[HN Gopher] Lost Highway: The trials of trucking school
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Lost Highway: The trials of trucking school
Author : samclemens
Score : 31 points
Date : 2024-01-18 20:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (harpers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (harpers.org)
| Mashimo wrote:
| > Long-haulers, lauded as the backbone of our economy, live out
| of their trucks for weeks at a time, often working eighty-plus-
| hour weeks while earning little more than minimum wage. The
| economist Michael Belzer has equated commercial trucking to
| working in a "sweatshop on wheels." The shortage is, in fact, a
| retention problem: annual turnover at large fleets in recent
| years has exceeded 90 percent.
|
| 90% turnover. That is insane.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| That insanely high figure is also why the predicted labor
| strike against automation of long haul trucking likely won't
| happen. Very few love the job and most who have experienced it
| quickly leave. It's one of those cases where not many will be
| put out of work should self driving ever come to be. Short haul
| on the other hand seems to be growing, pays better and probably
| is more difficult to automate.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Factory workers and coal miners in the 1800s probably didn't
| _love_ their jobs, either. They still _needed_ them, though,
| and thus... organized labor.
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| If you have 90% turnover it means that people indeed don't
| need _this particular job_.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They may need _a trucking job_ , though. It depends quite
| a bit on where they turnover to.
|
| If they're largely jumping from trucking company to
| trucking company, a strike is still entirely feasible.
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| I would disagree with your reasoning. The high turnover
| and a short tenure means people are not very attached to
| the job but more importantly it also means the drivers in
| any given trucking company don't know each other very
| well and it would be quite difficult for them to organize
| for a common cause such as a strike. Way to easy for the
| trucking company to play the drivers against each other.
| dchuk wrote:
| What's actually insane: for many fleets, 90% turnover would be
| considered amazingly good. Some fleets suffer from 300%+
| turnover!
| noshortage wrote:
| these non-trucking magazines that constantly claim there is a
| driver shortage should explain the extreme excess in supply and
| shortage of demand.
|
| do we need these drivers rolling at below cost before we start
| claiming the shortage is over? the data we look at in the
| trucking industry isn't indicating a shortage, many of us in
| the industry are perplexed by the constant "driver shortage"
| claims but i think people might just be used to news that
| doesnt tell the truth
| jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote:
| Claiming labor shortages in particular industries increases
| supply, which lowers wages.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It may be partially intentional, or at least advantageous to
| the companies. There's a common model where a company pays for
| the driving school and then the driver leases a truck from the
| company.
|
| The driver is technically an owner-operator, and has all the
| expenses and risks of that, but are contracted to the company
| to "pay off" the school fees and so are effectively an
| employee. If they quit the company gets the truck back and the
| driver has to repay the school fees. A very cheap & low risk
| way for the company to have drivers, if they can manage the
| turnover.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the case, and the turnover usually involves the
| driver going to another company. Often those big "signup
| deals" you see for drivers are to pay off the previous
| company if necessary.
|
| Once a driver has some experience they will settle down in a
| company that doesn't turn over as much, or actually become a
| real owner-operator.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>90% turnover. That is insane.
|
| Yup
|
| It screams to me: Bad Management
|
| There are evidently companies that can retain workers
|
| There is obviously a lot more demand for trucks rolling on the
| road than supply
| gosub100 wrote:
| this might be how they want it though. The industry knows there
| is a steady stream of newly licensed, but completely
| inexperienced drivers. If some companies are willing to take
| the risk on them, but pay less, this could be a good
| introductory job for them. both parties know the employee will
| quit once he has enough hours to get hired by a better firm.
| the better firm has a different risk model, where they only
| hire drivers with X-month employment with no accidents. In
| return, they are willing to pay a premium.
| blantonl wrote:
| I just recently went through the process at age 49 to get my
| pilot's license. Purely for fun, however the vast majority of the
| students that I trained with were just like many of the hopefuls
| in this article - pursuing a high paying career.
|
| I could write a book about flight school management dynamics. The
| personalities, the hopefuls, the dreamers, the wild power
| dynamics between a flight school and a student who desperately
| wants to get to the airlines (the promise land). The instructors,
| who all were just recently students now grinding out hours to
| qualify for an airline job. Safety. Studying and learning.
| Relationships. Accidents.
|
| The financial aspects are incredibly risky for many. The
| statistics: only 22% of students who begin training for the first
| step - a private pilot license - end up finishing. For those
| wanting to make a career or progress further, there's your
| instrument rating (to fly in bad weather), your commercial
| license (to fly for money), your flight instructor license (so
| you can teach - which essentially is your only path to gaining
| experience/hours without having to pay for it out of pocket), and
| then your Air Transport license, which ... airlines. That
| requires 1500 hours of experience.
|
| It truly was one of the more fascinating adventures I've done.
| hollerith wrote:
| >teach - which essentially is your only path to gaining
| experience/hours without having to pay for it out of pocket
|
| Flying for a military organization is another path, is it not?
|
| Or do the airlines no longer want former military pilots? I
| know they used to hire a lot of them.
