May 28, 2018
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.
Comments