Speaker 1: Brought to you by Bank of America. Merrill Lynch Seeing
Speaker 1: what others have seen, but uncovering what others may not.
Speaker 1: Global Research that helps you harness disruption voted top global
Speaker 1: research from five years running. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and
Speaker 1: Smith Incorporated. If all things were equal, you know, and
Speaker 1: you worked an eight hour day and you made enough
Speaker 1: money to pay your bills, it would be a decent job.
Speaker 1: Because you're out, You're out on the road. I mean,
Speaker 1: there is the freedom. One of the reasons I drove
Speaker 1: a truck is because I don't like sitting behind a desk. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome back to Bloomberg Benchmark Show about the Global economy.
Speaker 1: It's Thursday October. I'm Scott Landman, an economics editor with
Speaker 1: Bloomberg and News in Washington, and I'm Keith Smith, an
Speaker 1: editor with Bloomberg in New York. Today we're going to
Speaker 1: turn our attention to one of the biggest economic puzzles
Speaker 1: of our time, one that seems to be a microcosm
Speaker 1: of the U. S. Labor market. It seems like a
Speaker 1: lot of numbers show it's in great shape, but below
Speaker 1: the surface, some funky things are going on. And one
Speaker 1: of those kind of funky things that you're talking about, Scott,
Speaker 1: is where have all the truck drivers gone? That's right.
Speaker 1: We'll be talking first with Justin Fox, a columnist for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg View who has written about this issue, and then
Speaker 1: with an actual truck driver who happens to be a
Speaker 1: close relative of mine. What actually sparked this discussion is
Speaker 1: a recent article by one of our U S economy reporters,
Speaker 1: Patricia Eliah. She wrote that one trucking company is getting
Speaker 1: so desperate for new drivers that they're handing out all
Speaker 1: kinds of bonuses, including signing bonuses of up to five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. And Scott, when I read that, there was
Speaker 1: just so fascinating to me because the idea of, you know,
Speaker 1: the signing bonus here in the economy is just it's
Speaker 1: so unheard of. That's I mean, that's something that's like
Speaker 1: reserved for the NFL or the NBA or something like that,
Speaker 1: certainly not truck drivers from what I would assume. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I was thinking of these draft picks that
Speaker 1: get like a million dollar bonus if they're going to
Speaker 1: be the next hot quarterback or something like that. But um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not just the shortage, the shortage of
Speaker 1: labor that's driving up these bonuses and wage costs for companies.
Speaker 1: And Patty explained to me there are a lot of
Speaker 1: other factors going on. There's an age restriction, you have
Speaker 1: to be at least twenty one to drive across state lines.
Speaker 1: Certifications are expensive, truck drivers are aging, It's not an
Speaker 1: easy job to do, and you're away from home a
Speaker 1: lot um. So what gives here though? Is there really
Speaker 1: a worker shortage or are they just not offering high
Speaker 1: enough wages or something deeper going on. I want to
Speaker 1: bring in Justin Fox, who's sitting with Kate in our
Speaker 1: New York studio. Justin's a calumnist for Bloomberg View and
Speaker 1: used to be the editorial director at the Harvard Business Review. Justin,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining us, Thanks for having me so, Justin,
Speaker 1: you also wrote a column of after seeing Patty's story,
Speaker 1: and it was trying to figure out what's going on
Speaker 1: with all of these truck drivers. So I mean, talk
Speaker 1: to us about kind of some of your main theories.
Speaker 1: What do you what do you think is the most
Speaker 1: plausible here? Well, everybody's been talking a lot about this
Speaker 1: looming threat of automation, um in trucks and cars and
Speaker 1: everything else. And I mean one of the interesting things
Speaker 1: is truck driving. In a time when manufacturing employment has
Speaker 1: been on this long decline, truck driving has made up
Speaker 1: for a lot of that, and it's something you don't
Speaker 1: necessarily need a college education to be able to do.
