December 18, 2025 • 15 mins
The trucking industry has long been dominated by older white men. But as those truckers steer toward retirement, who will replace them?
On today’s Big Take podcast, host Sarah Holder hits the road with Bloomberg’s Jaewon Kang, who’s been exploring how one company is trying to transform its trucking workforce. And we hear from MIT’s Chris Caplice, DAT Freight and Analytics’ Dean Croke and two Walmart truckers about what’s working for the industry and the challenges it faces on the road ahead.
Read more: Walmart’s $115,000 Starting Pay and Better Rigs Draw Women to Trucking
Hosted by Sarah Holder Produced by Julia Press Reported by Jaewon Kang Edited by Tracey Samuelson Fact-checking by Rachael Lewis-Krisky Engineering by Katie McMurran
Senior Producer: Naomi Shavin Deputy Executive Producer: Julia Weaver Executive Producer: Nicole Beemsterboer
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Late this past summer, Bloomberg retail reporter Jaywon Kang flew
to Anchorage, Alaska, got in a truck and headed south
toward Kenai.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
You're surrounded by these really majestic mountains, and it was summer,
but you could still kind of see like snow on
the tip of the mountains. It was sort of the
calm before the storm, because you know, a few months
after that trip, the weather would have started getting pretty harsh.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yes, hair will turn into pig cheeks of mines.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Jaywan was riding Shaka and the driver's seat next to
her there was a trucker named Leslie Scott.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Do you see those mountains.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
It's pretty mellow right now, but sometimes it could be
pretty treacherous.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Leslie has been driving trucks for nearly a decade. For
the past few years, she's driven with a partner, Michelle Saliki.
They call themselves Belma and Luise. They even have a
shared TikTok account.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Okay, Michelle making video does a breakfast good I'd go
there are you? Even though Lesslie makes me walk a mile.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Leslie and Michelle don't fit the typical truck driver profile.
More than ninety percent of truck drivers in the US
are met, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
A lot of drivers still will say, oh, are you
driving with your husband? They're shocked to the Seer team
women out here, especially.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Right Leslie is fifty eight, Michelle is sixty nine. The
median age for a truck driver in the US is
about forty five. Leslie and Michelle drive for Walmart, and
right now the company is making an effort to recruit
more drivers because the trucking industry is at a critical
juncture and the decisions its biggest players make now could
(01:58):
affect their ability to meet the increasingly insatiable demand of
American shoppers in the years to come.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
The current workforce a lot of people will probably start
retiring within the next ten years or so roughly, and
so the big question is do we have enough people
who can replace those people who are going to be
leaving the workforce.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News Today on the show, the US trucking industry
at a crossroads. An aging workforce, chronically high turnover, long hours,
and inconsistent pay. How Walmart is trying to change trucking
to appeal to people who might not otherwise find themselves
(02:44):
behind the wheel. If you've ordered anything to be delivered
this holiday season, or even bought something in a store,
there's a good chance it got to your doorstep or
onto those shelves because of a truck driver.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
The job of being a truck driver is really important
in this country. I mean, you know, it's estimated that
about seventy percent of freight is handled by commercial truck drivers.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
According to the shipping firm Pitney Boats, eleven and a
half billion parcels were shipped in the US back in
twenty sixteen. By twenty twenty four, that had nearly doubled
to more than twenty two billion parcels. And moving all
those packages across the country isn't easy.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
It's a really tough job. I mean, generally speaking, you're
spending hours every day driving. You're spending days away from
your loved ones, sometimes spending weeks away from your home.
Depending on who you work for, you might be asked
to help unload and load all the goods in that truck.
(03:52):
So that's physically demanding.
Speaker 5 (03:54):
It's one of the hottest jobs I've evid done in
my life.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
That's Dean Krok. Today he works as an animals at
DAT Freight and Analytics, but before that he spent years
as a driver in Australia before moving to the US
in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
You've got to be able to handle being on your own,
so there's the mental aspect of it, and as you
get older, you become less tolerant to the extreme cold
or the extreme physical activity.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
And the trucking industry can be volatile. It's prone to
booms and busts. One of the booms came during the pandemic.
