Friday, September 9, 2022

Teamsters.* They aren't what they used to be. And that's sad in some ways.

Teamster, Toledo Ohio, 1920s.1

It was the only thing in the parking lot.

My 2007 Dodge 3500 that is.

It was parked there, all alone.  My wife took it to work, as I drove the 1997 Dodge 1500 to the shop for an exhaust repair.

A Haliburton driver drove into the lot, apparently one of the numerous misdirected truck drivers that take the exit, wrongly, and need to turn around in the parking lot.  He had plenty of room, but he hit my 3500 anyway.

He was driving a tractor trailer combo.

He was from Nigeria.2. 

I have nothing against Nigerians.  I've had one friend from Nigeria.  But I have to ask the question.

Are there any American truck drivers anymore?3. 

I work on trucking accidents quite a bit.  The last one I worked on featured a Polish driver.

In one I'm working on now, the drivers were Somalian.  I had a prior one where a driver was a central African who died driving a pickup truck in the first snowstorm he ever experienced.

Some time ago I worked on one where one of the drivers was Ukrainian.  

I see them all the time where the drivers are Russian.

I used to see them where the drivers were from Mexico.  No more, however.  Mexican drivers made sense, given NAFTA, which makes me wonder who is now driving the trucks in Mexico.

What's going on here?

Supposedly the US has a truck driver shortage to the tune of 80,000 drivers.  By the end of the decade that figure is expected to be 130,000.

Maybe the drivers just are paid so little, in context, that Americans have other options and won't do the job.

Indeed, I think the entire concept of a labor shortage in a country of 300,000,000+, which isn't gaining any more land, is a complete crock.  Truly, at that level of human settlement, if there are jobs going wanting, it makes sense that they be exported overseas.

But you can't, of course, export trucking jobs.

Supposedly the percentage of immigrant truck drivers is around 18.6%, just a little higher than the percentage of immigrants in the workforce, which is 17%.  That demonstrates its own oddities, again, for a country that now is likely exceeding its carrying capacity for human habitation, or at least the capacity at which it doesn't become extremely limiting and overall unpleasant for the inhabitants.  But just considering that, 18% is a lot.

So, might we note, is 17%.  That figure we'd also note resulted in one of Chuck Todd's accidental points against the point he was trying to make in a fairly recent post COVID Meet The Press in which he blamed inflation on the Trump era reduction in immigration, the logic being that the price of labor was going up as we weren't taking in as many immigrants.  And, indeed, that may be a factor, but the point would be that we're artificially keeping wages low by depressing wages by taking in those who are willing to undercut those already here.  It's like shipping jobs overseas, but by importing the overseas workforce instead, with the express intent of keeping wages in the country low.4 

Which brings us to this point in the current inflation finger pointing.  Part of this is just wages being readjusted to the level they should have been at long ago. And part of that, although probably not all that much, can be offset by reducing the obscene wages the upper management at a lot of large American corporations receive.

That aside, the 18.6% doesn't reflect what we're seeing in accidents.

An industry source reports the following:

Research Summary. Using a database of 30 million profiles, Zippia estimates demographics and statistics for heavy truck drivers in the United States. Our estimates are verified against BLS, Census, and current job openings data for accuracy. After extensive research and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that:

Well, I don't know what you make of that other than that truck drivers are, on average, not paid that great.  That probably explains why people don't want to do it.  Living away from home, for wages that aren't as high as you could get doing something else, why would you want to do it?

Twenty mule team.

Which likely explains why we see as many immigrant truck drivers as we do. Whatever they're making here is more than they'd make where they are from.  We noted some of this earlier here, before it really applied directly to us in the form of collision:

Some of those who don't want to go back are truck drivers. The country is short 20,000 truck drivers right now.

In recent years the country has actually imported a lot of truck drivers, something the general public seems largely unaware of.  Anymore, when I read the names of people involved in truck driving accidents, I expect the drivers to be Russian, and I'm actually surprised when they are not.   What happened here overall isn't clear to me, but over the last fifteen years technology has developed to where it's much easier for trucking companies to keep tabs on their truckers while on the road and things have gotten safer. At the same time, this means, as it always has, but perhaps more so, that these guys live on the road.  According to Buttigieg the industry has an 80% annual turnover rate.

