Truckers Are Working Countless Hours That They're Not Getting Paid For

they talk about certain ways. You know, there's a lot of talking the industry about a so called truck driver shortage, which is this talking point media has reported for a long time. But how can you discuss these things, you know,

without actually hearing from a truck driver. Why perhaps the industry has had trouble hiring and retaining drivers, right, but also just talking about some of the supply chain issues as we happen for the past two years or so, and all the talk about you know, things being stuck at the ports or things being stuck at rail yards and truck drivers getting caught up in those and having to wait hours and hours and hours to pick up

or drop off a load. But we haven't actually spoken to the people who are living that very experience, right. So one dynamic, and we talked about it on a recent episode with Rachel Premac, is this fact that truck drivers are paid by the mile, right, and you even see it on the back of trucks. Often when they're trying to recruit drivers, they talk about how much you can get paid per mile, which has the drawback potentially

of you don't get paid for time. And therefore, if you're at a warehouse and you're depositing a load or picking up some goods, you can wait around for a really long time, potentially hours if the warehouse is inefficient or blocked or just sort of very crowded, which a lot of infrastructure has been over the last couple of years, and you're not getting paid for that time. It's detention, is they call it in the industry, And if it's really bad, if it's an efficient, that's just hours of

your life wasted because it's not a mile, right. And so the supply chain crisis has kind of shown a light on this practice, and the question now is whether or not it starts to change, because clearly, if you're talking about how difficult it is to get stuff from point A to point B. And a big part of the choke point is while people are just waiting all day to pick that stuff up at a particular port

or rail yard or depot or whatever. Then you could see people maybe want to start to alleviate some of that weight time and right. And that's what happens, I think in a so called supply chain crisis, is you noticed various choke points or an efficient that you maybe you tolerated private or previously, or that weren't a big deal, and so, okay, we have this problem where people are wasting their time at the warehouse is waiting for load or unload, but whatever, it's okay because things are still

moving smoothly. When you get the real seas up and you're like, oh, these are like dramatic inefficiencies and the cost of adjustment falls on the truck drivers themselves because they're the ones that have to essentially eat the cost by wasting time. Yeah, exactly. So when you get these choke points, as you mentioned, it seems like a good time to sort of evaluate the process on a whole

and what can be done to alleviate them. And you know, some people are like, oh, it's apps and we need like algorithms like uber and stuff like that and make everything more efficient. But you know, at that point it's just speculations. So let's talk to a driver and let's find out what really is going on and how much time and waste and if there are any potential solutions to this issue of truck driver detention. Let's do right,

I'm really excited about our guests. We're gonna be speaking to a truck driver and also the author of the Autonomous Trucker's Substack, Gordon McGill. Gordon, thank you so much for coming on, Odd Lots, Hello, Odd Lots, Hi Tracy, Hi Joe, thank you for having me on. Thanks for coming on. What do you sort of give your some wary How does a truck driver get paid? And what is detention? There's numerous three ways truck drivers get paid.

Some get paid by percentage of hall, some get paid by the mile, some get paid salaries, some get paid by the hour. It depends on what part of the market you're in, what capacity you're working in, whether it's local, regional, or over the road, or if you're like a drade trucker working on ports, there's many different pay models, but the pay is downstream of basically piece work and the quoted rate that the company you work for gives to

their customer. So talk to us a little bit more about driver detention then, why exactly does detention happen at all? And have you, you know, personally noticed a change in the amount of time that you're spending waiting to either pick something up or drop it off. So detention is

it can be caused by any number of things. I mean, you know, as they as the famous T shirt and bumper sticker says, you know, ship happens, um so sometimes it's you know, it's it's it's just you know, mechanical breakdowns,

personnel shortages, whatever. But with distribe the distribution of freight in America, the entire system is set up and predicated on the fact that all of the time efficiencies and problems get downloaded onto the drivers because there's no cost associated with their time, and there never has been, So you just end up sitting and waiting and it could be for any reason under the sun. And it's been

like that basically since forever. Do you have a sense of like how much time you like, what's a week look like for you or a month look like for you? And do you have any sense of how much time you in particular? And then maybe the industry drivers as a whole waste in unpaid attention. So there was a study done. I'm gonna I'm gonna quote the science seeing as how this you know, very popular thought terminating cliche