Online sales shot up and the number of trucking carriers
rose to fill that.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
Need, and then demand fell away, so those trucks had
to do something. I created this over supply of trucks
on the road and they competed for less freight and
it drove freight rates down.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Dean says, we've been in a freight recession for the
last three to four years.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
And now we're starting to see bankruptcy start to rise
and turnover levels start to increase, driver pay levels of
starting to decline, so we're at the bottom of the market.
Speaker 6 (05:03):
There's a lot of people who operate this when it's
economically viable, and otherwise they'll just park it and do
something else.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Chris Kaplis runs the Center for Transportation and Logistics at
MIT and founded MIT's Freight Lab, which.
Speaker 6 (05:18):
Looks specifically how companies, shippers, truckers, transportation providers, carriers, and
brokers can all work together.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Chris says that for all these industry players, driver retention
is a big issue.
Speaker 6 (05:31):
Turnover is pretty high. Sometimes for a lot of carriers
it's one hundred percent. Doesn't mean that every driver leaves,
but you have some that leave in much shorter periods
of time.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
That means you might be going through multiple drivers in
one position, even if others stay on. That's expensive for carriers.
Chris says one reason for the high turnover is how
drivers are paid.
Speaker 6 (05:54):
Drivers typically only get paid when they're hauling loaded miles.
The empty miles are when they're going to position to
pick up a load, and so if you get delayed
for loading, you might get pushed two or three hours.
That pushes off everything that you have down the line.
So the real challenge is that the driver pays that
price because they can't make up that time.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
In twenty thirteen, the government capped how long drivers can
be on the clock during an average week at seventy
hours each day. They can work fourteen hours, only eleven
of which can be spent driving, and most drivers don't
get paid for the time they spend on the loading dock,
So if drivers spend too many hours waiting around without pay,
(06:36):
that means fewer paid hours on the road.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
You have no idea how soul destroying sitting.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Around waiting is Dean crok Again.
Speaker 5 (06:44):
I probably spend a third of my working life sitting
on ship a loading docks, waiting to get loaded and unloaded,
and losing thousands and thousands of dollars in the process.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
All that leads to a really unpredictable schedule, which makes
the job a tough sell, especially for people with families.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
One of the things that drives drivers absolutely insane is
not having consistent start and finish times like One of
the things we found that increased driver turnover rates, like
as in quitting, was when drivers didn't get home when
they were promised. You could be stuck in traffic and
not get home for an hour later, and that's very
difficult if you've got childcare and you have to pick
(07:23):
up someone at four PM. Really difficult industry to work
around those fixed deadlines.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Even for truckers who do get more consistent hours, the
days can get really long.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
As a primary care a twelve hour day just doesn't work.
I need someone to look after my children. Whether I'm
male or female like that, It's a really difficult industry
to work in, even if I'm going to be home
every night.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Then there are the challenges that disproportionately affect women drivers.
Here's Bloomberg's j One King.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
There are dangers on the road if you're driving alone,
you know, risks of sexual harassment, and so that's kind
of deterred women from entering this job.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
So how are companies like Walmart trying to recruit the
next generation of drivers before the current workforce retires. That's
coming up. When Leslie Scott decided to become a truck driver,
(08:26):
she knew she wanted to drive for Walmart. They paid
the best, They paid the best. Walmart started to anticipate
a truck and crunch more than a decade ago, when
those new caps on driver hours were introduced. To get
ahead of it, the company ramped up its recruitment and
retention efforts for its private fleet. In twenty twenty three,
(08:48):
it launched something called the Associate to Driver Program. Here's
Bloomberg's jaywon King.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
They're basically tapping their existing employees who you know, work
at their stores or on the front lines and training
them to become truck drivers by covering the costs associated
with you know, learning and getting the you know, the
commercial driver's licenses, which you know cost thousands of dollars.