Speaker 1: Traditionally the pay was pretty good and so um. I
Speaker 1: Actually it happened to be that Patricia's story came out
Speaker 1: the day before the monthly jobs report for September, and
Speaker 1: so I like to dig around in the job's report
Speaker 1: to look at things that other people aren't paying attention
Speaker 1: to every month, and so I was just I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: I'll look at trucking employment. And one interesting and somewhat
Speaker 1: odd thing is it hasn't actually grown since mid two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen. There was a big recovery from the recession,
Speaker 1: and then it's been pretty much flat since then. And
Speaker 1: what is that? Because there, you know, maybe there's demand
Speaker 1: in this one place. I think it was in floor
Speaker 1: to the Patricia wrote about maybe it's not national, or
Speaker 1: maybe it's just that trucking companies are having so much
Speaker 1: trouble getting people. So then I looked at wages in trucking,
Speaker 1: and I mean that should there's no dramatic developments in
Speaker 1: that lately. They haven't suddenly gone way up, although you
Speaker 1: might not capture these kind of signing bonuses thing in
Speaker 1: that data anyway, but put some context, So what kind
Speaker 1: of would be the range of truck driving wages? I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm just curious if I've totally picked the wrong
Speaker 1: career choice here. I mean, it's currently looks to be
Speaker 1: around a little over twenty dollars an hour average hourly
Speaker 1: earnings of production and non supervisory employees in the trucking industry.
Speaker 1: And now the interesting thing is in nineties there was
Speaker 1: a big truckers made a bunch more than most workers,
Speaker 1: um and then somewhere around after two thousand that slid
Speaker 1: down to where it's almost identical to the average private,
Speaker 1: non farm, non supervisory worker. And how much war was
Speaker 1: it back in kind of what you were saying, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm eyeballing a charge here. It looks like it was
Speaker 1: about thirteen dollars to ten dollars. It was significant. One thing,
Speaker 1: one other thing in Patty's story justin was that, uh,
Speaker 1: some some companies, trucking companies were also reporting that they
Speaker 1: needed to find workers, but they were unable to raise
Speaker 1: wages because they couldn't really raise the prices they were charging.
Speaker 1: Is that, you know, a broader conundrum in the economy
Speaker 1: or dilemma? Um, I mean it definitely. These have not
Speaker 1: been a great few years for trucking companies, and I'm
Speaker 1: not exactly sure why that is. I think part of
Speaker 1: it is just the recession came and sort of goods
Speaker 1: trade volumes never quite boomed back to where they were before.
Speaker 1: Maybe people are spending more time buying apps than buying stuff,
Speaker 1: um so, and and trucking companies in general just had
Speaker 1: a really tough time, So I would imagine that, I mean,
Speaker 1: a it's just it's still a competitive enough, competitive enough
Speaker 1: industry that, um, you know, they can't just set prices
Speaker 1: as they will be. There's these new players coming in,
Speaker 1: like most notably Amazon, that are probably making life tougher
Speaker 1: for some of the incumbents. And it's also hard to
Speaker 1: kind of talk about, you know, something like trucking industry. Right,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't necessarily require a college degree, but it's
Speaker 1: a steady job, it can pay pretty much. And like
Speaker 1: as we've been watching this election, unfold. That's one thing
Speaker 1: that keeps getting brought up. All our jobs are gone,
Speaker 1: all our jobs are gone. But in reality it sounds
Speaker 1: like we're talking about a job where they're having a
Speaker 1: hard time attracting people. Yeah, but part of that is
Speaker 1: it's no longer as good a job as it used
Speaker 1: to be. I mean, the pay used to be better,
Speaker 1: and we may be hearing later that the work conditions
Speaker 1: aren't as good. I don't know about that. What about
Speaker 1: these stories that have been coming out recently. There's there's
Speaker 1: one study by former Obama economic advisor Alan Krueger saying
Speaker 1: that men are men who are out of the labor force,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are on pain medication. And there's
Speaker 1: other people citing a study saying men would rather play
Speaker 1: video games. These are people who have kind of be
Speaker 1: in the prime age for a trucking job. What do
Speaker 1: you make of that? I mean, it's really this this
Speaker 1: puzzle of why there's so many more men out of
Speaker 1: the labor force than there used to be. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's been the steady growth since the sixties, but pretty
Speaker 1: dramatic um since two thousand and you know, there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of different different explanations one of them. Part of
Speaker 1: it is clearly on the the sort of demand for
Speaker 1: their labor. So manufacturing jobs have declined, trucking jobs are
Speaker 1: still there, but the pay is not as good. And
Speaker 1: then there have been these other theories about I mean,
Speaker 1: one big one is, um, the incarceration boom. They're just
Speaker 1: a lot more people with criminal records than there used
Speaker 1: to be. It's hard for them to get jobs. Um.