circulates around the internet and the discourse. There was a study done by there's like a subdivision of M I T which studies logistics and trade, and they showed that the average trucker in America, although they are allowed to drive eleven hours a day, only drives on average about six and a half hours because their day gets sucked up with waiting to load and unload so much that they literally lose almost you know, liketent of their available

driving time. There's been a lot of discourse, as you guys mentioned in your opening about problems supply chain. Well, a pretty major problem is when fortent of your available trucking capacity is being held up right, right, So you mentioned the eleven hours there, and this was gonna be my next question, like don't truckers and I apologize and advance her a very basic question but don't truckers have like a certain limit on the amount of driving time

that they can do per day. But you're saying that the waiting time doesn't factor into it, or are there any sure So yeah, so it's called hours of service and all truckers in America and and most other western

countries are governed by DHS rules. In the United States, you're allowed to drive eleven hours a day, and you get like a fourteen hour window to complete those eleven hours, and then the other three hours are safe pre trip inspections, loading, unloading on the other duties you have to take care of. But like you know, if those other duties exceed three hours and then eat into the eleven of driving, you

lose them. And that happens all the time. And again as as Joe, as you guys mentioned at the beginning, the amount of time you sit cuts into the amount

of time that you can drive. And there for the truck, which is considered you know, an asset and a part of logistics capacity is now just sitting there wasting not making any money, right, correct me if I'm wrong, But in the price of a trip or in the cost of a trip, there are sometimes attempts to compensate for expected way times or if a if a shipper has a reputation for having inefficient warehouses or for long wait

times picking up or dropping off. In theory, they do pay more to the to the owner operator or to afraid broker, who then theory pass it along like there is some cost to them that sometimes factored into what they pay per mile for the trip. Well that's in theory, but again because of the hyper competitive nature of the

trucking business. You know, I was speaking with an owner operator a friend of mine the other day and he, you know, mentioned, you know, he's always worried about you know, the other guy, the other guy, the other company that's willing to like forego that cost. And it's always used as a threat um, you know, like, yeah, if you guys charge us too much for the marriage time, we just won't use you and we'll use another trucking company. So there's this, you know, playing off um companies against

each other to try and remove that. Some companies do pay it, typically and specialized or niche markets, there's very low tolerance for waiting time. I drove truck in New Zealand for a little while and because the cost of doing business down there is so much higher and the margins are that much thinner, they don't tolerate waiting time.

And then in other countries it's mandated that drivers get paid by the hour, and because you're paying by the hour, you can't waste those people's time because it's coming out of the bottom line of the company who's holding you up. Whereas in the United States there's nothing to force anybody to a out for drivers time like whatsoever. So there's a very small minority of companies that will pay for that, but they're so inconsequential that the rest of the business

they just they just don't pay. Well, maybe this is a good time to talk about how we ended up with that system in the US, because, as you mentioned, like, it does seem strange. You know, for most people in the States, they work forty hour weeks and then if they work over time, they'll get some sort of extra compensation, um, you know, to compensate them for that. But in the case of truckers it seems to be different. So how

did we end up with this system? In nineteen thirty eight, during Roosevelt administration, they passed a piece of legislation called the Fair Labor Standards Act, which included the idea of paying people over time and included the idea of the standard forty hour week, and a few different occupations were exempted from that included transportation and truck drivers were explicitly exempted from being paid overtime. And it's been like that

ever since. So the entire industry has built it's like rate structures, the way it does business, the way it pays people, the way it schedules things around the fact that, hey, we don't have to pay these guys any extra for their overtime, and that's fine, and we're just gonna keep

doing that. So they've created like a two tier system where you know, you might be at a Walmart warehouse or whatever distribution center and everybody that works there gets paid over time if they have to work for the hours, except the dozens or hundreds of truckers sitting outside in their cabs waiting to get loaded or unloaded. So what would it is there would it have to be a law that would change this, Like what would be a

way out to so that? Okay? Because what you first of all, what you say makes sense that in countries in which you have to pay truckers by the hour. Then it becomes a real cost to the shippers if they're just holding you there for hours. So what would it take to get into a mode where that's how truckers are paid. You make a good point, Joe, um the the system here, because there's no cost associated with the driver's time, it creates what they call a market failure.

