IMO, the NPR article from a few months ago is pretty balanced on the issue of the so-called “driver shortage”.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2...river-shortage
Cliffs with some of my own exposition:
* Big carriers, repped by the large industry lobbying entity, American Trucking Associations (ATA), push the “driver shortage” story to extract help from big business-friendly members of Congress to make it easier for big carriers to churn new-to-the-industry drivers at much lower pay rates into their truck fleet seats given their roughly 90% turnover rate. A recent example is a proposed new federal law that is the deceptively-named DRIVE-Safe Act, that would lower the minimum driver age for interstate carriers from 21 to 18. But because only large carriers have the financial strength to self-insure — and thus aren’t required to have independently underwriten insurance policies on their fleet — only the major carriers are likely to be able tap into the 18-20 labor pool for drivers of interstate freight.
* Owner/operators, usually repped by a different lobbying entity, Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIPA) usually say there really isn’t a driver shortage, just a bad retention rate for the major carriers because they tend to pay way too little or treat many of their drivers very poorly, resulting in high turnover at thise big companies. But it should be recognized that owner/operators that get paid as a percentage of the freight charge (versus a fixed per mile rate), benefit from actual positive demand-supply imbalances, which drive up freight rates, such as has been happening since the first wave of COVID pandemics lockdowns ended sometime last year.
I’ll address some of the other questions in a later post.