The Replacement of American Truckers Continues, Nebraska Edition
American Truckers, kicked in the nuts by the Cornhusker State.
Update - Werner finally got back to me with a statement about 2 hours after this post went live; it is included at the bottom.
Yesterday, Tuesday, September 9, I was alerted to an interesting article from an online outfit called ‘Kenya Insights’ by a Twitter mutual who goes by the name of Tarheel Trucker, whose handle appears to derive from living in North Carolina.
Despite the ambiguous phrasing of the title - American Jobs? In Kenya? Nebraska? What? my curiosity was piqued and I immediately set about digging around after reading it, as the first few sentences were immediately inflammatory, especially if you are me and your beat is covering the dissolution/immolation of the American Trucker.
I had to take a screenshot as this website in Kenya won’t allow the highlighting or cutting and pasting of text; when you try, a little box jumps up that says “Content Protected!”, which appears to be significantly more effort than our own government puts into protecting the livelihoods of its citizens.
You will notice that this Kenyan article references the ‘truck driver shortage’; if you have any booze nearby, pour yourself a shot and DRINK!
Given the claims made in this article, and that it comes from some website in Kenya no one has ever heard of outside of Kenya, I attempted to triangulate the information presented about this supposed labor mobility agreement. Another article from another website in Kenya pops up, and this article is more inflammatory and concerning than the last.
Werner Enterprises is one of the largest logistics companies in the United States, and has been a key player in the industry for decades. Their discussions centred on exploring avenues to engage Kenyan truck drivers overseas and support the Kenyan diaspora in securing more opportunities for employment and enterprise development
The truck driver shortage is no secret.
“There are tens of thousands of truck driving jobs that are open at any given time,” said Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen.
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She further extended an invitation to the Werner Enterprises team to visit Nairobi with the aim of further solidifying the engagements and allowing the team to witness the hardworking spirit of Kenyans firsthand. Additionally, it would provide an opportunity for the company to train prospective Kenyan recruits on the requirements needed to qualify for positions at Werner Enterprises.“Kenya is open to sharing its excellent talent with the world, and we think Nebraska would make a good home for our people,” stated PS Roseline Njogu.
The article shares a couple of photos purporting to be of meetings taking place at Werner’s HQ in Omaha, Nebraska, but the wording in this article is a little bit weasel-ish and there are no comments from anyone at Werner.
I’m thinking that Werner, one of the biggest trucking companies in the United States, would have a massive Public Relations problem on their hands if it was found out that they were trolling for truckers in Africa when America is shedding an awful lot of jobs, and as I have reported here numerous times as of late, the trucking industry is on year three of a protracted freight recession and massive over-capacity glut.
We will get back to Werner later.
And just what is the Secretary of State of Nebraska, Bob Evnen, up to with this ‘labor mobility agreement’ with Kenya? As it turns out, quite a bit.
Back in March of 2024, Secretary Evnen announced his leadership of a trade and investment mission to Kenya, which is fairly typical stuff and not all that worrisome, until you read through the companies involved.
The delegation included representatives from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Nebraska Corn Board, Cantera Partners, Home Health Care, Pioneer Crop Science, GLASS (Geo-Location Addressing System Service), and Grand Island Express, Inc., among others.
Grand Island Express is a small trucking company, by American standards, with only 165 trucks on the road, per their own website, but big enough and having been around long enough to be considered a ‘marquee’ name in the business, and a frequent sight along the interstates throughout the midwest. Why would they need to be involved with a trade delegation to Kenya, all the way over in Africa? So much for this claim on Grand Island Express website - if they’re so great to work for, why do they have to hire Kenyans?
NBC affiliate KSNB Local 4 out of York, Nebraska, did a feature on this program, and filmed a number of prospective Kenyan truckers touring the facilities of Grand Island Express. Of note in the piece is Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen repeating the utterly and throughly debunked driver shortage myth, as he engages in ‘pre-damage control’ from the inevitable questions one might have of why we need to source truckers from a country in East Africa in the middle of a protracted freight recession affecting all of the United States.
It appears that Grand Island Express is not the only company in Nebraska looking to deal with its churn and retention problem via importing Kenyans; in fact, there is an entire cottage industry built around this insourcing program in Nebraska, and it is centered in the small Nebraska town of Aurora.