Like I lean a little bit libertarian. I used to be a pretty strident libertarian in the past, but like we're we're seeing this confluence of different factors where because it's not legally acquired and because there's so many humongous so called mega carriers in the market who have built their business model around turning and churning through drivers and

not paying them what they're worth. And as you know, the professor Steve as Shelley said in his book The Big Greg Walking in the Client of the American Dream, that it doesn't cost them any extra money to manage driver attention and driver turn So these companies have essentially built it into their operating model that you just don't

pay over time and you don't worry about it. So it just might be you know, as much as the libertarian part of my brain doesn't want this that the government has to basically say, look, you're this industry and the supply chain system that keeps America going is dependent on having professionals and safe people that are happy with their jobs don't want to stick around, and this model

of not paying them isn't sustainable. So maybe, and I could be wrong, but maybe it is the you know, like the Guaranteeing Overtime for Trucker's Act, where there's that requirement that drivers be paid for their time in order to force all of these clowns to actually pay people what they're worth and to stop the ongoing churn retention cycle. Can I just ask a Devil's Advocate question because I think this comes up a lot. But so in the States, truckers are paid by the mile or per trip for

the most part. And one of the things that comes up when you start talking about well we should pay them over time is well, how are you actually going to track and monitor? And then you know, I'm so glad you brought up just to be clear, Devil's Advocate, but please give us your response. That is a fantastic question. And um, y'all went to grade school and high school before they had uh smartphones, and some of those places they taught you how to use this thing called a calculator.

And then the calculator got turned into an app on your cell phone and on your laptop. And there's this little thing we can do called pro ration. And guess what the government does pro ration on the miles you travel to figure out who to allocate fuel taxes to the states. Why can we not pro rate miles to figure out what your average hourly mileo D rate is, to then figure out what your base hourly rate would be based on those miles, to then calculate what your

overtime would be. This is so simple, but like I think that, like truckers have spent so many decades of just being abused and pummeled by all these forces beyond our control, and then you have people like the American Trucking Association who represent these mega carriers that just go right along with it, that we can't imagine something as simple as a calculator being able to figure this out for everybody, especially given that many trucking companies these days,

much like Twitter who elon Musk, just cut out all of these sort of like parasitical non work people that don't produce anything. Trucking companies have the same problem with like compliance and human resources managers and all these people that like have to basically make sure that the trucking companies don't get crushed by the d O T. So, like can they not operate calculators? Can they not figure out how to pay people? Like? This is real simple.

As an avid Twitter user who wants the site to remain stable, I'm a little worried that he may have let go of people who are crucial but and not entirely all parasites. Um. But nonetheless, I take your I take your point. I just I want I want the site to remain functioning and high quality engineers to work there. But that's a sidetrack I want to get. You know, you just mentioned um, the A T A and you know, for years you hear about the so called truck driver shortage.

But as you just pointed out, or as you argue that for also years that the mega carriers have had this like churn mentality, they're like, well, it's okay if a driver only stays in the industry for a few months or a year, etcetera. Can you talk a little bit more about that model the churn that, like, let's just turn through the driver's model and it's okay if it's cheap and it's okay, and how sustainable that is

and what the cost of that is? Well, okay, So the short answer is is, A, it's not sustainable and B it's not sustainable because of the costs that have

been externalized. Right, So the costs are on both the drivers themselves who again enter these models working for freight companies where they go through some kind of truck driving school and often enough owned by the carriers themselves, and then they get either the carrier gets subsidized by the government in some way through subsidies of grants to hire drivers, or they offload the cost of the training onto the drivers through these like credit obligations with ridiculous interest rates,

and then they have to sign a contract and stay with the company. But then the company abuses them, and then they discover that they waste half of their life waiting at docks or being at the mercy of dispatch systems that are often wonky, and nobody seems to care because you're at the other end of a surveillance technology like a qual calm or something in the truck, and and and the companies don't necessarily care about where you are what your time is. So there's a lot of washout.