Speaker 1: This video game theory from Eric Hurst, Chicago economist, is
Speaker 1: just that, I mean, there is evidence that men who
Speaker 1: are out of the lay refore spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time playing games or watching TV. And one and I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about this. When I was a kid and
Speaker 1: I would be sick home from school, all it was
Speaker 1: on TV was game shows and soap operas. Now, if
Speaker 1: you're stuck at home, there's a lot of fun stuff
Speaker 1: you can do. And so there is some argument that
Speaker 1: actually there are other things out there if you've got
Speaker 1: enough money to get by on and I don't know,
Speaker 1: you're living in your parents basement and your twenty seven
Speaker 1: you know the balance wing g Do I want to
Speaker 1: go drive a truck all day and all night or
Speaker 1: do I want to play video games? In the basement.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe that's a little bit of it, but I
Speaker 1: can't believe. I mean, they're really big differences in male
Speaker 1: labor force participation now between the US and a lot
Speaker 1: of other wealthy countries. And I think the video games
Speaker 1: are just as good in Japan and Germany as they
Speaker 1: are in the US. So I don't know that that
Speaker 1: explains a whole lot of it. We keep saying male
Speaker 1: is obviously this the female statistics don't match well. The
Speaker 1: problem with the female statistics, it's not problem, is just
Speaker 1: that when you there's this category of people who are
Speaker 1: not in the labor force, which means you don't have
Speaker 1: a job, you're not looking for a job, and UM,
Speaker 1: in the female category, people who are not in the
Speaker 1: labor force, half of them are working, but unpaid, work
Speaker 1: at home, they're taking care of kids, they're taking care
Speaker 1: of elderly family members. Very small percentage of the men
Speaker 1: who aren't in the labor force are doing that. And
Speaker 1: so all it is is it just makes it hard
Speaker 1: to compare the two. I think general sense, like with
Speaker 1: the pain killers, if if you cut out those women
Speaker 1: who are not in the labor force but are actually working, um,
Speaker 1: the percentage of men and women who are taking pain
Speaker 1: killers and aren't in the labor force is about probably
Speaker 1: about the same. Interesting All right, well, Justin and Kate,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break now for a
Speaker 1: word from our sponsor, and when we're back, we are
Speaker 1: going to talk with my uncle who spent his whole
Speaker 1: career as a truck driver. Brought to you by Bank
Speaker 1: of America Merrill Lynch. Seeing what others have seen, but
Speaker 1: uncovering what others may not. Global Research that helps you
Speaker 1: Harness disruption voted top global research from five years running.
Speaker 1: Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Venner and Smith Incorporated. Welcome back. Now
Speaker 1: we're going to bring in a very special guest, someone
Speaker 1: who knows a lot about the trucking industry because he
Speaker 1: spent thirty seven years as a truck driver himself and
Speaker 1: actually now drives a minibus locally. He happens to be
Speaker 1: my uncle. Kenny Han joins us from his home on
Speaker 1: Long Island in Central Islip, New York. Hey, uncle Kenny,
Speaker 1: how's it going. It's going great. How's it going with you? Scott?
Speaker 1: All right? So can you just give us a quick
Speaker 1: recap of your career as a driver and how you
Speaker 1: got started, Well, um, it was sort of something I
Speaker 1: had to do. When I was about seventeen years old,
Speaker 1: I got married and uh I believe it or not,
Speaker 1: and so I just took whatever job I could get,
Speaker 1: you know, and I started driving first. I first started
Speaker 1: driving a van for florist, but I drove a truck
Speaker 1: starting when I was eighteen, I started driving for a
Speaker 1: kitchen cabinet distributor, and then back when around nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: I got my my tractor trailer license and started driving
Speaker 1: over the road and then became a teamster in four
Speaker 1: and worked for the same company for twenty six years.
