Milby said, “I have forty open positions right now. We’ve had a shortage for the past ten years. It’s just getting worse every year.”
The American Trucking Associations (ATA) is reporting this week that there will be a shortage of nearly 50,000 truckers in the United States by year’s end. The shortage was pegged at 30,000 drivers two years ago, according to money.cnn.com, and 20,000 drivers a decade ago.
American businesses need truck drivers to move goods around. And not having enough of them affects daily deliveries of everything from food and gas to home delivery of online Amazon orders.
Trucker compensation has been going up 8 percent to 12 percent a year in recent years, according to Bob Costello, chief economist at the ATA. That’s a lot higher than wages for the rest of Americans, which have barely budged recently.
The median annual wage for a trucker who works for a private fleet, such as a truck driver employed by Walmart, is $73,000, according to ATA.
The Labor Department pegs the median annual salary for all truck drivers at about $40,000.
There are 1.6 million truck drivers in America. Of those, about 750,000 are “for hire,” meaning they work for a truck company that’s hired by another company, such as a grocery chain, to deliver its product. These truckers are sometimes on the road for 10 days at a time before coming home, Costello said.
At a time when work-life balance issues, such as paid leave and flexible schedules are gaining spotlight in the U.S. economy, trucking companies are challenged to recruit and retain workers. Add an aging workforce and a lack of interest from young workers and you’ve got a shortage.
The median age of truckers is 49, according to ATA. The median age for all American workers is about 42, according to Labor Department.
Costello admits the industry is having the toughest time retaining young workers. Trucking companies also have a tough time recruiting women, who have become a larger part of the workforce than in previous generations.
Women make up 47 percent of the total U.S. workforce, yet only 6 percent of all truck drivers are women, according to the Labor Department and ATA.
“A lot of times depending on where you’re working, you’re gone all week, sometimes you’re gone more than a week, and it’s just hard getting people into it that if they have little kids,” said Brad Bradley of Home Run Inc.
Driver school also is expensive.
“If we could just get them to come in, I think they’d enjoy what they’re doing,” Bradley said.