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The Truth About the ATA Article on Trucking Turnover

In case you missed it, recently, the American Trucking Associations published an article about the “real” reasons for driver turnover. You can find it at https://www.trucking.org/news-insights/truth-about-trucking-turnover . 

Let’s discuss this article, shall we?

Right out of the gate, in sentence number one, we hear about a “new class of armchair experts has risen to explain all that ails America’s trucking industry” followed immediately by “Bureaucrats, essayists, and other cultural commentators…”. 

Already this piece is a hit job with name-calling. Way to be the adult in the room ATA.

Later, in trying to explain turnover rates we get this “Turnover is not an indicator of people exiting the industry (we know, because ATA created and tabulated the metric)” So the ATA created the way to measure employee turnover? Come on. The point is actually valid but the ATA creating the metric is nonsense and adds nothing to your argument. 

But the rest of the article is where the discussion goes south. They suggest that drivers move due to demand and opportunity. Forgetting that the opportunity creates the demand for a moment, the article implies that pay increases in the market drive the movement of drivers from company to company and not out of the industry. In the article “What does this mean for “turnover”? Driver A, who’s been working for a fleet for only four months, knows he can jump to another carrier and get an immediate $15,000 sign-on bonus plus pay raise. Six months later, he can do the same thing again. This churn—or poaching, or whatever one wants to call it—is what inflates turnover in a tight labor market.” 

Ok, first of all, what companies are paying out $15,000 that quickly? We should all get CDLs and drive for the bonuses. Nearly all sign-on bonuses of size are paid out over a number of months often stretching out to a year or more. So the idea of job-hopping to collect those five-figure checks just isn’t valid. Again, please tell me who pays $15,000 immediately as the article says.

But they save the best for last… “So when Kaiser-Schatzlein and others point to high turnover figures as a sign of truckers’ job dissatisfaction, they’re missing the mark. One could argue they’re getting it backward. In many respects, high turnover is an indicator of driver empowerment. When the labor market tightens, drivers find themselves in the driver’s seat (pardon the pun), putting millions of hard-working men and women in control of their own destiny in ways they haven’t been in years, if ever. “ 

This is said as if there is no stress to finding and changing employers. The stress of an unknown new truck, new dispatcher, new routes, new benefits if they are offered, possibly a new way of getting paid (short miles vs practical miles and don’t get me started on that). It also assumes that the drivers have full and complete knowledge of how every trucking company operates and not just what they say so the driver can make the best decision. The driver doesn’t want to make any more job changes than necessary for the reasons mentioned above. This is a nice way to say that you used to have to put up with being treated poorly with no chance of changing but now you have a chance to change! The article fails to put any responsibility on the trucking companies for the driver leaving them in the first place. Why not just say “Let them eat cake”?

There’s more to this article that needs discussion like the citation of raised pay but not talking about how drivers get significantly lower real wages than they did 40 years ago. I will leave you with a few final thoughts. Check out the OOIDA’s response to this article at https://landline.media/the-ata-says-driver-churn-is-good-for-you/ and check out our article about John Oliver’s ‘trucking’ video a couple of weeks ago about this as well at https://www.truckingpayroll.com/latest-news/john-olivers-trucks/ 

With that, I will sign off but unlike the article, I have the courage to put my name at the bottom.

Mike Ritzema

Written by Mike Ritzema

With over 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship, management, business planning, financial analysis, software engineering, operations, and decision analysis, Mike has the breadth and depth of experience needed to quickly understand entrepreneurs’ businesses and craft the most suitable solutions.

 

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