Truckers have won 'The Race To The Bottom'
The problem with global homogeneity is that you eventually run out of drivers from other countries.
There’s an old saying, a meme, if you will, which has circulated amongst the left, populists, and those skeptical of the ‘neo-liberal’ project of globalization, for quite a long time - ’The Race to the Bottom’. The phrase is actually quite old, and it’s use seems first attributed to Justice Louis Brandeis (according to Wikipedia), and throughout my life it has mostly been uttered by those on the left. The highest profile leftist politician in America, Senator Bernard Sanders, has been using it for a long time, and in this video from Congress in 1993, Sanders, in one of the few times in his career he has been correct about something, uses the phrase to describe what would eventually happen after NAFTA was passed.
NAFTA was good for certain areas of the trucking industry, especially in Canada, as this free trade agreement dramatically increased the amount of cross border trade between the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
What was good for truckers wasn’t necessarily good for everyone else, but I will leave those righteous observations to the JD Vances of the world.
I hadn’t given much thought to this phrase in a long time, until yesterday, when estimable co-host of the Bloomberg podcast Odd Lots, Joe Weisenthal, tagged me in one of those Twitter threads that is interesting for various reasons, in that I ran into normies who have no idea about labor issues in the trucking business, to whom I could spread the gospel; and, for getting to bump into the champagne socialist types that I would normally sacrifice my own children to stay away from. The thread also set me to thinking about the argument I’m going to make below.
Some selections from said thread, starting with our champagne socialist, who, much like Senator Sanders, has the same batting average as every other broken clock.
https://twitter.com/NathanJRobinson/status/1646231321012756481?s=20
https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1646256160805101572?s=20
https://twitter.com/DriverAutonomy/status/1646263115523162112?s=20
Many of us in the trucking industry know that the driver shortage is a myth, and everyone from Overdrive to FreightWaves to my friends at CDL - Drivers Unlimited have commented on it; including and especially myself, ad nauseam, much to the chagrin of my Twitter following.
Something I have noticed recently, since starting this Substack and the Voice Of GO(r)D Podcast, and having the opportunity to speak with drivers in other parts of the world, is that the driver ‘shortage’ narrative is not unique to America, nor to our good and virtuous friends at the American Trucking Association.
What other countries claim to be short truckers?
Courtesy of comrade and fellow Substacker Graham Brown, aka The Lorryist , I have come to find out about an organization called IRU, who bills itself as ‘the world road transport organization’, which is a bit rich, given I’d never heard of them til reading a piece by Graham, and I’ve been in the business my entire life.
Nevermind, here is their Driver Shortage Global Report 2022, which is full of some interesting statistics (and various obfuscations) about the state of the world’s supply of truckers.
Some highlights -
Over 2.6 million truck driver jobs were unfilled in 2021 in surveyed countries.
countries included: United Sates … Mexico, Argentina, Europe (Spain, Italy, France, UK, Germany, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Belgium, Netherlands), Russia, Turkey, Iran, China
And an interesting tell about whose side they are on here -
Over 50 million people were unemployed in 2020 in the countries and regions analysed (unemployment rate was over 10% in some of them), representing an available workforce that could largely cover the existing gap.
Ahhh, we can just grab the unemployed off the streets, throw them at a CDL School, and voilà, problem solved!
Where have we heard that before? They’ve been doing it in my home province of Ontario since forever, and reading from the same script about just throwing the unemployed out on the road, with no consideration of what the job entails, or what a constant flow of new entrants does to the wage floor of those of us who chose this career, enjoy it immensely, and would also like to be paid correctly.
Effective April 29, 2022, we expanded the program to better help people who may face challenges finding stable jobs, such as gig workers, youth, and people on social assistance.
Despite the best efforts of ANTIFA and their backers like George Soros, and any number of NGO/Foundation/Non-Profit money laundering operations of the rich and well connected, the Lumpenproles will not be at the vanguard of The Revolution.
Oh no, comrade, dirty ‘Capitalists’ will use government money to put the Lumpenproletariat out on the road.
Ahem.
Alright, back to the Global ‘Shortages’.
From my man Graham at The Lorryist -
So, for example, the United Kingdom has trained people out of being truck drivers, but that’s OK, we’ll just import truck drivers from places like Lithuania. But hold on, what’s happening here…? Lithuania now has an even worse shortage of truck drivers, and industry there is lobbying for migrant truck drivers to be allowed in. In Western Europe we rightly complain about globalisation stripping out our cultures, but it’s doing the same everywhere, that’s the direction of travel.
The link Graham shared from Lithuania is quite remarkable , and you have to wonder what exactly is going on when a little country like Lithuania is supposedly short …. 30,000 drivers? What?
It claims Lithuania is short of around 30,000 drivers, and that 20% of the trucks in the country are unused. If true, this means there are 12,000 lorries in the country that remain grounded due to the inability of Lithuanian road transport firms to find drivers.