And then there's also a lot of accidents. Um. There was a a report released here recently that showed UM, since the in position of the electronic Logging device mandate that like truck accidents continue to climb. So there's this cost sent to society. I like to I like to call the drivers shortage narrative. I've come to this recently. I want to call it the Pardo's truck driver shortage. So there's there are companies who are short drivers, right like the guys some people I used to work for

in Canada have about twenty trucks sitting. But they're a specialized niche carrier and they need competent, good drivers that

know what they're doing. And so what happens is because the other eight percent of the business is stuck going through this retention problem and churning through drivers because they can get away with it because the government subsidizes it, and or they offload the cost of training onto the drivers and get them stuck in this credit problem, and it sucks in all kinds of people into the business

who shouldn't be driving. That basically turns off the number of people who would come into it, who are competent and who would graduate through the system, the pipeline, so to speak, from being a new driver to a good competent driver to moving on to a really good paying job that's you know, in a niche market saying doing oversize or hazardous materials or or some such other commodity that pays a little better, and then sticking with it.

So the percent of the parado distribution that's locked in by this really bad model of turning through drivers that drivers shortage is fake. They just keep going through them. There's no shortage. There's tons of people with CDLs. They

just end up quitting. And then at the other end, the of people who are really competent, the companies and that part of the market, they can't get people because the people who would come through the system and graduate towards those good jobs quit before they get a chance, because they're just like this is the ship show, Like why would we stay here? Why would we stay in

this business that doesn't value our time? And they end up quite It seems like there's a really interesting sort of like kind of perverse economic phenomenon where people here about how there's a driver's shortage, and they say, Okay, well, why don't we subsidize going to drivers school, Why don't we make it easier to get your CDL bring new

people in? But the real upshot of that, essentially it sounds like it's just sustained the churn model rather than that's right because what what what they're what they're doing is they're they're they're using these systems to take care of the bottom end of the problem rather than the top end of the problem. Right, So like instead of trying to keep people, like why pay people more, why treat them better? Why improve the material conditions if you

can just keep on going through. And I hate to sound like, you know, a snob or anything, but like these systems suck up people who are desperate. And one of the problems in our economy over thirty forty years of you know, Reaganomics, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it, um shipping at all of our manufacturing base to China and Mexico and whatnot. Well, you can't ship out the truck drivers. So the trucking industry, as represented by the

American Trucking Association, may they burn in hell? Uh, they've basically created the system where it's like, we can't get rid of the drivers, so somehow we have to make them as cheap as the third world places we've sent all of the other jobs too. And so they've created this system, and now, you know, any suggestion at changing that system is met with like a wall of inertia, right like, oh, no, you can't do this because then

it's gonna cost the economy more money. Or you know, it's gonna affect the supply chains because now you're constricting the available drivers. If you say, make it more difficult to get a cd L or can I pay? Just just on this point, um, And this is another sort of devil's advocate question, But I feel comfortable asking you

this because you mentioned your libertarian roots. Is there is there like attention between the deregulated trucking industry low barriers to entry, you know, sort of maybe attracts a certain type of person to be a driver, someone who wants to work for themselves, who wants to have freedom, not have to jump through a red tape and then actually reforming the industry, maybe putting in more restrictions, more training, more regulations. Is that like a sure that that is attention?

And that's a very good question, and I'm glad you asked it, because what happens with that tension is so there's been a lot of discourse around about the downstream effects of the nineteen eight Motor Carrier Acts finned into law by Jimmy Carter and the effects that's had on the trucking business and the you know, the downward pressure on rates and wages. And that's a thing that's true. And it was a first identified academically by this guy named Michael Belzer who wrote a book and that was

published in two thousands called Sweatshops on Wheels. And a thing that Belser identifies in the book, which I have also seen and a lot of other truckers have also seen, is that instead of regulating the business side of it, like freight lanes, how much your rates are gonna be all that side of the business, they now overregulate the

operational side, so they regulate the driver's right. So and and there's gonna be another book being published next month by an academic at Coronell named Karen Levy, which is called data driven Trucker's in the New workplace, a veilance, and she has spent ten years studying like the effects of all of the regulatory imposition on the driver through surveillance technology, driver facing cameras, e l d s, all of this stuff that's meant to regulate us because of

the public sphere of you know, drivers driving tired, over their hours, all this stuff, which is an effect of the fact that the market has been pummeled by deregulations. So there's this regulation question, but it's not looked at correctly that that they've deregulated the market. But they just moved the regulation from the operations of the companies and the rating and the business side of it, and they've moved all the regulation onto the operations and onto the driver.

