the salary, you're paid by the yow, or paid by the year. So one of the challenges they've got here is drivers have to be paid for the time they spend on the job. So to attract the new generation of drivers to the industry, they have to find a way to pay them for their time and services.

In the meantime, new autonomous technologies could transform the nature of the job.

I think what you'll see is that trucking will become different. Technology I think will help bridge the gap. Instead of me trying to stay awake between midnight and six, technology will take over and I'll assist me through that worst period of the night. If you think about a current truck driver, you have an autonomous vehicle going along into State forty out near Laramie, and it has a flat tire,

As the trucking industry confronts these coming changes, Leslie Scott is about to embark on her own next chapter. Her driving partner, Michelle, is planning to retire shortly after she turned seventy next year.

And my therapist asked me, where's your safe space in your life? And I said it or not. Cab of the truck in Alaska's my safe space.

Yeah.

When I close is Curtain's pie. Because of her, I don't think about what's out here. Yeah, because I know.

She's gotten Thelma will be looking for a new Luise. This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access to all of bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow