Stuck in Reverse

Nearly every element of every thing produced by a modern economy rides on a truck at some point in its life. As a result, trucking touches every industry in America, leaving truckers at the forefront of the nation’s economic turmoil over many decades. The job they perform, and the quality of that job especially, can serve as an important indicator of the American worker’s well-being. In a sane world, economists would spend as much time at the annual Mid-America Truck Show in Louisville, Kentucky as they spend each winter in Davos.

MATS, as the regulars call it, typically sees over 55,000 attendees descend on the massive Kentucky Exposition Center complex, many of them truckers who bring their rigs and camp out in them over the three days of conferencing and festivities. An extraordinary feature of the event, to which it owes much of its popularity, is its cost. Register months in advance and it’s free. Miss that cutoff, the ticket skyrockets to $10, a price that most working-class people can easily afford.

Like any job, trucking has its tradeoffs. Life on the open road means time away from home. Freedom and solitude can quickly turn into uncertainty and loneliness. At least in theory—especially given the industry’s incessant complaints of a “driver shortage”—the market would be solving these problems. Different types of employment, including independent ownership of a truck, could offer truckers options that speak to their different priorities. Technology could make the job more pleasant; more efficient practices could boost productivity and pay. Maybe regulators could even play a role, ensuring that the corporations occupying such a vital economic role adhere to rules that make their industry a reliable and resilient one. A gathering like MATS could be an exciting opportunity to learn about developments on all these fronts.

Unfortunately, it is closer to the opposite. There’s no shortage of fanfare, from information sessions befitting C-suite corporate shindigs, to product manufacturer displays, to companies looking to hire drivers, country music performances, and dozens of chrome-bespectacled custom rigs competing for your attention. But good news is hard to find. The industry appears stuck in reverse, with forces conspiring to degrade the trucker’s job even as employers complain they cannot find enough drivers to do it.

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The first half of MATS’s opening day is reserved mostly for industry insiders, but numerous sponsored breakfasts and seminars are open to the public, and one of the most highly attended early events this year was hosted by Kevin Rutherford, a longtime trucker and industry commentator. Rutherford has been in the business since 1986, his dad was a trucker, and many of his brothers have been behind the big wheel as well. He doesn’t speak about trucking as a job, exactly. The industry is one that has long suited independent owner-operators on a small-business model, and many working people aspire to that arrangement. Rutherford has made a name for himself teaching people how to go into business for themselves properly.

MATS is infused with this dream of small business ownership—nearly all the trucks on display outside the convention center are owned by sole owner-operators or those with small fleets of trucks, who typically have relationships with their own customers rather than arrangements negotiated through larger carriers. Some carriers did have recruitment displays in one wing of the massive Expo Center, but even they tended to be small by comparison to the mega fleets that have thousands of trucks.

This year, 70 people signed up for Rutherford’s “Certified Master Carrier” course, which included two days of seminars and instructional presentations, and a full year of support afterward. Rutherford has been running some variation of the program since 2005 and has taught thousands of people to become their own boss, long before the “Uberization” of the economy began in earnest. But his task is as much to steer people away from that path as on to it.

“Not everyone has the right mindset or attitude to be a successful business owner,” Rutherford told me in a phone interview. “Some people are great truckers, but that doesn’t automatically translate to business acumen.” He adds that some don’t like to be told that they’ll be better off as employee-drivers. “I tell people things they don’t want to hear. I have a focus on success and many of the things which make you successful are not always popular.”

The idea of being a business owner, with its ostensible independence, often runs into certain market, managerial, and regulatory realities necessitated by the Amazons of the world and the pressure they exert on prices. The low barriers to entry and constant price wars reward those who cut corners, which in turn triggers further oversight, both from regulators and ass-covering corporations. The challenges of navigating the bureaucracy widen the gap between those who have the chops to back up their small business desires and those whom would be better served by driving for an employer. The costs in time and money of keeping “between the lines” can be as straining as keeping the truck on the road; some of us would rather “steer and gear” than do paperwork, have weekends to ourselves, and not be taking the risk of owning and maintaining a depreciating piece of equipment while trying to turn a profit.