(09:15):
And already about half of their new drivers come through
that program, and they, you know, that that's something that
they want to keep investing in. To build their pipeline.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Walmart has given its drivers more predictable schedules and Wi
Fi equipped trucks. For safety, it pairs up drivers on
its most treacherous routes, like the one in Alaska that
Leslie and Michelle drive. Leslie and Michelle both earn about
one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars a year. That's
about twice what a typical US trucker makes. Here's Leslie
(09:49):
this kay.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Sliving w I can support my family capture with the
amount of line that I've.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Man, Leslie says. The job still ha its challenges, especially
on the Alaska route she's driving. She's encountered hungry bears
on the road, faced extreme weather and dangerous winds, and
had to deal with the constraints of her schedule.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
It took me two years to get a mamogram.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
The sedentary nature of the work has taken a toll too.
Since she started driving, Leslie gained seventy pounds and had
to have bariatric surgery last year. Still, having Michelle as
her driving partner makes Leslie feel more secure on the road.
Leslie also says she feels a lot of job security.
(10:37):
This is the first job where she feels like if
she were to quit, she'd have another offer in no time.
Leslie just loves what she does, and she thinks the
trucking industry as a whole could do more to bring
other women on board.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
I think maybe.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Too enties for women to do this, especially in my
age group, because we are the free ones. Most of
us have rates for children, and we're also proven fact
to be a safer once we're more cautious, you know,
they say we.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Don't have big accidents. Get all the brands out here.
That's my mom truck. Wellcome, thanks the world.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
The real.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Today about eighteen percent of Walmart's truckers or women, according
to an estimate from the data firm Revellia Lapse. That's
nearly double the rate of competitors. But high pay isn't
enough to combat some of the other factors keeping women
out of the industry, like the long and often unusual hours. Leslie,
(11:35):
for example, was actually always interested in becoming a trucker,
but it took until her kids were out of the
house for her to feel like she could make it work.
I asked Dean Krok, the analyst for DAT Freight and Analytics,
how the industry overall is doing with recruiting women and
younger drivers. He said, there have been some improvements, some
(11:57):
redesigning of how trucking works.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
We are doing better. So the pandemic drove a lot
more warehouses closer to urban populations. So when we were
at home during the pandemic ordering things overnight, that drew
a lot more warehouses that staged our freight closer to us.
So what that created was a lot more deliveries in
smaller vehicles closer to our homes. That created a whole
(12:22):
new set of jobs.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Some of those are gig economy jobs. People using their
own vehicles to drop packages on doorsteps in the middle
of the night.
Speaker 5 (12:30):
But there's been a whole new economy around small box
trucks and straight trucks and smaller vehicles delivering freight in
that sort of maybe one hundred mile radius. So there's
a lot of growth in that particular market. There's also
a lot of growth in what I called daycab work.
So what the industry is doing a lot more of,
and what it can do more of is make vehicles
(12:53):
and jobs and routes and freight networks more conducive to
jobs that get drivers home every night.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
But at the end of the day, Dean says, making
this job appeal to more people comes down to changing
how a majority of drivers are paid, offering annual guaranteed
salaries as opposed to the hourly per mile and activity
rates that companies like Walmer use.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
So it doesn't matter how long you spend on a
loading dock, you're paid by the salary, you're paid by
the yow, or paid by the year. So one of
the challenges they've got here is drivers have to be
paid for the time they spend on the job. So
to attract the new generation of drivers to the industry,
they have to find a way to pay them for
their time and services.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
In the meantime, new autonomous technologies could transform the nature
of the job.
Speaker 5 (13:43):
I think what you'll see is that trucking will become different.