| blantonl wrote:
| Yes, this is an avenue into the career of being an airline
| pilot. However being a military pilot doesn't directly
| translate to being what is essentially a bus driver, and
| there is extensive retraining that has to occur.
|
| But yes, the airlines recruit and bring in a ton of military
| pilots.
| jonhohle wrote:
| A few months ago a former Navy guy mentioned to me that you
| can tell if your pilot is Navy or Air Force by the landing.
| Air Force pilots will come in nice and smooth, but Navy
| pilots, having been trained to land on carriers, will hit
| hard.
|
| I don't know if there is truth to that, but if so, I've
| definitely had more than a few Navy pilots.
| jonah wrote:
| My cousin - RIP - who was former Air Force, flew for
| FedEx. He said he preferred flying freight to passengers
| because you didn't have to worry about being has gradual
| on the climb out or smooth on the approach and landing
| and he didn't have to deal with annoying passengers. ;)
| bombcar wrote:
| Probably the 'optimal' path to a pilot's job would be to
| fly bulk for the military (boring things like the C130),
| not the fighters, and transition to a freight airline.
|
| The UPS planes out of Ontario, CA would climb a hell of a
| lot faster than the passenger jets out of LAX.
| blantonl wrote:
| It's kind of a fun old wives tale that is humorous, but
| not really a thing in practice.
|
| Some of the biggest challenges military pilots face
| transitioning to the airlines are that the vast majority
| of them worked far more independently in their roles in
| the military. So cockpit resource management for a lot of
| them is a huge challenge. Airline pilots also are
| responsible for a lot more "working with the masses" type
| work.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| No. Any Navy pilot is skilled enough to flare. The
| descent rate necessary to land on a carrier is 600-800
| feet per minute, which would literally break the landing
| gear on any airliner, or at least cause a hard landing
| inspection to have to be done to the airframe looking for
| potential damage.
|
| Airliners and civilian aircraft "hit hard" for two
| reasons usually. Either the pilot mildly goofed the flare
| and "dropped it in" slightly at the end, or else the
| runway is slick and/or short. In which case, they are
| aiming to put the aircraft down early and somewhat firmly
| so they can get on the thrust reversers and/or brakes
| quickly. A nice greaser of a landing tends to allow the
| aircraft to float awhile in ground effect, and sometimes
| the runway is short or slick enough that style points
| don't count.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| > Either the pilot mildly goofed the flare and "dropped
| it in" slightly at the end
|
| It's funny, I'm sure it's much more difficult in a plane,
| but this sounds like such a similar experience to
| thinking you've braked smoothly but accidentally having
| your final complete stop become sharp because you've
| overestimated how much speed you've shed.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| I'm getting close to retirement and have been considering
| getting a pilot's license. My only reservation is the expense
| of fuel/rental when I get bored of flying around my city/area.
|
| Curious to hear more about your journey and how you reckon with
| the expense of getting into the air for fun.
| blantonl wrote:
| your reckoning with the expense of getting into the air for
| fun is this: Go take about $2000 in various denominations and
| flush it down the toilet. Did that feel good? /s
|
| If that didn't hurt too bad, you're past the first hurdle.
| Solvency wrote:
| What about all the relatively poor Alaskans who fly small
| planes around (no roads, tracking animals, checking traps)?
| What are the dynamics such that they can afford that
| lifestyle?
| blantonl wrote:
| there are exceptions to every rule. Alaska and aviation
| is literally the wild west. The dynamics are they
| essentially _have_ to make it work.
| bombcar wrote:
| Like the similar situation in Australia, there's a strong
| culture of "you'll probably only kill yourself" that
| allows a lot of things to be overlooked.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Cutting corners.
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-tallied-alaska-
| avi...
|
| > A KUCB and ProPublica analysis has found that in recent
| years, Alaska has accounted for a growing share of the
| country's fatalities from crashes involving small
| commercial aircraft. Since 2016, 42% of the country's
| deaths in these crashes occurred in Alaska, up from 26%
| in the early 2000s.
| bombcar wrote:
| The percentage of aircraft crashes in Alaska in the 60s
| that _involved alcohol_ was depressingly high.
| bombcar wrote:
| Flying comes down to a "dollars per minute" - you can
| rent a plane "wet" today for $120-200 an hour (depending
| on your location) - which translates to $2 per minute or
| about $1 a mile.
|
| Rental prices include _everything_ so you can own your
| own plane for less, it 'll be ancient and old, and if you
| do your own maintenance it can be even cheaper.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you rent less than about 150 hours/year, you probably
| can't own for less money. (The first minute each year
| costs about $20K [calendar-based maintenance, hangar,
| insurance, databases/avionics subscriptions]; every hour
| after that costs less than renting.)
|
| Most people who own do so for flexibility rather than
| savings. It usually costs _more_ to own, but it also lets
| you get a plane you probably can 't rent, configure it
| the way you want, leave all the headsets and supplies in
| the plane, fly it when you want without scheduling, fly
| it somewhere and stay for a week without paying daily
| minimums, etc.