Which is another reason people wash out because if you're somebody like me who has been in the business my entire life, my dad was a trucker, both my uncles were truckers, my grandt was a trucker. I was fixing, helping mechanics, fixed trucks and driving around when I was a teenager after school and I'm one of the sort of last of the big game hunters. I know what

I'm doing. If somebody is a professional and knows what they're doing, they don't want to be told how to do their job by some human resources heridan or health and safety pencil neck person that's breathing down their neck. And that's a factor. Like another thing, and this applies more to than just trucking, is like the psychology of people who work for a living. Most people that work for a living just want to do their jobs and

be left alone. And we have this like management mentality, were like every single thing has to be done exactly as the computer models tell us and as safe as possible, and like they're trying to impose theory on material real reality, and it drives the people actually doing the work insane. So you know, you want to like end driver churn

and driver attention. One of the factors causing that is that they've overregulated the people doing the work rather than the people in charge of the markets and which the work is being done. Like does that make any sense? Yeah, that's and that's an incredible point. And I hadn't really thought about this before. This idea that's like, okay, the business of trucking, the business of pay etcetera increasingly deregulated, even as more burden gets shifted to the driver in

the truck. And the idea of monitoring and so essentially sort of redistributing the imposition of where the regulation happens. And I hadn't really thought about it before, but it sort of leads me to where I was going to

go with my next question. And you know, one of the things that Tracy and I have talked about, and we interviewed the CEO of a freight brokerage kind of is this attempt to make it even more computerized, like the like the uberization of trucking, that all deal are, all gigs are an app and you put in your requirement and then a job shows up. What have you seen in terms of how that affects you? This attempt to essentially apply apply this sort of algorithm uper model

to your industry. Well, that model can work in certain sectors, but not all of them. So trucks move everything right, and not all commodities, not all products get moved in the same type of truck right right now, eye haul logs, you cannot do anything with logging trailer I pulled except haul logs. That's it. That's all it's good for. Right. A really good friend of mine, owner operator is name's Chris. He has a he works for a company that does

bulk pneumatic stuff. So like it's like bulk commodities that are like either powder eyes or small pellets and they get blown in and out of his tanker trailer with a vacuum or or a pressure system. You can't just put that on uber. The uberization of trucking is only for like freight, where like you have a box trailer with doors on the back and everything comes in and

out on the forklift. And so the trucking industry because it's so diverse and there's so many different angles on it, like the uberization thing only applies to certain parts of it. Does that make sense? Yeah? Absolutely? Can I ask one more, one more like specific example, which is I was reading your blog, which is great, by the way, but you mentioned that in your three decades of trucking experience that you had one experience with someone who actually paid you

over time for trucking. Can you talk a little bit about that, like why why would some people pay overtime versus the vast majority who are not paying extra. How does that work? Yeah, that one employer was b here in the United States, and I'm not sure if that was a function of state law or just the fact it was like hazardous materials and they wanted to be able to keep people around. And it was seasonal right.

The commodity I held with propane, and a lot of people in the North used propane to heat their homes. Soince it gets really busy in the winter, busy to the point where you're working seventy eight hours a week, and if it didn't over time, they probably wouldn't get anybody to work for them, whereas other companies I've worked for,

it was either straight mileage or percentage. And you know, I learned very early on in my truck and career that you know the freight market, the you know, pulling a box trailer, it's because of all the factors we've just discussed. It's not it's not the place you're gonna make tons of money. And I've always done oversized loads, heavy stuff, bualt, commodities, hazardous materials of all a lot of fuel blogs. I've tried to stay away from the

freight market. But the I mean, it's easy enough for somebody who's been in the business long enough like me and who is competent to say that, but we still have to have something for the vast majority of drivers who are stuck in this freight market that just won't seem to heal itself and correct the factors which make it underpaid. Turned through drivers cause accidents, offload all of

