Truckers Are Aging Out. Who Will Replace Them?

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1:02Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Late this past summer, Bloomberg retail reporter Jaywon Kang flew to Anchorage, Alaska, got in a truck and headed south toward Kenai. 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.

1:40Jaywon was riding shotgun. In the driver's seat next to her was a trucker named Leslie Scott. You see those mountains. It's pretty mellow right now, but sometimes it can be pretty treacherous. Leslie has been driving trucks for nearly a decade. For the past few years, she's driven with a partner, Michelle Salicki. They call themselves Belma and Louise. They even have a shared TikTok account. Okay, Michelle, I'm making a video. Was the breakfast good? I'd go there again. Even though Leslie makes me walk a mile. Leslie and Michelle don't fit the typical truck driver profile. More than 90 % of truck drivers in the U.S.

2:24are met, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A lot of drivers still will say, oh, are you driving with your husband? They're shocked to see two women up here, especially our age. Leslie is 58. Michelle is 69. The median age for a truck driver in the U.S. is about 45. 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 affect their ability to meet the increasingly insatiable demand of American shoppers in the years to come.

3:05The current workforce, a lot of people will probably start retiring within the next, you know, 10 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? I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, the U.S. 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 behind the wheel.

3:48If 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. The job of being a truck driver is really important in this country. I mean, you know, it's estimated that about 70 % of freight is handled by commercial truck drivers. According to the shipping firm Pitney Bowes, 11.5 billion parcels were shipped in the U.S. back in 2016. By 2024, that had nearly doubled to more than 22 billion parcels. And moving all those packages across the country isn't easy. It's a really tough job.

4:33I 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 the truck. So that's physically demanding. It's one of the hardest jobs I've ever done in my life. That's Dean Croak. Today, he works as an analyst at DAT Freight and Analytics. But before that, he spent years as a driver in Australia before moving to the U.S. in 1999. You've got to be able to handle being on your own. So there's the mental aspect of it.

5:13And as you get older, you become less tolerant to, you know, the extreme cold or the extreme physical activity. 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 need. And then demand fell away. So those trucks had to do something. It created this oversupply of trucks on the road. And they competed for less freight and it drove freight rates down. Dean says we've been in a freight recession for the last three to four years. And now we're starting to see bankruptcy start to rise and turnover levels start to increase.

5:56driver pay, you know, levels are starting to decline. So we're at the bottom of the market. 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. Chris Kaplis runs the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT and founded MIT's Freight Lab. Which looks specifically how companies, shippers, truckers, transportation providers, carriers, and brokers can all work together. Chris says that for all these industry players, driver retention is a big issue. Turnover is pretty high. Sometimes for a lot of carriers, it's 100%.

6:35Doesn't mean that every driver leaves, but you have some that leave in much shorter periods of time. 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. 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.

7:14In 2013, the government capped how long drivers can be on the clock during an average week at 70 hours. Each day, they can work 14 hours, only 11 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, that means fewer paid hours on the road. You've got no idea how soul-destroying sitting around waiting is. Dean Croke again. I probably spend a third of my working life sitting on shipper loading docks waiting to get loaded and unloaded. and losing thousands and thousands of dollars in the process.

7:54All that leads to a really unpredictable schedule, which makes the job a tough sell, especially for people with families. 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 up someone at 4pm. Really difficult industry to work around those fixed deadlines. Even for truckers who do get more consistent hours, the days can get really long.

8:35As a primary carer, a 12-hour day just doesn't work. I need someone to look after my children, whether I'm male or female. It's a really difficult industry to work in, even if I'm going to be home every night. Then there are the challenges that disproportionately affect women drivers. Here's Bloomberg's Jaywon Kang. 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. So how are companies like Walmart trying to recruit the next generation of drivers before the current workforce retires? That's coming up.

9:23When Leslie Scott decided to become a truck driver, she knew she wanted to drive for Walmart. Because they paid the best. They paid the best. Walmart started to anticipate a trucking 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 2023, it launched something called the Associate to Driver Program. Here's Bloomberg's Jaywon Kang. They're basically tapping their existing employees who work at their stores or on the front lines and training them to become truck drivers by covering the costs associated with learning and getting the commercial driver's licenses, which cost thousands of dollars.

10:15And already about half of their new drivers come through that program. And that's something that they want to keep investing in to build their pipeline. 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$135 ,000 a year. That's about twice what a typical U.S. trucker makes. Here's Leslie. This pays a living wage. I can support my family comfortably with the amount of money that I make. Leslie says the job still has its challenges, especially on the Alaska route she's driving.

11:04She's encountered hungry bears on the road, faced extreme weather and dangerous winds, and had to deal with the constraints of her schedule. It took me two years to get a mammogram. The sedentary nature of the work has taken a toll too. Since she started driving, Leslie gained 70 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. 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.

11:45And she thinks the trucking industry as a whole could do more to bring other women on board. I think we need to entice more women to do this, especially in my age group, because we are the free ones. Most of us have raised our children, and we're also proven that to be the safer ones. We're more cautious. You know, they say we don't have big accidents. Get all the grannies out here. That's my mantra. We'll fix the world, the grandma's. Today, about 18 % of Walmart's truckers are women, according to an estimate from the data firm Revella Labs. 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.

12:35Leslie, 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 Krogh, 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 redesigning of how trucking works. 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.

13:14So what that created was a lot more deliveries in smaller vehicles closer to our homes. That created a whole new set of jobs. Some of those are gig economy jobs. People using their own vehicles to drop packages on doorsteps in the middle of the night. 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 100 mile radius. So there's a lot of growth in that particular market. There's also a lot of growth in what I call day cab work. So what the industry is doing a lot more of and what it can do more of is make vehicles and jobs and routes and freight networks more conducive to jobs that get drivers home every night.

14:02But 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 Walmart use. So it doesn't matter how long you spend on a loading dock, you're paid by the salary, you're paid by the hour 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.

14:37In the meantime, new autonomous technologies could transform the nature of the job. 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 assist me through that worst period of the night. If you think about a current truck driver, you have an autonomous vehicle going along Interstate 40 out near Laramie and it has a flat tyre. 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.

15:16But that person's also doing other paperwork, triaging things that might go wrong in the vehicle. So I think that's where we might land with a hybrid type driver. 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 turns 70 next year. My therapist asked me, where's your safe space in your life? And I said, could her not the cab of the truck in Alaska is my safe space? When I close those curtains, I, because of her, I don't think about what's out there. Yeah, because I know she's got it.

15:56Thelma will be looking for a new Louise.

16:03This 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.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

16:26Thank you.