An 80% annual turnover rate doesn't sound even remotely possible to me, but that there's a high one wouldn't surprise me.  It's a dangerous job and contrary to what people like to imagine, it doesn't really pay the drivers that well as a rule, or at least fairly often.  Often the drivers are "owner operators" who own their own super expensive semi tractor and who are leasing it to the company they are driving for.  That in turn means that they're often making hefty payments on the truck.  I don't blame anyone for not wanting to do it.

I can blame the nation for putting itself in this situation, however.

Trucking is a subsidized industry, but people don't think of it that way.  Its primary competitor is rail. Railroads put in their own tracks and maintain their own railroad infrastructure. When you see a train, everything you were looking at, from the rails to the cars, were purchased by private enterprise. When you seem a semi tractor, however, it's always traveling on a public conveyance.


It's doing that fairly inefficiently compared to rail.  Rail is incredibly cheap on a cost per mile basis, and it's actually incredibly "green" as well.  It's efficient.  Trucks are nowhere near as efficient in any fashion.  Not even in employment of human resources.  Trains have, anymore, one or two men crews, the same as semi trucks, but they're hauling a lot more per mile than trucks are with just two men.

Well, sooner or later people are going to have to return to work.  When the money runs out, that's the choice you have.

But this isn't going to return to normal. Whether we'll stabilize soon in a new economy, and we better hope that we do, or keep on enduring this, which will be wiping out savings and destroying earning capacity, remains to be seen.  The current Administration will be a key to that. 

What this also shows is the impact of technology.

It was trains, not trucks that moved most American goods and products prior to the 1950s.   We've addresssed that here as well too:

Following the Second World War the U.S. saw a rising expansion of over the road trucking.  By the late 1950s the US was, additionally, overhauling its Interstate highway system via the Defense Department's budget with new "defense" highways, which were much improved compared to the old Interstate highway system.  With the greatly improved roads, by the 1960s, interstate long haul trucking was in an advance state of supplanting the railroads for a lot of American freighting.  At the same time, the diesel engine supplanted the gasoline engine for semi tractors.  A very uncommon engine for motor vehicles in the United States prior to the 1950s, diesels started coming in somewhere in that period and by the 1960s they'd completely replaced gasoline engines for over the road semi tractors.  Now, of course, diesels have become fairly common for heavy pickups as well, and are even starting to appear in the U.S. in light pickup trucks in spite of the higher cost of diesel fuel.


The change was dramatic, although few people can probably fully appreciate that now, as we are so acclimated to trucking.  Thousands of trucks supplanted thousands of rail cars, and entire industries that were once served only by rail came to be served by truck.  The shipping of livestock, for example, which was nearly exclusively a railroad enterprise up into the 1950s is now done entirely by truck, a change which had remarkable impacts as rail shipping required driving the livestock to the railhead, whereas with the trucks they are simply scheduled to arrive at a ranch at a particular time.  Likewise, businesses that at one time located themselves near rail lines, so that they could receive their heavy products by rail, no longer do, as they receive those items by trucks.  For example, pipeyards, once always near a railhead, are not always today.


But here's something I hadn't considered, even thought it's referenced in the post above.

And trucks have become part of the American vehicular fleet in a way that would have been hardly imaginable even 50 years ago.  As they've become more comfortable to drive, and easier to drive, they've been a common family vehicle, which is not what they once were.  Pickup trucks used to be pretty much only owned by people who had some need of them, even if that need was recreational.  Now, they're common everywhere.  Indeed, the Ford F150, Ford's 1/2 ton pickup truck, has been the best-selling vehicle, that's vehicle, not truck, for the past 32 years.  So, so common have trucks become in the United States that one model of 1/2 tone truck is the number one single high selling model of vehicle.  Pretty amazing for a vehicle that started off as utilitarian and industrial.

That is, they've all become more comfortable to drive.

Semi's too.

Early semi tractors were pretty hard to drive.  Transmissions were not synchronized, and the drivers had to be able to double clutch and work two transmission levers simultaneously, while also driving something that had manual steering.  I've actually seen this done, FWIW, on 1950s era 6x6 trucks, although it took somebody who really knew them well to do it. Early truck drivers did, often shifting with both hands while hooking an arm through the steering wheel, something that sound frighteningly dangerous.  By the time I was young, however, big rigs had evolved considerably.  Nonetheless, they still required the ability to really work a manual transmission.