these costs onto society insurance claims for accidents. There's this whole discourse around like what do they call it nuclear claims? Were like or nuclear verdicts, where you know, there's an accident and some people are killed and then like the judge just goes to crazy on the on the trucking company in question. And then there's another issue in the

trucking business with self ensuring. A lot of these large mega carriers, they're so big and they and they have have so much throughputting, they make so much money that they self ensure. And when you self ensure, you're not playing by the same rules as other insurance companies who might want to vet drivers better or impose experience limits. Right, So there's there's just all these different factors affecting the business that make it very difficult to say, you know,

here's one solution that's gonna work for everybody. Right, I want to get to just sort of the current state of the sort of marketing, the economy and diesel prices. But one last sort of very just a detail question. What do you do while you're waiting there for hours? What do you truck drivers do while you're waiting? Do you like do you like haunk your horn and complain and say I don't know. You know, the few times back in the day when I hauled freight, I just

carried lots of books with me and I read. Some guys polished their wheels. Some guys catch up on sleep. Some guys, I mean, you know, now they're smartphones, so they just scroll reads, catch up on sleep whatever. And I mean it should be noted that during the COVID regime, where everybody was like scared of this marginally if effective virus, that many distribution centers and facilities across America and Canada wouldn't let drivers into use their facilities. A lot of

them don't. As a matter of course, anyway, there's this whole problem with like distribution centers not letting you use their lunch rooms or bathrooms or anything. They just expect you to stay in your truck the whole time. So you're basically being treated like a pariah as a matter of course, like it's sort of an industry standard thing. And then COVID like crank that up to eleven and made it even worse. So you basically spend a lot

of time sitting with yourself. Why don't we broaden it out a little bit and talk about the general environment for trucking at the moment, because you know, this has garnered quite a lot of attention. People like to look at freight rates as indicative of where we're heading in the economic cycle. So what are you seeing in terms of I guess load activity and also the rates that you're actually being paid. I'll give you a good reference my friend Jamie Hagen, who's very active on Twitter, real

good Twitter follow at hell bent hagen Um. He's an owner operator, has a bunch of his own trucks. He made a tweet on the weekend about watching um the spot load market. Loadboards drop almost instantaneously like you would try and book a load, and like a load might pay a dollar fifty a mile and then it would all of a sudden drop down to a dollar a mile. And we had a conversation about this, and he mentioned that, you know, typically trucking gets really slow in January and February.

There's always this like post holiday lull, and that's that happens regardless of whatever the other economic circumstances are. It's sort of like a truism and trucking that you know, January and early part of February or slow. We're seeing now that that drop off and slowness is happening now when it should be peak season. Um loads, loads being moved in advance of Christmas holiday shopping, you know, um,

you know, people ordering things from Amazon. So you know, there was there was an article on freight waves recently about like FedEx is like furlowing drivers. But it's it's only mid November, right, So the market such as it is, seems really unhealthy right now. Plus you know we're I I live in upstate New York. Uh, six dollars and five cents a gallon seems to be fairly average around here for fuel. That's unsustainable without significant fuel search charges

out of the freight bills. I can't I can't speak for the rest of the country, but like you know,

the we're not looking at a very good time. So I just have I guess one last question here, but whether it's you know, this sort of broader the sustainability of existing trends, the current macro climate and sort of all of it put together, do you see any prospect for change positive in the industry and or internally or self motivated or is it all sort of going to like setting aside, whether things even improve, or whether there's a new pay model which was probably not gonna happen

for a while. What do you see as lasting changes from the sort of the ructions that we've seen during all the supply chain stress in COVID. Well that's hard to protect. But I mean the nice thing has been the sort of level of awareness And I wanna, you know,

credit you guys with this a little bit. You know, since the whole COVID thing for the last couple of years, a lot of people being that they're sort of stuck at home in the in the in the brighter amongst them are wondering how everything is still moving while the keyboard warriors and email case stays at home. Is that like there's this new there, there's there's some attention being