The success of “independent” owner-operators, or lack thereof, was central to the thesis of University of Pennsylvania sociologist Steve Viscelli’s landmark study, The Big Rig: Trucking and The Decline of the American Dream. Published in 2016, The Big Rig was the culmination of more than a decade of research on the strategies that trucking companies adopted after the industry’s deregulation in 1980 and the reasons why the industry churned through so many truckers.

A key strategy, Viscelli found, was the lease-operator model, pitched to drivers as an “independent” opportunity to buy their own trucks through lease-to-own programs and pursue the widespread American dream of small-business ownership. But the lease agreements heavily favored the companies offering them, shifted risk to the driver while leaving control with the company, and mostly failed to deliver on the promises of independence or success. The extraordinary washout rate for lease operators has prompted a number of high-profile lawsuits, challenging the legality of the arrangements and alleging that trucking companies misclassified what are essentially employees as “independent contractors.”

At MATS, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) held an information session open to the public, centered on questions about the lease-operator model, attended sparsely to say the least. The same pattern was apparent throughout the “Pro-Talks Seminar Series”—information sessions presented by MATS on various aspects of the industry and sponsored by a number of product manufacturers, as well as load brokerages and even by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Truckers, who have become progressively more surveilled and regulated than any other group of workers, can be forgiven for skipping presentations such as “Are You Unknowingly Noncompliant?” or listening to bureaucrats at the “FMCSA Information Session on Key Programs and Policies.”

As in so many sectors of the economy, real opportunity does exist for the person with entrepreneurial talent and the aspiration to build a business. But as in so many sectors, only a small fraction of workers fits that definition. For everyone else, the “opportunity” appears mostly to be a smokescreen hiding their own worsening fortunes, as truckers wages, adjusted for inflation, are half of what they were in 1980.

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And what of the company driver? A visit to the recruiting area of MATS finds several dozen companies with staff on hand and rigs on display, hoping to sign up another disaffected trucker looking for a better deal. Talk of home time, and the freight lanes on offer that would get truckers into their own driveways more often, as well as benefits and cents-per-mile rates dominate, but for the most part the offers are bland and lousy, reflective of the constraints that hem trucking companies in.

As I have written previously, the deregulation of the 1980s set off a vicious cycle in which trucking companies competing on price, rather than service, continually sought to squeeze more work out of drivers while slashing their pay, leading to extraordinarily high levels of churn in the workforce. In a proper market, the need to retain good employees would have halted this decline. Instead, the companies “solved” their problem by lobbying the government to provide a constant stream of freshly trained drivers and by developing exploitive models like the lease-operator and various forms of indentured servitude for immigrant drivers. Any trucking company that tries to do right by its drivers gets quickly undercut.

The questions that a trucker might have for an employer go well beyond the typical concerns about wages and benefits. Home time, areas of operations, length of run, and types of loads all shape the job. More striking are the newer questions now piled atop the old: Do your trucks have driver-facing cameras? Is your equipment old enough, or are you otherwise exempt from the Electronic Logging Device (ELD) mandate? Will I be paid for the loading and unloading delays caused by customers? (Such compensation is rarely guaranteed, and not mandated by law.)

The ELD best captures the modern driver’s problems. It is a piece of satellite-tracking surveillance technology mandated in 2017 to be installed on trucks. The idea was to improve safety on the roads by preventing drivers from driving in excess of regulated hours of service and then adjusting the numbers with traditional paper logs. But those adjustments were a way of dealing with the tension created by hard-and-fast rules disconnected from the reality of the job and the adversity that drivers face on a day-to-day basis. As Cornell sociologist Karen Levy observed in Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, the ELD mandate was never going to deliver on the promises of improved safety, because it did not address the underlying economic incentives that encourage aggressive driving in the first place.