IWS Trucking advertises itself as a recruitment and training service that places brand new truckers with various companies in the industry. The home page of their website is very up front about what they are doing.
In the section of IWS website where they describe their training process, it becomes immediately apparent that they are not set up for hiring Americans, and they are also giving out the most bare bones, ‘train for the test’ instructions which are going to set up these new migrants to America for failure, if not for becoming another statistic in all of the major truck involved collisions on our roads, which have been on the increase since 2016 after many years of slow and steady decline.
‘Training’, Phase One
Interesting how the first orders of business are to establish fake residency status for people who just got off the plane from Kenya. Maybe that’s how they avoid being issued a ‘Non-Domicile’ or ‘Limited Term’ CDL, which would more accurately describe their situation. Now that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is investigating the issue of so many ‘non-domicile’ CDLs, downstream of the research into them from my friends at American Truckers United, maybe US DOT and FMCSA need to pay a visit to IWS to see what they are up to.
’Training’, Phase Two
3 days in class on theory, with computers and wifi! I wonder if that includes English as a Second Language training, or maybe some discussion about how radically different America’s driving culture is to the vast majority of the rest of the world; so different, in fact, that the average Kenyan driver is four times as likely to be involved in a fatal collision as an American driver.
’Training’, Phase Three
Looks ‘impressive’ to the untrained eye, but I don’t see anything about driving in snow or other inclement weather conditions, training for navigating the mountains and steep grades which occupy much of the country, chaining up for those mountains in winter, training for operating in dense urban environments like most of the Eastern Seaboard, training for any other type of trailer besides a van trailer, defensive driving, crash avoidance, nothing. This is the barest bones of the barest bones, and is clearly meant to produce a ‘steering wheel holder' ‘meat in the seat’ body, who, if churn and retention statistics show, will soon quit the first company they are handed off to. And then the next one, and the next one, and the next one, until, like so many Americans have done, quit the trucking industry altogether because it will not address any of the underlying issues which cause it to go through people at such a rapid pace.
I have gone through a number of other CDL schools and training provider programs in Nebraska, and none of them, as yet, are specifically targeting migrant groups.
1. American Job Center (Lincoln/Lancaster County)
Offers a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) Program with full tuition coverage for driving school, plus help with transportation, childcare, and license fees.ajc.lincoln.ne.gov
Partners with schools like Pro-Fleet CDL Driving Academy (Omaha), Roadmaster, Southeast Community College (Milford), and 160 Drive Academy (Omaha).ajc.lincoln.ne.gov
Estimated demand: 778 annual openings for tractor-trailer drivers in Lancaster County. Median wage in Lincoln around $84,410/year. Funding supports 80 people under specific programs.ajc.lincoln.ne.gov
2. Northeast Community College (South Sioux City & Norfolk)
6-week CDL training—190 hrs classroom, 50 hrs hands-on. Free tuition possible via GAP assistance and a $1M U.S. Department of Labor grant.northeast.edu
3. Southeast Community College (Milford)
10-week CDL program (one term) with in-person/online options.
Tuition ~$3,493 total; assists via GAP and Nebraska Trucking Association scholarships. ELDT & HAZMAT compliant. Ranked #4 nationally.southeast.edu+1
4. Central Community College (Hastings)
6-week CDL course, 240 hours training, at least 50 hours of hands-on driving (500 driving miles + 1,300 observation miles).cccneb.edu
5. Western Nebraska Community College
Offers Class A & B CDL training. Class A tuition is free for residents via Gap funding or Department of Labor grants.wncc.edu
6. Additional Programs
WNCC, MCC, Custom Diesel Drivers Training, and multiple other schools across Nebraska offer truck driver training programs to prep for CDL licensing.mccneb.eduNebraska DMVcddt.uswncc.edu
Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) connects job seekers with training and support services—another pathway for eligible folks.dol.nebraska.gov
It appears that these guys at IWS have been at this game of insourcing truckers for at least several years, and their operations pre-date Nebraska’s recent trade mission to Kenya.
Between all of these programs, that is an awful lot of taxpayer money being shoveled at an industry with an atrocious retention problem, and one ought wonder when Nebraskans are going to ask about any value they are getting for all of the money they pay to train these truckers when 35% of them quit within four months, on average.
Back to IWS.