paid to the to the material economy. Um, whether or not that attention manages to last, and whether or not, you know, people like you know, Representative Andy Levin who's been primaried out and won't be in Congress next year and is guaranteeing overtime for Trucker's Act bill keeps moving forward. Remains to be seen, but like you know, a lot

of these problems have been highlighted. I don't I don't know whether or not whether or not I should be optimistic about this, because you know, the truck dry verse, they're deeply cynical people, right because this the exemption to us being paid overtime has been around for so long. The sort of like the just nature of the business and and so many different factors affecting trucking and making logistics. You just kind of sort of shrug your shoulders and

say it is what it is. And I know that's not like a complete answer for you in your audience, but like it's hard to tell, but I am sort of heartened somewhat at the interest shown to this business in the wake of the COVID stuff. You know, guys like yourselves and the popularity of people online such as like huntsmen and various logistics specialists. You know, that's good.

Whether or not that translates into legitimate attempts to fix the business, I don't know, but like one of the reasons I wrote my latest substract about the American Trucking Association is if UM norms in like you know, NPR American podcast listeners keep coming to the American Trucking and before, so thank you for that. Well we had, we had Gordon, before,

we had an at least. Okay, that's good. That's good. No, but like um, it's good that you guys spoke with me, and I think like speak with more people on the ground, you know, to borrow my friend Oliver Bateman's phrase, doing the work, like doing the actual work of the material economy, and and and like the last thirty forty years of whatever you want to call it, Reagonomics, neoliberalism, Clinton whatever, globalism, global much in ad whatever you wanna call it, has

shifted so much attention away and concern away from the working class. If you keep focusing on those people, keep having use conversation you know, as they say, the devil is in the details and where the folks on the ground actually doing things. Keep keep keep that up and you might actually start fixing things. Gordon McGill such a treat speaking to really appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk and I hope to have you back on at some point. That was a really fantastic

and thank you so much. Oh no, thank you guys, Like I say, keep it up. I appreciate your fetishization of freight, nursery and logistics and whatnot. It makes it fell feel good. Thank you, sure, take care of Thank you. I thought that was a fantastic conversation with Gordon and just extremely in a short time, extremely illuminating about some of the pain points and trucking that I hadn't fully appreciated. Absolutely. I also I hadn't realized that we had not actually

spoken to a truck driver. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure we've spoken to some informally at various conferences over the years, but not officially on the podcast. But I also thought, you know, the point he made about if you're concerned about supply chain issues, choke points at ports and depots, and things like that. The idea of having an actual chunk of your trucking capital tied up waiting and not being particularly efficient. I thought that was a

good point, and I really thought it was interesting. You know, I hadn't thought it's like, okay, there's a shortage of you know, people keep talking about the truck driver shortage, and on some level, fun we can accept that. But I hadn't really thought it's like, Okay, it makes sense, like make it easier to get a CDL, make it easier to go to truck driver school, make it easier

for people to come into the business. But I hadn't thought about this idea that what that does, ultimately is it just sustained a churn model where yes, you solve the problem of people coming in, but you don't solve the problem of truck driver retention people actually staying in the industry. Yeah. Absolutely, all right, Well, plenty more trucking episodes to come. I'm sure. Shall we leave it there for now? Let's leave it there, Okay. This has been

another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway, and I'm Joe Wi isn't, though. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart, check out the autonomous Trucker subject of our guest Gordon McGill, follow our producer Kerman Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, and for all of our podcasts at Bloomberg, check out the handle at podcasts. And I wanted to let you know about a special event that we're holding

four listeners. My co host Tracy Alloway and I will be speaking with past guest Josh Younger as well as Columbia law professor levmanand in a special live episode of The Odd Lots podcast on November twenty nine. We're gonna be holding it at Bloomberg h Q, and you're welcome to come Mingo Joint. We're gonna have cocktails, cannapay and other stuff on that day along with the live recording.

So if you're interested in attending a live episode of the Odd Lots podcast as well as meeting me and Tracy, as well as meeting our guests, and as well as meeting other Odd Lots listeners, go find the rs VP. Both Tracy and I have tweeted about it. It's also on Bloomberg dot com slash odd lots. Sign up and join us in New York City at Bloomberg h Q on November twenty nine. Thanks for listening.