Speaker 1: Retired from there and in two thousand and eight, and
Speaker 1: then got my job with the town of Iliad driving
Speaker 1: a minibus transporting seniors. So, Uncle Kenny, if I can
Speaker 1: ask you a little bit about kind of what does
Speaker 1: it take to be a truck driver. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: read some I've read some stories that Bloomberg has written,
Speaker 1: some some other ones. It sounds like it's a really
Speaker 1: tough job. It is a tough job. It's not an
Speaker 1: easy job. It's not one that everybody's gonna like. You're
Speaker 1: you're on the road all the time. I mean I
Speaker 1: spent probably most of my career in twelve to fourteen
Speaker 1: hour days every you know, five days a week, sometimes
Speaker 1: even six days. And uh, you know, it's tough on
Speaker 1: your back, it's tough on your on your home life.
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's a very difficult job to do. You
Speaker 1: have to constantly be a you're driving, you know, anybody
Speaker 1: who drives, even to work knows that it can be
Speaker 1: pretty stressful. You're doing this with a with a forty
Speaker 1: eight thousand pound vehicle. You know that that splits in
Speaker 1: the middle and can spin around if you don't if
Speaker 1: you're not careful, and you've got people cutting you off
Speaker 1: all day. So it's a very stressful, stressful job. How
Speaker 1: did you how did you balance you know, that job
Speaker 1: with you know the obviously had had two kids and
Speaker 1: you know, taking care of them part of the time too. Well.
Speaker 1: I was divorced when I was twenty one and a half,
Speaker 1: so you know, but I did have I did see
Speaker 1: my kids on weekends, and uh, yeah, it was tough.
Speaker 1: I mean I was married the second time, and I
Speaker 1: was married for twenty years, and uh, I think one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I got divorced the second time was
Speaker 1: because I was never home and uh, you know, I
Speaker 1: was always you know, when I came home, I said,
Speaker 1: come home at eight o'clock at night. I'd have to
Speaker 1: go to sleep because I have to be back at
Speaker 1: work at six the next morning. So it was it
Speaker 1: affected my home life a real lot. The pay, Like
Speaker 1: you know, I was listening to what you guys were saying,
Speaker 1: and uh, I could tell you that I started as
Speaker 1: a teamster. And now, when I started driving a truck
Speaker 1: back in nineteen seventy two, you know, the pay was,
Speaker 1: you know, on par with what most people were making
Speaker 1: in in you know, in lower level jobs like that.
Speaker 1: But when I when I became a teamster in the
Speaker 1: night four, the pay scale was thirteen twenty three an hour. Now,
Speaker 1: I worked for the same companies as a teamster for
Speaker 1: twenty six years, and when I retired, my pay scale
Speaker 1: was only up to twenty one dollars and changing out,
Speaker 1: which means in twenty six years we are pay only
Speaker 1: went up eight dollars an hour. Now, the way I
Speaker 1: made up for that was by working only over time,
Speaker 1: because luckily for me, being a teamster was an early job.
Speaker 1: But this driver is that you know that like he
Speaker 1: was saying twenty dollars an hour, you make it twenty
Speaker 1: dollars an hour. And there's a lot of these trucking
Speaker 1: companies that don't want to pay you when you have
Speaker 1: to sit around. They don't want to pay you when
Speaker 1: you when you're on layover. And so these guys are
Speaker 1: working twenty four hours around the clock on the road
Speaker 1: and really not really only getting paid for like maybe
Speaker 1: ten of those hours. Are that teamsters as active in
Speaker 1: the industry now as they work during your time. Well,
Speaker 1: the teams have been decimated by by the regulation from UM.
Speaker 1: When I first started driving, there was a hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty two trucking companies teams to trucking companies, and we're
Speaker 1: down to two now. One of them is a company
Speaker 1: I worked for, a BF and the other one is
Speaker 1: Yellow Roadway, which is a combination of two major companies
Speaker 1: that had to combine because they weren't making any money
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, they can't find drivers anymore to
Speaker 1: be teams. Is because the pension plans are going into
Speaker 1: the toilet. And uh, you know, my pension in particular
Speaker 1: has been cut by nineteen hundred dollars because they because
Speaker 1: the pension is going broke. So even those were the
Speaker 1: best jobs in trucking, and those jobs stink. So you
Speaker 1: can only imagine, you know, working for companies like J
Speaker 1: Beyond that want to work you like a dog and
Speaker 1: not pay you anything for for your for your efforts,
Speaker 1: how hard it is for them to find drivers. If
Speaker 1: I can jump in. That just doesn't seem like a
Speaker 1: long term model, you know. I mean we were talking
Speaker 1: about how you know you can't these people are having
Speaker 1: a hard time hiring drivers. I mean, you've been in
Speaker 1: the industry for quite a long time, you know it intimately.
