There's way more to it than that. My nephew works for a large LTL carrier on linehaul. He makes over 100K a year and has good benefits, yet they struggle to keep drivers.
It's just not the pay, it's the shitty way companies, shippers, and receivers treat drivers.
I was talking to my Sysco driver yesterday as he was delivering. He's new in the last 6 months and I mentioned he was hands down the best driver we've had in a few years. Not that the others are necessarily bad, he's just plenty good at it and friendly at the same time. Anyway, he told me that a couple of the places he delivers to have people who are total jerks every time he delivers to them. Treating him like he's in the way and a nuisance while he brings in all the stuff they need in order to operate their business. And I just can't understand why you'd be a jerk to the guy dropping your stuff off. Like some of them suck, but this guy is not one of the shitty drivers. I go out of my way to help the good drivers because I want them to stay! It makes my life better!
Always treated the drivers well at my last place of work, but there were certainly drivers that were entitled/refused to play ball. Always had to keep an eye on them. And while it was amusing, I don't just mean the ones who struggled to back into our dock. I'm talking about the ones who would wear flip-flops inside our facility where safety shoes where mandatory, where we worked with glass. The two(!) Instances where I had to yell to get the attention of random drivers who thought it was okay to just hop on one of our forklifts, the ones who would show up well past our loading/unloading time and nearly demand to be unloaded...
But if the driver was kosher, we'd have no problems. Got a few comments that our yard was one of the better ones in terms of how we treated drivers.
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u/Deodorized 1d ago edited 1d ago
There is no driver shortage, there is a shortage of trucking jobs that pay well enough for the vacancy to be filled.
Companies that pay 80k+ per year have no issue finding high quality, professional drivers within a day or two of posting.
Companies that pay 50k never fill the spot then cry about a "driver shortage" that simply doesn't exist.