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Trucker shortage grows more severe
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
The lure of the open road and the power of a big rig rumbling down a rural highway may seem the epitome of American commerce, but the romance of trucking isn’t grabbing today’s job seekers.
A shortage of truck drivers continues to be a major hurdle for the entire trucking industry, said Phil Byrd, president and chief executive of Bulldog Hiway Express in North Charleston and vice president at-large of the American Trucking Associations.
Companies such as Byrd’s are trying to sweeten the deal for prospective drivers by offering better pay and benefits, preferred routes and less time away from home.
“It’s hard to take trucking out of trucking,” Byrd said. “But as a company, we are putting all our efforts into everything from earning potential to the customers we serve, making sure they treat our drivers with utmost respect. Yet again, there is still a very severe shortage of qualified drivers in our industry, and it is getting more severe, not better.”
Kevin Young noticed the shortage several years ago when he was running Charleston Staffing, a skilled labor placement service.
“Most staffing services do not staff truck drivers,” Young said. “A lot of staffing services referred their business to me. They just didn’t want to mess with it.”
Hiring a commercial truck driver involves a lot of time spent in interviews, Young said, as well as compliance with state and federal Department of Transportation regulations, drug screenings and reference checks. Homeland security issues, particularly in port cities such as Charleston, have also increased the importance of criminal background checks.
“Most companies don’t have time to do the interviews and go through the applications,” Young said.
Young opened Coastal Driver Leasing in 2003 to focus on the driver-staffing niche. Sales doubled between 2003 and 2006 to nearly $1 million, he said.
In March, Young merged with Best Drivers, a Tennessee-based driver staffing company with eight locations in the Southeast, including Best Drivers of Charleston.
“The opportunity came up to merge with a larger company and basically grow,” Young said. “It’s a full-time job to basically recruit drivers. If you just look at the classified ads in the paper, you can see all the want ads for drivers.”
Young described his company as a human resources department for companies that need truck drivers. Best Drivers of Charleston matches drivers with companies and issues driver paychecks and W-2 forms at the end of the year. The company also handles workers’ compensation.
“We have companies that will use our drivers without hiring a driver on their payroll at all,” Young said. “We are saving them time and in a lot of cases can save them money. We’re large enough that we can have reduced rates on a lot of expenses.”
Bill Hollifield, terminal manager for Golden Strip Transfer and an American Trucking Associations board member, said Young’s company has furnished Golden Strip with a part-time driver to supplement its pool of company drivers. The part-time driver works two or three days a week for Golden Strip when the workload is heaviest.
“This driver staffing service does all the legwork,” Hollifield said. “They furnish the drug screen, they furnish us a work record that’s been approved and we send it to the home office and they send it to the insurance company. It saves me a lot of heartache because I don’t have to do all the homework on a start-up driver.”
Greg O’Donnell, vice president of Atlantic Trucking Co., said he would consider finding out more about driver staffing services because of the difficulties of recruiting and processing new drivers.
“There is a tremendous amount of screening and processing,” O’Donnell said. “In all areas of the transportation industry, it’s very difficult to find qualified drivers to meet the very strict insurance guidelines that are getting tighter every year.”
Atlantic Trucking Co. is based in Charleston and has six other locations in the Southeast, O’Donnell said. The company does all of its business at the port, where it picks up containers for delivery locally or throughout the region.
Golden Strip Transfer does 99% of its work at the port, Hollifield said.
Byron Miller, spokesman for the S.C. Ports Authority, said the port has done a number of things to try to help trucking companies remain productive and profitable. The port has extended operating hours, installed new information systems and late last year spent about $24 million on 16 new rubber-tired gantry cranes used for stacking containers. Turnaround time for truckers at the terminal has gone from more than an hour a few years ago to about 21 minutes, Miller said.
“The port industry relies on a qualified pool of independent tuckers, local truckers and company drivers,” he said. “They’re essential to our business and they’re essential to our economy. We’re doing everything we can to keep turn times down and improve productivity in the port, but as far as the next generation of drivers, that’s a big issue here and nationally.”
The American Trucking Associations in 2005 estimated the shortage of truckers at 20,000, said Clayton Boyce, the group’s vice president of public affairs. Estimates are that the shortage will increase to 111,000 over the next seven years as freight volumes continue to increase.
“That’s made worse by the aging of the work force,” Boyce said.
Ric Todd, president of the S.C. Trucking Association, said the economy is growing while a wave of baby boomers is getting ready to retire.
“We don’t see the numbers there to replace them adequately and we’re concerned about the strain on the system,” Todd said.
Close to 90% of all freight moved in the country is moved by truck, he said. Truckers who own their own trucks, which means they may have less leverage with customers, are among those hurting the most today as gas prices climb, Todd said.
Filling a big rig can take up to 200 gallons of fuel. There isn’t a lot about the trucking business right now that entices young recruits, he said.
“Trucking and the movement of freight is projected to increase and we’re having a hard enough time filling the seats today,” Todd said. “Frankly, we just don’t know where (drivers) are going to come from in the future. Although a professional truck driver is a skilled occupation and it pays well, a lot of folks just don’t look at that as a career goal. It doesn’t sound glamorous. As a society we’ve got these expectations of our children and rarely does it involve blue collar work, but our economic foundation is based upon blue collar workers.”
The trucking industry has cranked up a nationwide campaign to improve the image of trucking and includes ads and billboards of big rigs against scenic backdrops with the slogan: “My office has a better view than yours.”
Until those ads attract more drivers, the effects of the driver shortage may start reaching the consumer.
“I think it probably already has,” said Byrd of Bulldog Hiway Express. “As trucking companies pay their drivers more and benefit their drivers more, that has to show up on their freight rates, and it ultimately shows up on the shelves in what the consumer pays.”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@charlestonbusiness.com.
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