Technology I think will help bridge the gap. Instead of
me trying to stay awake between midnight and six, technology
will take over and I'll assist me through that worst
period of the night. If you think about a current
truck driver, you have an autonomous vehicle going along into
State forty out near Laramie, and it has a flat tire,
(14:04):
someone's got to put the warning triangles out. If you've
got somebody that's in the vehicle doing the other duties,
I could see that defraying some of the costs of
the driver. But that person's also doing other paperwork, triaging
things that might get wrong in the vehicle. So I
think that's where we might land with a hybrid type driver.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
As the trucking industry confronts these coming changes, Leslie Scott
is about to embark on her own next chapter. Her
driving partner, Michelle, is planning to retire shortly after she
turned seventy next year.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
And my therapist asked me, where's your safe space in
your life? And I said it or not. Cab of
the truck in Alaska's my safe space.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
When I close is Curtain's pie. Because of her, I
don't think about what's out here. Yeah, because I know.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
She's gotten Thelma will be looking for a new Luise.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access
to all of bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg
dot com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be
(15:17):
back tomorrow
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Late this past summer, Bloomberg retail reporter Jaywon Kang flew
to Anchorage, Alaska, got in a truck and headed south
toward Kenai.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
You're surrounded by these really majestic mountains, and it was summer,
but you could still kind of see like snow on
the tip of the mountains. It was sort of the
calm before the storm, because you know, a few months
after that trip, the weather would have started getting pretty harsh.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yes, hair will turn into pig cheeks of mines.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Jaywan was riding Shaka and the driver's seat next to
her there was a trucker named Leslie Scott.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Do you see those mountains.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
It's pretty mellow right now, but sometimes it could be
pretty treacherous.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Leslie has been driving trucks for nearly a decade. For
the past few years, she's driven with a partner, Michelle Saliki.
They call themselves Belma and Luise. They even have a
shared TikTok account.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Okay, Michelle making video does a breakfast good I'd go
there are you? Even though Lesslie makes me walk a mile.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Leslie and Michelle don't fit the typical truck driver profile.
More than ninety percent of truck drivers in the US
are met, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
A lot of drivers still will say, oh, are you
driving with your husband? They're shocked to the Seer team
women out here, especially.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Right Leslie is fifty eight, Michelle is sixty nine. The
median age for a truck driver in the US is
about forty five. Leslie and Michelle drive for Walmart, and
right now the company is making an effort to recruit
more drivers because the trucking industry is at a critical
juncture and the decisions its biggest players make now could
(01:58):
affect their ability to meet the increasingly insatiable demand of
American shoppers in the years to come.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
The current workforce a lot of people will probably start
retiring within the next ten years or so roughly, and
so the big question is do we have enough people
who can replace those people who are going to be
leaving the workforce.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News Today on the show, the US trucking industry
at a crossroads. An aging workforce, chronically high turnover, long hours,
and inconsistent pay. How Walmart is trying to change trucking
to appeal to people who might not otherwise find themselves
(02:44):
behind the wheel. If you've ordered anything to be delivered
this holiday season, or even bought something in a store,
there's a good chance it got to your doorstep or
onto those shelves because of a truck driver.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
The job of being a truck driver is really important
in this country. I mean, you know, it's estimated that
about seventy percent of freight is handled by commercial truck drivers.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
According to the shipping firm Pitney Boats, eleven and a
half billion parcels were shipped in the US back in
twenty sixteen. By twenty twenty four, that had nearly doubled
to more than twenty two billion parcels. And moving all
those packages across the country isn't easy.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
It's a really tough job. I mean, generally speaking, you're
spending hours every day driving. You're spending days away from
your loved ones, sometimes spending weeks away from your home.
Depending on who you work for, you might be asked
to help unload and load all the goods in that truck.
(03:52):
So that's physically demanding.
Speaker 5 (03:54):
It's one of the hottest jobs I've evid done in
my life.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
That's Dean Krok. Today he works as an animals at
DAT Freight and Analytics, but before that he spent years
as a driver in Australia before moving to the US
in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 5 (04:08):
You've got to be able to handle being on your own,
so there's the mental aspect of it, and as you
get older, you become less tolerant to the extreme cold
or the extreme physical activity.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
And the trucking industry can be volatile. It's prone to
booms and busts. One of the booms came during the pandemic.
Online sales shot up and the number of trucking carriers
rose to fill that.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
Need, and then demand fell away, so those trucks had
to do something. I created this over supply of trucks
on the road and they competed for less freight and
it drove freight rates down.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Dean says, we've been in a freight recession for the
last three to four years.
Speaker 5 (04:50):
And now we're starting to see bankruptcy start to rise
and turnover levels start to increase, driver pay levels of
starting to decline, so we're at the bottom of the market.