As I haven't kept up on this, it was only fairly recently, due to an item of litigation, that I learned manual transmission trucks are on their way out.  Indeed, almost all of the big rigs you seen on Interstate highways have automatic transmissions.  Trucks coming in and out of oilfield locations, if owned by contractors, are probably manuals, but they're also older as a rule.  If you see new trucks, even there, coming in or out of one, its an automatic.

And frankly, anyone, with just a little driving experience, can drive an automatic transmission semi.  Maybe not well, but you could drive it.

And hence the problem.

By the time I was a college student the romance of truck driving, and yes it was once regarded as romantic, had gone.  Locals started disliking the heavy trucks and the people who drove them, as they were regarded as dangerous.  I recall that coming up, oddly,in a geology class once during which the professor, from rural Montana, noted that he thought the decline in truck drivers was sad, as he had an uncle who was a truck driver when he, the prof, was young, and he was such a good driver.

And he probably was.  This conversation would have occurred around 1983.  The uncle probably drove trucks in the 40s and 50s, when they remained pretty hard to drive. People working skilled equipment are, well, skilled, and skill develops professionalism as a rule.

Now the trucks have become so easy to drive the real skill has faded, and with that, I suspect, the job has become dull in the way that skillless jobs become.  It doesn't pay well, and people don't want to do it, save for those who almost have to in some circumstances.

Footnotes:

*. The name teamsters refer to men who used horses and wagons.  I.e., they drove a team.  That shows us, really, how old the term is, and how old the Teamsters Union is.  Having said that, horse-drawn teams were still in use for some things as late as the 1940s.

1. See footnote above.

A relative of my wife's, I'd note, was a teamster driving 20 mule teams locally when the oilfield still used them and when the refinery required them for heavy construction.  All a thing of the past, but something also requiring vast skill, which is relevant to this discussion.

2.  "He doesn't speak English" was a text I received right away from my wife.  "Russian?" was my reply, suspecting this must be the case.  "Nigerian" came the reply back.

In fact, she knew that right away.  We are friends with a Nigerian Catholic Priest and their accent is very distinct.  She just didn't want to embarrass the man by assuming his nationality, but he volunteered it.  Nigerian accents can be quite difficult to understand, as compared to other African accidents.

3.  I should note that it was clear that truck driving was probably only part of this individuals job.  He was dressed appropriately in FRs and likely was driving to a frac location.  Indeed, he noted he had to get to Shoshoni.  
But this raises its own interesting questions.  His "day boss" came to the location, driving in from Gillette, and taking a lot longer than he estimated it would take him.  The day boss was from Oklahoma or Texas, as his soft southern accent made clear.  The Haliburton trailer was licensed in Oklahoma. Haliburton used to have a yard here, but it no longer does.

I've encountered a lot of Mexican immigrants in oilfield service jobs, but up until recently I didn't encounter any African ones.  This is only the second time that I have, but here too, it's an interesting phenomenon.  For years, it's been a bedrock belief of Wyomingites that the oilfield provides good, high paying, jobs, and that certainly has in fact been true.  But for some time now, quite a few companies are actually staffed by out-of-state crews in some instances.  Locals still work on a lot of crews.  But now we're starting to see, at a very low level, I think, small numbers of immigrants who have come from overseas to work in these industries.

Again, who can blame them?  Nobody. But what is the overall impact on wages and employment?  Right now, probably not much, but some evolution seems to be going on.

4.  This is one of the things that gave rise to Donald Trump and the populist right.  A large number of Trump supporters came out of the Rust Belt Democrats who simply grew tired of having their traditionally well paying manual labor and skilled labor jobs erode economically due to intentionally bringing in an immigrant population that would work for lower wages.  This lead to a strong anti-immigrant feeling amongst them which mirrors a less virulent overall feeling in the country, save amongst liberals, that immigration into the country is at far too high of a rate.

This sense dates back all the way to the 1970s, but repeated generations of Democratic and Republican politicians have flat out ignored it, with the Democrats erroneously believing that every immigrant is a future Democratic voter and the Republicans cynically believing that this serves the interest of industry by keeping wages depressed.  With Trump's express adoption of this long suppressed view, many Rust Belt Democrats bolted their party and became Trump Republicans.

There is a lesson there about ignoring a long held concern of a large section of the country.  Not only has this now come into one of the two parties in force, it's become malignant in certain ways as well.

Related Threads:

Automotive Transportation I: Trucks and Lorries


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