The local newspaper to IWS, the Aurora News-Register, has seven different stories about IWS and their project of replacing American truckers with insourced labor. They are mostly behind paywalls, and the button to register to pay to get to them appears to not work, so we will have to infer things from the brief openings to each article.
https://www.auroranewsregister.com/search/node?keys=IWS+trucking+
A phenomenon repeated across almost every ‘driver shortage’ news story you will come across these days is on display with the fourth article listed, where we find the usual contradiction that none of these ‘journalists’ ever explore-
The American trucking industry is currently facing a number of prolonged and serious challenges, including a soft market characterized by lower freight rates, higher fuel costs and rising interest rates. In addition to these challenges, there is a shortage of skilled and qualified drivers to haul the nation’s vital goods.
Do I really need to explain Supply and Demand to journalists who have made it through at least high school, and possibly, most likely, possess undergraduate degrees from university? Maybe they even have advanced degrees?
The reason that freight rates are in the toilet is because there are too many trucks on the market. When there is an oversupply of any product or service on the market, the price of that product or service goes down.
Ergo, THERE ARE TOO MANY DRIVERS!
TOO MANY DRIVERS = NO SHORTAGE
NO SHORTAGE = NO NECESSITY TO INSOURCE LABOR FROM OVERSEAS
It appears that IWS is so confident in their business model that they needed to purchase a hotel for all of the ‘drivers’ they are hoping to cycle into the country.
Ken’s Motel, a landmark local business built 65 years ago by a man who left a legacy as “Mr. Aurora,” has been sold to Ajira America. Todd Vettel of Aurora, one of three partners in a second-year organization focused on recruiting and training immigrants (mostly from Africa) to become professional truck drivers in America … we’re going to re-professionalize the American trucking industry …
If re-professionalizing the industry means flooding the place with migrants, I have some news for the folks at IWS.
https://www.theblaze.com/align/highway-to-hell-mass-influx-of-foreign-born-truckers-cause-carnage-on-american-roads
As mentioned above, Kenyan drivers are four times as likely to be involved in a fatal collision as an American driver, and it turns out that they are even an outlier within Africa, which is saying quite a bit about the mentality of their average driver.
IWS training regimen, start to finish, arrival from Kenya to handed a CDL and turned loose on America’s roads, appears to be about three weeks. There is no universe where the kind of driving mentality that animates the average Kenyan can be beaten out of their heads and brought up to the standards of our driving culture in only three short weeks. Also, this is pure and 100% exploitation of workers from the third world, who are being set up for failure by such limited and negligent ‘training’.
So, we have to ask ourselves, given that there is no driver shortage, trucking rates and wages are in the toilet, and that so many carriers seem hell bent on insourcing labor from countries where dangerous driving is SOP, and not from others, just what the heck is going on here?
Companies like Grand Island Express have customers … and the biggest shipper in Grand Island, Nebraska is JBS Foods, the self proclaimed largest producers of beef and poultry in the world.
JBS Foods is also a known abuser of illegal migrants and child labor.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/09/26/greeley-meatpacking-human-trafficking-abuse-union-investigation/
Workers at the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado are painting a picture of dangerous working conditions, unfair treatment, wage theft, and a lack of reimbursement for workplace injuries.
President of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, Kim Cordova, said it all began last fall when JBS began hiring asylum seekers and legal immigrants from Haiti and Benin.
https://www.wsj.com/business/immigrants-haitian-jobs-meatpacking-eb174d69
Perdue Farms and JBS, two of the country’s biggest meatpackers, will pay a combined $8 million after the Department of Labor found the companies relied for years on migrant children to work in their slaughterhouses.
The deals, announced this week, are part of a flurry of child labor settlements that have come in the last days of the Biden administration, which has been cracking down on the practice.
It is rare for major brands to come under federal scrutiny for child labor. Many food-processing and manufacturing companies outsource cleaning and other jobs to third-party staffing firms, which technically employ the workers and shield companies from any violations.
And directly from The Department of Labor
Since 2022, the department has investigated various third-party contractors that provide sanitation services at meat packing establishments and service providers of poultry catching operations across the U.S. These investigations discovered that JBS’s third-party service providers employed children in dangerous jobs and during overnight shifts at the company’s facilities in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska.
I could go on about JBS or the many other companies who engage in these practices, but I think you get the point.
