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Showing Original Post only (View all)Why Trucking is Struggling - 94% Turnover [View all]
And the port conditions of course.
More info in the supply chain.
If everybody is "an independent contractor " when they don't want to be, why are companies suprised when people dont show under adverse conditions?. Reminds me of an article at Utne reader, from 10 years ago, on distribution/warehouse workers.
[link:https://prospect.org/economy/why-trucking-cant-deliver-the-goods/|
For the past dozen years, Omar Alvarez has been a key link in the nations supply chain. Hes one of some 12,000 truckers who haul the containers from the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach (where 40 percent of all the ship-borne imports to the United States arrive) to the immense complex of warehouses 50 miles east of L.A., where the goods are unpacked, resorted, put back on other trucks, and sent to all the Walmarts, Targets, and the like within a thousand-mile radius.
Alvarez works for one of the largest trucking companies at the ports, XPO Logistics, but XPO insists that Alvarez and his fellow truckers arent really employees. As far as XPO is concerned, theyre independent contractors and it treats them as suchthough they drive XPO trucks they lease from the company or its adjuncts and cant use those trucks for any other jobs. As independent contractors, they receive no benefits and arent covered by minimum-wage statutes. They must pay for their gas, maintenance, rig insurance, and repairs themselves; and, ever since the pandemic clogged the ports with more goods than ever before, theyve had to wait in lines for as long as four to six uncompensated hours before they can access a container and get it on the road. If they get in the wrong line at the port, they literally cant get out, surrounded by other trucks and doomed to waste more time. Many ports dont even provide bathrooms for waiting truckers, because they arent port employees.
According to a 2019 study by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the median annual pre-tax income of Alvarez and his fellow port truckers, once their expenses are factored in, is a munificent $28,000.
We have no health insurance, Alvarez says. Like the majority of port truckers, hes an immigrant who doesnt qualify for Medicaid. When I need to see a doctor, he says, I drive [not in his truck] to Tijuana.
Perhaps one-fifth of port truckers actually are independent contractors; nearly everyone else is, like Alvarez, misclassified as independents. Over the past decade, dozens of lawsuits from misclassified drivers have resulted in judgments affirming that theyve been misclassified and awarding them compensation from the companies that misclassified them. XPO recently paid a $30 million fine to a large number of its drivers. But neither XPO nor any of the other fined companies have stopped misclassification. Its cheaper for them to pay a fine than to pay their drivers a living wage.
Not surprisingly, given the long waits and meager rewards, a lot of drivers have simply stopped showing up. According to Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of L.A., fully 30 percent of the ports 12,000 drivers no longer show up on weekdays, a percentage that rises to 50 percent on weekends. Once the waits exceed six hours, as they now sometimes do, drivers would run the risk of exceeding the 11-hour federal limit on trucker workdays if they then were to actually get a loadwhich means the port must turn them away, and theyll have spent an entire workday for no pay at all.