Speaker 6 (05:03):
There's a lot of people who operate this when it's
economically viable, and otherwise they'll just park it and do
something else.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Chris Kaplis runs the Center for Transportation and Logistics at
MIT and founded MIT's Freight Lab, which.
Speaker 6 (05:18):
Looks specifically how companies, shippers, truckers, transportation providers, carriers, and
brokers can all work together.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Chris says that for all these industry players, driver retention
is a big issue.
Speaker 6 (05:31):
Turnover is pretty high. Sometimes for a lot of carriers
it's one hundred percent. Doesn't mean that every driver leaves,
but you have some that leave in much shorter periods
of time.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
That means you might be going through multiple drivers in
one position, even if others stay on. That's expensive for carriers.
Chris says one reason for the high turnover is how
drivers are paid.
Speaker 6 (05:54):
Drivers typically only get paid when they're hauling loaded miles.
The empty miles are when they're going to position to
pick up a load, and so if you get delayed
for loading, you might get pushed two or three hours.
That pushes off everything that you have down the line.
So the real challenge is that the driver pays that
price because they can't make up that time.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
In twenty thirteen, the government capped how long drivers can
be on the clock during an average week at seventy
hours each day. They can work fourteen hours, only eleven
of which can be spent driving, and most drivers don't
get paid for the time they spend on the loading dock,
So if drivers spend too many hours waiting around without pay,
(06:36):
that means fewer paid hours on the road.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
You have no idea how soul destroying sitting.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Around waiting is Dean crok Again.
Speaker 5 (06:44):
I probably spend a third of my working life sitting
on ship a loading docks, waiting to get loaded and unloaded,
and losing thousands and thousands of dollars in the process.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
All that leads to a really unpredictable schedule, which makes
the job a tough sell, especially for people with families.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
One of the things that drives drivers absolutely insane is
not having consistent start and finish times like One of
the things we found that increased driver turnover rates, like
as in quitting, was when drivers didn't get home when
they were promised. You could be stuck in traffic and
not get home for an hour later, and that's very
difficult if you've got childcare and you have to pick
(07:23):
up someone at four PM. Really difficult industry to work
around those fixed deadlines.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Even for truckers who do get more consistent hours, the
days can get really long.
Speaker 5 (07:35):
As a primary care a twelve hour day just doesn't work.
I need someone to look after my children. Whether I'm
male or female like that, It's a really difficult industry
to work in, even if I'm going to be home
every night.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Then there are the challenges that disproportionately affect women drivers.
Here's Bloomberg's j One King.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
There are dangers on the road if you're driving alone,
you know, risks of sexual harassment, and so that's kind
of deterred women from entering this job.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
So how are companies like Walmart trying to recruit the
next generation of drivers before the current workforce retires. That's
coming up. When Leslie Scott decided to become a truck driver,
(08:26):
she knew she wanted to drive for Walmart. They paid
the best, They paid the best. Walmart started to anticipate
a truck and crunch more than a decade ago, when
those new caps on driver hours were introduced. To get
ahead of it, the company ramped up its recruitment and
retention efforts for its private fleet. In twenty twenty three,
(08:48):
it launched something called the Associate to Driver Program. Here's
Bloomberg's jaywon King.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
They're basically tapping their existing employees who you know, work
at their stores or on the front lines and training
them to become truck drivers by covering the costs associated
with you know, learning and getting the you know, the
commercial driver's licenses, which you know cost thousands of dollars.
(09:15):
And already about half of their new drivers come through
that program, and they, you know, that that's something that
they want to keep investing in. To build their pipeline.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Walmart has given its drivers more predictable schedules and Wi
Fi equipped trucks. For safety, it pairs up drivers on
its most treacherous routes, like the one in Alaska that
Leslie and Michelle drive. Leslie and Michelle both earn about
one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars a year. That's
about twice what a typical US trucker makes. Here's Leslie
(09:49):
this kay.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Sliving w I can support my family capture with the
amount of line that I've.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Man, Leslie says. The job still ha its challenges, especially
on the Alaska route she's driving. She's encountered hungry bears
on the road, faced extreme weather and dangerous winds, and
had to deal with the constraints of her schedule.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
It took me two years to get a mamogram.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
The sedentary nature of the work has taken a toll too.
