Washington Post Headline Writer Hypes Trucker Shortage
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The headline of the Washington Post article should have us all worried, "America has a massive truck driver shortage. Here's why few want an $80,000 job." That sounds pretty dramatic.
The article does begin by telling us about Joyce Brenny, who runs a trucking business in Minnesota, who supposedly pays many of her drivers more than $80,000 a year. (It doesn't indicate if she is the source for this number.) However, folks who read a few paragraphs down discover:
"A few drivers told The Washington Post that they earn $100,000, but many said their annual pay is less than $50,000 (government statistics say median pay for the industry is $42,000)."
In other words, if Ms. Brenny is actually paying her drivers $80,000 a year, she is very much an outlier. The typical driver makes barely half of this amount, which is a likely explanation for any shortage of truckers that might exist. (For a point of reference, the annual pay of a truck driver would be about half of what many CEOs earn in a day and roughly one-tenth of a what a top line politician would get for a one-hour speech to a major bank.)
It also seems that folks who run trucking companies have a hard time understanding how labor markets are supposed to work. Here is the average hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, in the trucking industry:
Trucking Industry: Average Hourly Wage, Adjusted for Inflation
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly pay for truck drivers is actually down from its level of two years ago. While it is up by roughly 5.0 percent from its level a decade ago, it is down by more than 7.0 percent from the peaks hit in the late 1990s.
This seems like yet one more case where we have employers whining about worker shortages because they are unwilling to pay the market wage. And, it seems the Washington Post is aggressively pushing the employers' case even if it means misrepresenting the facts.
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The Washington Post should just stop writing about economics...
Considering that corporate profits are at a record high... and that employee income is flat... any editor should look
twiceten times before publishing anything about "lack of qualified labor"...But this is the venerable Washington Post. I thought everything they publish is the honest truth. Since it is basically unskilled labor, perhaps they could hire illegal aliens to drive the trucks. Of course a lot of this already goes on daily on our highways.
In a similar vein, the airlines and regionals are into a growing shortage of qualified pilots, but are paying more to start and sometimes the entire cost of their training ab initio. Guess the starting and continuing pay depends on the job requirements and skills. People are pretty much paid what they are worth and what they bring to the company.