What makes a good Trucking Job?

Answers abound at The Mid-America Trucking Show; an essay for American Compass

It took a few months, but an essay I was commissioned to write by my friends at American Compass has finally been published.

Their mission statement - “To restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.” certainly points to a question posed to me by American Compass founder and chief economist Oren Cass, ‘What makes a good trucking job?’

I like to think my lifetime in the business, as well as my current sidelining from it by the various pathologies which make the industry largely unattractive to those of my temperament in 2024, put me in a good position to answer that question. So I proposed looking at trucking as a job through my visit to the Mid-America Truck Show earlier this year, and Oren was happy to let me write this essay.

MATS took place at the end of March, and being that this is an election year, the essay kinda got lost in the shuffle, so you will pardon the delay.

My next pitch to American Compass is to write some draft policy proposals for the return of the Trump administration, which I might workshop as short essays here first; one component of which will be to make suggestions to the President’s new DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency) Team of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk. Given last week’s announcement by the FMCSA that they are going to flush another $140 million of taxpayer dollars down the drain of driver training, there is plenty of ‘efficiency’ to explore. More on that very soon.

In the meantime, enjoy this essay, hot off the presses -

https://americancompass.org/stuck-in-reverse/

Some snippets -

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.

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.”

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.)

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.

I hope you take the time to read the whole thing, and if your position is somewhere in the chain of management in trucking, be it as a freight broker, operations manager, or, ye gads, possible a government regulator, consider that maybe its time to stop treating every trucker like the lowest common denominator; you might keep more of the high quality operators around that way.


Some photos from MATS -

ELD and Emissions Control EXEMPT Peterbilt 359

Justin ‘Supertrucker’ Martin, myself, Steve Viscelli, Mike Lombard

Freedom in Analog

Former guest of Voice Of GO(r)D and very talented truck sketch artist, Flatbed Red

Legendary Singer, Trucker, and writer, Long Haul Paul Marhoefer

As always, questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are both welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com


Thanks again for reading, and do me one small favor - if you know a trucker who hasn’t yet heard of this Substack, send it along to them for me.