I guess when all those Eastern Europeans that are heading to work in the UK (or Canada), that means Lithuania loses.
Let us change location a bit, and check in on somewhere in ‘The Global South’
How about South Africa? They’re short too, imagine that.
This article here contains an interesting observation that gets to the crux of the point I am making -
A second reason is the emigration of the already small driver pool to foreign developed countries in the search of better wages and much better working conditions and lifestyles. The trucking industry's turnover and emigration rates are very high as job conditions are challenging. Longer working hours are not just a consequence but also a reason for the shortage as more and more experienced drivers quit in search of better pastures in foreign lands. All these challenges have created a vicious cycle of low-skilled drivers and higher turnover rates in the industry. The income disparity between drivers in Africa and other developed countries such as the United Kingdom & the United States also attracts skilled drivers to emigrate and earn more in those foreign lands.
The fellow in South Africa, nor the writer of the article from Lithuania, bothered to ask what effect all of those drivers heading off to other countries would have on the local wages of the guys already working there, but I guess that isn’t their concern.
And while we are in the southern hemisphere, how about my old friends in Australia?
Looks like they seem to have a retention problem as well - check it out here, here, and here.
(Side note - I went to drive trucks in Australia back in 2014; unfortunately, at that time, the government wasn’t friendly to a Canadian traveler like me trying to live out my dream of driving road trains across the Outback, and my employer may have stretched what my job title was, just a little bit, in order to bring me there. Story for another time.)
What can we conclude from all of this, and what does that conclusion have to do with the term ‘Race to the bottom’?
It appears what we have here, to give credit where it is due to our friends on the left, who have been making arguments like this since well before the above linked speech from Senator Sanders, is the ultimate end point of globalization within one particular sector of the labor market.
Most truckers on Earth are being treated like shit, surveilled by Big Brother to the nth degree, and, quite frankly, are vastly underpaid. You see the same scenario in every article or study, written in every country, as those listed above, and many drivers respond by making the rational choice to ply their trade elsewhere, only to end up depressing the wages of those who already work in those countries to which they migrate (or are headhunted to move to.) Some might call this the logic of capitalism, to grind down the profit margins of any possible producer or provider of a service, and some of us might just call it greed. I’ll leave that up to you, but its quite clear that if anything, the economic imperialism of today looks like “truckers are scum and you shouldn’t pay them enough, no matter what part of the world they work in.”
If the situation is the same everywhere in the world, and the total number of truckers is finite, and if corporate welfare masked as job training produces more washouts than career drivers, as is the case in Canada and The US, then what we have here is the end of this particular road. Rich countries will poach from poor, and established immigrants will abuse their fellow countrymen, thus suppressing wages for native born drivers, further exacerbate retention problems, and the cycle will continue, at least until this well runs dry - and as it can be seen, we are having to send the bucket down ever farther.
I know this is a radical suggestion to industry and economists, but how about we pay truckers more money, stop treating them like accidents waiting to happen, and stop expecting the third world, or the taxpayer, to subsidize your addiction to cheap freight? Those autonomous trucks are still a long way off, and as manufacturers point out, their implementation will be slow, and limited to a very narrow range of applications.
That race to the bottom is about to hit a wall, and it is not going to work out well for any of us.
https://twitter.com/FreightAlley/status/1646461433234718723
I’ll leave the last word on this to former Presidential Candidate Ross Perot, who, in the debates of the 1992 election, introduced us to another famous adage related to the ‘race to the bottom’ -
”a giant sucking sound”
Who would have guessed that ‘sucking sound’ was the trucking industry running out of the ‘fuel’ which gets it down the road, and keeps our supply chains and economies moving - the very people who drive those trucks.
Truckers have won 'The Race To The Bottom'
Good afternoon Gord ... please tell me you weren't actually wearing sandals when you were leaning on that W9 ... you were taught way better. A little input regarding NAFTA from someone who was there before it all started. Canada and United States had a very successful free trade agreement in place for many years prior to the introduction of NAFTA and it worked well. Free trade on its own is not a bad thing. The flaw in the NAFTA agreement was that 2 of the participants had very comparable standards of living while the 3rd participant had and still has a standard of living from a previous century and that won't work. The only winners were the big corporations exploiting the disparity and the politicians doing their bidding. On another note, sorry but I am not buying your wage issues in today's trucking industry. If you are a good truck driver working full time in the industry and you are not pulling down a minimum of $100,000.00 per year you need a new job or you need to change professions because you aren't good at trucking. Wages and working conditions have never been better than they are today. Trucks are more powerful, more comfortable, safer than any period in the last 50 years. Granted we need a little less government involvement, we need a lot more common sense on the part of the government AS WELL AS the industry itself. End of story.
Superb article! I can't add anything just yet, you've covered it so well. We should print some copies, and pin them to law-makers' foreheads.