| bombcar wrote:
| That matches my math when I was flying, if you're not
| doing 10+ hours a month _or_ have a specific mission that
| can 't be solved by rentals, you're best off renting.
|
| There's a middle-ground which is quite common of the "own
| a share" - you and five others buy and maintain a plane
| and "rent" it from yourself - this works great if the
| times you want to fly don't all overlap.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The partnership angle is a great one!
|
| I really wish I could have found great partners two
| decades ago. (I'd probably have a lot more money in the
| bank now, even if it meant we'd have missed more
| Christmas trips or moved that travel to the airlines
| because a partner had the airplane.)
| gosub100 wrote:
| If you do the bare minimum to earn your license, but only
| actually fly a few times/year, you are more dangerous than
| not earning your license at all. There's a break-in period
| where you have to get enough hours to be comfortable. Keep
| that in mind, and it's ok to quit (i.e. just get the license
| for the challenge of it and never use it if you lose
| interest, if you have that much money to burn), but pick one
| of (fly reguarly | dont fly at all).
| dchuk wrote:
| I've worked in freight tech for almost a decade (as in, I
| specifically work on a bunch of different software for drivers to
| use amongst other things).
|
| Many of our customers are the biggest fleets in the world. Each
| has their own relationship to driver turn over.
|
| The ones who don't struggle with turn over do 3 things:
|
| 1) they pay them well (sometimes 6 figures+)
|
| 2) they route their freight in a way that gets their drivers home
| consistently and frequently
|
| 3) they don't separate between "employees" and
| "drivers"...everyone is an employee, everyone matters
|
| Truck driving is a top 3 occupation in America, everything we
| consume relies on trucking at some point in its lifecycle.
|
| The simple fact here: everyone sucks at planning freight moves in
| a way that affords drivers ability to get home frequently. Almost
| all freight moves are the result of humans bashing away on
| keyboards connected to AS400 terminals. You'd expect some
| insanely well architected network optimization algorithm (and
| some fleets sort of have that don't get me wrong), but in
| reality, planning freight moves is basically still just note
| cards on a cork board, just typed into computers. The dilemma
| here is that fixing these things with software is very hard,
| almost always requiring practical operation experience in
| trucking in addition to deep tech knowledge.
|
| There are some leaders in the space who claim "we don't have a
| driver shortage, we just suck at planning freight moves optimally
| enough". I subscribe to that idea 110%, while also acknowledging
| it's a generally unappealing job for an increasingly white
| collar-oriented younger culture we have entering the workforce.
|
| It's important we keep seeing investment flow into freight tech,
| and hopefully not too much into the misguided self driving truck
| efforts that will never be feasible in our lifetime for
| practical/legal/cost reasons (though I'll admit the safety
| advancements those investments throw off are great...my point is
| just that trucks will not be moving without drivers for
| decades/potentially ever because of so many different variables,
| including the most important one: trucking is a single digit
| margin business, and Americans expect everything to only get
| cheaper and faster that they consume, so increasing logistics
| costs through more expensive automated equipment is at odds with
| the consumer demands).
|
| It's also important we respect truck drivers. They do a hard job
| most of us would never do, but we all depend on them doing it so
| we can live our cushy lives. They can't be the butt of jokes.
| Solvency wrote:
| "The dilemma here is that fixing these things with software is
| very hard, almost always requiring practical operation
| experience in trucking in addition to deep tech knowledge."
|
| But...why? Surely we have the tech, data, processing, and
| decades of collective analog wisdom to do this. If Amazon can
| optimize their entire delivery network, why not trucking?
|
| (I get it's still a challenge but surely not insurmountable?
| And likely incredibly profitable as a saas... so what are some
| of the less obvious complicating factors?)
| bombcar wrote:
| The biggest factor is that you don't have one company owning
| everything, like Amazon does with their network.
|
| You _can_ call UPS and get them to take a pallet somewhere,
| and it stays in the "UPS delivery network" but the _vast_
| majority of freight is not shipped that way (it 's quite
| expensive).
|
| For full truckloads you're usually dealing with a broker who
| finds a company or independent operator who is willing to
| take the load to where you want it, or if that is not
| available then the broker will find a chain of companies that
| will get you the result you want. This often involves
| _calling_ or _faxing_ to various "hubs" that he thinks will
| work.
|
| For LTL (less than truckload, think pallets) it is even worse
| - your pallet will be taken to a local warehouse by a local
| driver, and then combined with other pallets to another
| warehouse, and potentially a whole chain of these. The
| brokers work even harder on these.
|
| It is not insurmountable, but "modernization" doesn't get you
| much of a benefit at all until it's _all_ modernized, so
| there 's not much budget for "lets' modernize and have no
| benefit for 20 years".
| dchuk wrote:
| Change management is really damn hard. And I don't
| necessarily mean technical change management, I mean changing
| the behavior of millions of employees, many who often only
| know working for that one fleet their whole career, because
| their parents worked there before them.
| mhb wrote:
| An entertaining book about trucking. But perhaps much has changed
| since 2017:
|
| The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road by Finn
| Murphy
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36236118-the-long-haul
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