What is happening in trucking is this idea that we can continue racing to the bottom in wages and the material conditions of work by completely bypassing American truckers altogether, as a great deal of agricultural producers have done with every aspect of our food supply chain - from working the fields to butchering to packing sheds and every point in between. This low wage, migrant worker model is now being transferred to the trucking that agricultural products require to get to market.
As I reported in a recent Substack, indentured servitude is rife in American trucking, and it has gotten so bad that many of the companies who engage in it, often run by recent migrants themselves, know full well that American truckers would never put up with this shit, so they openly discriminate against them.
A revealing trend seen as of late is that the companies who typically hire and then abuse insourced labor are brazen in their explicit marketing which highlights that they are breaking the law, while also - albeit implicitly rather then explicitly in this example - discriminating against native born truckers.
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Amazon Relay, the in-house load management board which orchestrates most of the trucking logistics for Amazon, is a notorious user of these small scammy companies, again almost all of them owned and operated by recent arrivals, and all of them practicing forms of ethnic nepotism and outright discrimination against the native born truckers of the country to which they have arrived.
Speaking of the ‘race to the bottom’, something else I wrote back in 2023 will resonate with this situation that has been revealed in Nebraska.
Though the age requirements to get a CDL preclude companies like Grand Island Express or Werner or anyone else from recruiting illegal migrant children, the associations which represent these corporate scumbags are looking into sourcing abused domestic children instead.
You will remember President Biden’s wildly unpopular proposal to lower the interstate trucking age restriction from 21 to 18. As reported here at this Substack a few weeks ago, The American Trucking Association, in a recent White Paper, made bold suggestions that their members ought explore recruiting 18 year old kids who are exiting foster care.
Again, you have to ask yourselves, why the incessant need to throw people into a job with a massive retention problem, instead of just fixing the retention problem? Why pick on Kenyan migrants and abused children who were placed in Foster Care? What the fuck is wrong with these companies, and why won’t they pay more or improve the material conditions of the job? Truckers wages, on average, are frozen in the 1980s.
Earlier, I mentioned Werner Enterprises, one of the biggest trucking companies in the country with over 8000 trucks and something like 18 terminals across the country. Werner is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, and like Grand Island Express, are implicated in the articles I quoted above. Both companies are also members of the Nebraska Trucking Association, which is the state affiliate of the American Trucking Association, of whom Werner CEO Derek Leathers is second vice chairman.
Political Donations made by Werner, as well as lobbying expenditures, can be found here, and you can draw your own conclusions from that.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/werner-enterprises/summary?id=D000029797
And here you can find out about the $2.8 million that the ATA spent on lobbying our politicians in 2024 -
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/american-trucking-assns/summary?id=D000000177
Yesterday, when I made note of this program of insourcing ‘drivers’ from Kenya to replace American Truckers, it went viral almost immediately, and resulted in some responses from Mr Leathers himself.
Mr Leathers appears to be a fan of a River in Egypt, as per a response to a friend who had posted the same intel -
I can’t verify what went on in the meetings alluded to by the article from Kenyan Diaspora I already referenced above, and it is worded in such a way as to not directly implicate Werner in working on these visas. That said, Werner can’t be the biggest trucking company in Nebraska where the State Secretary is going on trade missions overseas to bring drivers into the state, while repeating talking points from the same corporate lobby group your CEO is also an executive of, and not know about it, or potentially benefit from it, if not immediately and directly.
Werner has a long history of its own retention problems, as well as problems with its own driving schools putting vastly unqualified mewling cabbages on our highways.
A judgement was issued in a 2019 lawsuit against Werner for $40 million dollars in the death of a woman named Kathryn Armijo, when one of Werner’s recent graduates drove his truck across multiple lanes of traffic and struck her car head on, outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico.
As reported by LandLine Magazine, the case revealed a number of troubling facts about Werner and their problems with keeping drivers around, which necessitates their entire business model being built on the backs of hapless and poorly trained new entrants to the industry.
The lawsuit claims that Werner knew about the shortcomings of its training schools. The complaint claimed that Jamie Maus, Werner’s vice president of safety and compliance, testified under oath during deposition in another fatal crash lawsuit involving one of their student drivers that Werner’s internal safety policy was different from federal guidelines.
