The trucking industry is currently in a bind. On the one hand, it has a miserable safety record, with over five thousand trucking-related fatalities annually. As 60 Minutes highlighted to the world, many small carriers are shady, fly-by-night operations that regularly break even the most basic rules of the road. And now that the Supreme Court has decided that freight brokers can be held liable for accidents caused by carriers they book—the biggest of those brokers, C.H. Robinson, recently lost a whopping $604 million suit—it seems inevitable that the trucking industry is going to have to clean up its act.
On the other hand, due to a crackdown on “non-domiciled” commercial drivers licenses, i.e., those issued to foreign nationals, and a new emphasis on English language proficiency for drivers, trucking also has a new labor shortage. This is reflected in recent wage increases for drivers but also in high spot rates and tender rejection rates, driven primarily by a loss of carrier capacity rather than heightening demand.