Since she started driving, Leslie gained seventy pounds and had
to have bariatric surgery last year. Still, having Michelle as
her driving partner makes Leslie feel more secure on the road.
Leslie also says she feels a lot of job security.
(10:37):
This is the first job where she feels like if
she were to quit, she'd have another offer in no time.
Leslie just loves what she does, and she thinks the
trucking industry as a whole could do more to bring
other women on board.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
I think maybe.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Too enties for women to do this, especially in my
age group, because we are the free ones. Most of
us have rates for children, and we're also proven fact
to be a safer once we're more cautious, you know,
they say we.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Don't have big accidents. Get all the brands out here.
That's my mom truck. Wellcome, thanks the world.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
The real.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Today about eighteen percent of Walmart's truckers or women, according
to an estimate from the data firm Revellia Lapse. That's
nearly double the rate of competitors. But high pay isn't
enough to combat some of the other factors keeping women
out of the industry, like the long and often unusual hours. Leslie,
(11:35):
for example, was actually always interested in becoming a trucker,
but it took until her kids were out of the
house for her to feel like she could make it work.
I asked Dean Krok, the analyst for DAT Freight and Analytics,
how the industry overall is doing with recruiting women and
younger drivers. He said, there have been some improvements, some
(11:57):
redesigning of how trucking works.
Speaker 5 (12:00):
We are doing better. So the pandemic drove a lot
more warehouses closer to urban populations. So when we were
at home during the pandemic ordering things overnight, that drew
a lot more warehouses that staged our freight closer to us.
So what that created was a lot more deliveries in
smaller vehicles closer to our homes. That created a whole
(12:22):
new set of jobs.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Some of those are gig economy jobs. People using their
own vehicles to drop packages on doorsteps in the middle
of the night.
Speaker 5 (12:30):
But there's been a whole new economy around small box
trucks and straight trucks and smaller vehicles delivering freight in
that sort of maybe one hundred mile radius. So there's
a lot of growth in that particular market. There's also
a lot of growth in what I called daycab work.
So what the industry is doing a lot more of,
and what it can do more of is make vehicles
(12:53):
and jobs and routes and freight networks more conducive to
jobs that get drivers home every night.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
But at the end of the day, Dean says, making
this job appeal to more people comes down to changing
how a majority of drivers are paid, offering annual guaranteed
salaries as opposed to the hourly per mile and activity
rates that companies like Walmer use.
Speaker 5 (13:18):
So it doesn't matter how long you spend on a
loading dock, you're paid by the salary, you're paid by
the yow, or paid by the year. So one of
the challenges they've got here is drivers have to be
paid for the time they spend on the job. So
to attract the new generation of drivers to the industry,
they have to find a way to pay them for
their time and services.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
In the meantime, new autonomous technologies could transform the nature
of the job.
Speaker 5 (13:43):
I think what you'll see is that trucking will become different.
Technology I think will help bridge the gap. Instead of
me trying to stay awake between midnight and six, technology
will take over and I'll assist me through that worst
period of the night. If you think about a current
truck driver, you have an autonomous vehicle going along into
State forty out near Laramie, and it has a flat tire,
(14:04):
someone's got to put the warning triangles out. If you've
got somebody that's in the vehicle doing the other duties,
I could see that defraying some of the costs of
the driver. But that person's also doing other paperwork, triaging
things that might get wrong in the vehicle. So I
think that's where we might land with a hybrid type driver.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
As the trucking industry confronts these coming changes, Leslie Scott
is about to embark on her own next chapter. Her
driving partner, Michelle, is planning to retire shortly after she
turned seventy next year.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
And my therapist asked me, where's your safe space in
your life? And I said it or not. Cab of
the truck in Alaska's my safe space.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
When I close is Curtain's pie. Because of her, I
don't think about what's out here. Yeah, because I know.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
She's gotten Thelma will be looking for a new Luise.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access
to all of bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg
dot com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be
(15:17):
back tomorrow
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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