“Upon information and belief, Werner knowingly, willfully, and recklessly continues to engage in this business practice as a mechanism of keeping cheap labor for its trucking force,” the lawsuit states. “Werner pays student drivers approximately $500 a week, which during a 60 to 70-hour workweek equals approximately minimum wage. To date, a Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuit addressing Werner’s failure to properly pay student drivers is pending in Nebraska.”
According to a news release from Harris’ firm, this is the second significant verdict against Werner in 18 months. In May 2018, Werner was hit with a $90 million verdict for systematic safety and training failures in a multiple fatality case involving a student driver.
—Among the largest trucking companies, Werner employs about 10,000 drivers and owns more than 7,400 trucks. Werner also owns 15 driving schools that it uses to train its own applicants in need of a CDL.
According to court documents, Carlos Romay oversees all 15 driving schools for Werner, including Roadmaster Drivers School. Roadmaster was acquired by Werner in 2015.
Court documents point out that Werner relies on its own schools to churn out drivers to address its high turnover rate:
“Werner relies upon these schools, including Roadmaster, to provide Werner with a constant pipeline of new drivers due to Werner’s high turnover rates. Werner has a yearly turnover rate of around 80%, which requires Werner to hire 8,000 new drivers per year. Out of these 8,000 new hires each year, 50% have zero commercial driving experience, while another 25% have less than three months of commercial driving experience. This means that over 60% of Werner’s driving force at any given time has less than three months of commercial driving experience.”
Werner has dug through the Human Resources barrel, scraped through the bottom, and has been pulling up the muck from below in order to keep its trucks moving, and I am extremely skeptical that Derek Leathers does not know what his State Secretary is up to, or what his peer companies in Nebraska are doing. He might not have his dirty little dick beaters directly in this rancid cookie jar, but he knows the jar is there.
Something Derek Leathers or Bob Evnen might have some insight to is how this program Evnen is helping to orchestrate is going to get around Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent announcement of a pause in issuing visas to foreign nationals specifically for trucking. It is, after all, a pause, and something tells me that the lobbying funds that the ATA directs to the government might go a long way towards removing Rubio’s finger from that pause button.
I have contacted by phone the office of Bob Evnen, Secretary of State of Nebraska, and they said they would get back to me with a statement, which they haven’t yet. I have also emailed Werner, who, oddly enough, have a specific email for the press. Must have been all of those crashes … and they have likewise ignored my request for comment.
Maybe you should contact the Secretary, and tell him that it is unacceptable for the State of Nebraska to be working with corporate lobby groups on a project which is directly replacing American workers. Maybe you could send him the back catalog of articles from FreightWaves, where their Bankruptcies and Layoffs section has been documenting thousands of American truckers being laid off amidst closure after closure after closure of American trucking companies over the past three years. Maybe then this Chamber of Commerce RINO douchebag will reconsider this utterly unnecessary and deeply offensive program.
If I were you, I would also contact IWS Trucking in Aurora, Nebraska, and tell them to fuck right off with their insourced labor scam.
Sooner or later our leaders need to tell people like Bob Evnen and IWS and Grand Island Express and Werner that ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, and maybe if they can’t make their businesses work by employing Americans at wages commensurate with the safety responsibilities that are part of being a trucker, then too bad, maybe its time that the free market tells them to go out of business.
Our leaders ought also let trucking operate a little more like an actual free market, and cut off every taxpayer penny made available to any of their training programs. There are plenty of unemployed truckers around, or those who have moved on to other lines of work, who would be brought back tomorrow if accorded the correct market wage rate, and not treated like shit. One of them is me.
UPDATE - Werner finally got back to me, here is their comment.
Thank you for reaching out. Here is a response to your request below.
In May 2024, at the request of the Nebraska Secretary of State’s office, Werner hosted a group of dignitaries from Kenya as part of a standard trade mission visit. The conversation at Werner covered a variety of topics; however, there were no commitments made or discussions regarding a program or Werner sponsoring visas. The group visited multiple companies across various industries in Nebraska and held discussions, but there were no takeaways, follow-up discussions or meetings involving Werner since that time. Whatever agreement the Secretary of State may have made during his recent visit does not include Werner Enterprises.
Give them some credit for getting back to me.
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com
Pour myself a drink? I will just go straight to barfing.
This is wonderful Gord! You weren't kidding about those rabbit holes. Wowzas !