For many truckers at MATS, the impositions of such oversight on those who do want to drive the right way is a bone of contention. By continuing to mandate these technologies, fleet owners and the government eliminate the driver’s agency and suggest that he or she is incapable of operating the truck safely. It might not seem like a big deal, but who wants to be told you aren’t to be trusted to do your job properly? If the technology led to dramatic safety improvements, perhaps there would be a case, but the data show pretty conclusively that the ELD mandate has failed to deliver on its promise, which tells drivers that the real point of the mandate is control. Aggressive driving infractions have gone up, collisions and other preventable incidents have gone up, and the supposed safety benefits are nowhere to be found. In the face of this reality, instead of reconsidering the imposition of the ELD mandate, the FMCSA is proposing an expansion to trucks older than model year 2000 as well, despite no evidence showing that exempt trucks are causing any problems whatsoever. Punishment and control, indeed.

In the meantime, the grandfathering of older trucks has led to truckers preferring them, which is part of the reason so many older trucks make up the displays at MATS. Pining for a past that went unusually well doesn’t amount to much in the way of adjusting the working conditions of the present, but almost every driver at MATS will tell you that recent regulatory incursions into the industry have made an already tough job more difficult. They see embodied in these older trucks the respect and professionalism once afforded them that has been chipped away for many years, and they would like to have it back. As always, the small-l folk libertarianism of America, in its own quiet way, can be measured by the actions of feet rather than voting for those who seem to have little control over the permanent bureaucracy that invades so much of our lives. Perhaps it is time to consider the human element, and to stop viewing potential truckers as liquid human resources slurry to be managed, and just let them do their jobs.

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Purveyors of the next wave of technology appear determined to repeat these mistakes. Autonomous truck manufacturers have been hyping their robotic trucks for some years now as the solution to the industry’s driver shortage complaints. One of those manufacturers, Aurora Innovation, either to their credit, or in a display of cajones worthy of an award, sent a representative to MATS to give a marketing presentation on replacing truckers, which was dressed up as concern for the same, though in clothing from that infamous naked emperor. Aurora’s presenter clearly held some kind of middle-management safety position at the company, reflected not only in his Tech-Bro vest, but also the style of his delivery, which seemed designed to put the audience to sleep. The company’s objective, he tried to convey, was not to replace human truck drivers, but to give them better jobs, contrary to the messaging found in their investor prospectus.

To its credit, Aurora had a mic set up to allow for questions from the audience. Some small-fleet owners asked about the cost of the “Aurora Driver” package, as they call it, while others were curious about how the technology worked. A colleague who had joined me at the event, James Year, asked a pointed question about the differences in messaging that Aurora gives to the public, to politicians, and to investors. I then challenged his use of industry statistics claiming a shortage of drivers.

Unbeknownst to us, an Aurora product manager was also in the audience, and when the presentation concluded, as the audience dispersed, he made a beeline for us. Exuding the energy of a happy salesman, he ended up offering James a job as a “safety driver”—one of these arrangements where the human is used to teach the machine to replace him, and acts as the party to blame if things go wrong and the lawyers show up. James passed on the offer, seeing the ruse meant to cover having to sign a non-disclosure agreement—the cost of knowing too much.

To the technologists, as to the employers, and the customers, and the regulators, truck drivers are not people at all—they are merely an input, like motor oil and tires, necessary to the process of moving things from place to place. The idea of shaping the job to accommodate the human person is entirely foreign to them. The person must adapt himself to the job, which will take whatever form makes everyone else’s life easiest. And if not enough proud professionals will accept this arrangement? Then there is a shortage, to be solved by finding new and far less qualified people to temporarily exploit and churn through.

Spend ten minutes at MATS, though, and the potential is undeniable. There is no shortage of drivers, or passion, or hard work. As in so many areas of our economy, the shortage is of dignity and freedom, created by a short-sighted quest for efficiency that assigns good jobs a value of zero. Destroying what could be a great profession may be profitable in the short term, but it is not progress.