Speaker 1: I mean that just seems like a kick go on
Speaker 1: for very long. It's just not a not a good
Speaker 1: long term model. It's not it's not a good long
Speaker 1: term model, and it's not good for you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: if if all things were equal, you know, and you
Speaker 1: worked an eight hour day and you made enough money
Speaker 1: to pay your bills, um, it would be a decent job.
Speaker 1: Because you're out there, you're out on the road. I mean,
Speaker 1: there is the freedom. One of the reasons I drove
Speaker 1: a truck is because I don't like sitting behind the desk.
Speaker 1: But you know, and there is that freedom. But you know,
Speaker 1: you're not working an eight hour that you're working a
Speaker 1: call up the fourteen hour day and you're and and
Speaker 1: it's very hard work. So it's a poor model to
Speaker 1: begin with. It's always been a poor and to drive
Speaker 1: a truck. You know where the old wagon train people
Speaker 1: again know peas where a horse uh where you know
Speaker 1: they control the horses on on a horse and wagon.
Speaker 1: You know, so we're still there. So it is it
Speaker 1: is one of these jobs that you know, people can
Speaker 1: can do. It's not it's not it's not a job
Speaker 1: that's going to move to China or overseas or somewhere else.
Speaker 1: They're they're going to need truckers to move goods around
Speaker 1: the country no matter what. You know, it's probably gonna
Speaker 1: take a long time to become truly automated. I mean,
Speaker 1: why why can't the Why do you think wages are
Speaker 1: going to stay low? Why won't they go up? Well,
Speaker 1: because because there's competition from all corners, you know, the deregulation.
Speaker 1: Anybody and everybody opens up a trucking company. You know,
Speaker 1: the reason why somebody drug companies went out of business
Speaker 1: was because, uh, you know, when when there was when
Speaker 1: trucking was regulated, they could control their prices and they
Speaker 1: could you know, and they were making a decent living there.
Speaker 1: Prices were set and you know, shippers could not take
Speaker 1: advantage of one truck and company over another because there
Speaker 1: were there was you know, lanes that they had to
Speaker 1: deal with. But now it's you know, whoever gives them
Speaker 1: the best price, and there's you know, there's there's like
Speaker 1: in any other industry, there's dogs out there. They are
Speaker 1: going to go in there and undercut whoever they can
Speaker 1: undercutt and uh, you know something, and it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to be that service matters as much as how much
Speaker 1: the pain for the shipping. Kenny, thanks so much for
Speaker 1: joining us. We're gonna leave it there. Did you want
Speaker 1: to get in a plug for your own radio show?
Speaker 1: A show? I do a Blue Show on w USB
Speaker 1: ninety one FM on Long Island and at Stonybrook University
Speaker 1: every other week from ten pm to midnight. It's a
Speaker 1: great show. I do my friend Jovi, and uh you
Speaker 1: can listen to it online for anybody who's listening around
Speaker 1: the country or around the world at w USB dot fm.
Speaker 1: It's streams. So yeah, thanks for letting me do that
Speaker 1: because I really love that. That's my that's my passion. Now,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm gonna check that out. Thank you, Thanks well.
Speaker 1: Benchmark will be back next week and until then, you
Speaker 1: can find us on the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg dot com,
Speaker 1: as well as on iTunes, pocket casts, and Stitcher. While
Speaker 1: you're there, take a minute to rate and review the
Speaker 1: show so more listeners can find us and let us
Speaker 1: know what you thought of the show. You can talk
Speaker 1: to us and follow us on Twitter, and you can
Speaker 1: find Scott at Scott Landman. You can find me at
Speaker 1: by Keate Smith, and you can find our guest Justin
Speaker 1: at a Fox just and my uncle is also on
Speaker 1: Twitter at at blues Lover three one two Thanks a lot.
Speaker 1: Brought to you by Bank of America. Meryll Lynch seeing
Speaker 1: what others have seen, but I'm covering what others may not.
Speaker 1: Global Research that helps you Harness disruption voted top global
Speaker 1: research from five years running. Merrill Lynch, Piers, Spender and
Speaker 1: Smith Incorporated