By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

As the nation’s ports strive to improve their productivity in the face of an anticipated 350% increase in Asian container cargo in the next 15 years, the region’s trucking firms are facing what may well be a far more daunting challenge—how to keep the freight flowing inland despite a critical shortage of drivers.

“There’s no question that, long term, we have very big challenges,” said Jimmie Gianoukos, president and CEO of ATS Logistics, a Charleston-based warehousing and logistics firm.

“With the Asian trade ramping up exponentially and various entities at the top of the cargo supply chain doing all they can to absorb that volume, the rest of us are witnessing a kind of domino effect.

“The problem is, there’s a real shortage of truck drivers in the United States right now, and the effectiveness of that link in the supply chain is what will determine, ultimately, how successfully we all cope with the Asian trade and how much trade goods will cost the consumer at the receiving end of the line.”

With the exception of about six months immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Douglas Oswald’s independent trucking firm has seen an increase in the volume of available cargo loads every year for the last 12 years, he said.

“We serve the ports of Charleston and Savannah, and on the whole, I’d say we’ve just been real fortunate,” said Oswald, owner of the Evans Delivery Co. in Charleston. “On the other hand, while there’s been more and more freight for us to pick up, we haven’t had quite enough trucks to haul it. I guess you could say we have more work on our hands than we can handle.”

Driver shortage

Oswald, who owns 10 trucks himself and contracts with other owner-operators to haul freight, said he’d be happy to buy more trucks but wonders where he’ll find “good, safe drivers” to operate them.

“It’s difficult work, and there just aren’t enough people entering the field when we really need them,” he said.

Experts in the trucking industry say a number of convergent factors have contributed to a driver shortage at the same time demand for their services is increasing substantially.

The first is monetary. According to several presenters at a recent port productivity conference held in Charleston, real wages for interstate truckers have remained essentially unchanged for more than 25 years.

At one time, drivers would boost their income by taking on more trips and driving longer hours, but the U.S. Department of Transportation recently adopted new guidelines that prohibit truckers from driving more than 11 hours with an extended stop for sleep.

Then came the more stringent background checks that began in the wake of 9/11. Given the choice between earning a meager living with substantially less privacy or doing something else, many truckers chose the latter, and those that might have been their replacements in years past simply stayed away.

Fuel prices final straw

Andy Linder, owner of Truckers Express in Wando, said the final straw was the rising fuel and diesel prices of the past year, which pushed out still more independent owner-operators.

“As a result, we wound up with fewer drivers to call on at precisely the same time that we needed as many as we could get,” he said.

Although approximately 150 motor carriers offer services into and out of the Port of Charleston, every firm contacted by the Business Journal said it has been consistently booked to haul shipments at least a week in advance.

“It used to be you could find some capacity somewhere, but those days are over,” Linder said. “The good thing is in the past year, the companies that we haul cargo for have realized that this is the way the industry is today,” he said. “You don’t hear that panic at the other end of the phone like you would have in years past if you have to tell someone, ‘I’m sorry; I’m booked four or five days out.’”

Getting in, out

The South Carolina State Ports Authority has responded to the situation by making reducing the time it takes truckers to get on and off its terminals a high priority.

“Our efforts began with a thorough review of all our operational procedures and practices, an analysis through which we identified and eliminated unnecessary and duplicate steps in the cargo moving process,” said SPA spokesman Byron D. Miller.

“We’ve also added personnel to the operational area, extended our operating hours so that they now run from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and added new equipment to more efficiently stack cargo containers.”

The centerpiece of the effort, however, is the Port of Charleston’s $10 million automated yard management system. By taking these steps, the SPA has cut median trucker turn-around time at Charleston’s common user interchanges by 75% since 2000, down to 25 minutes.

“Twelve years ago, you could expect that drivers would occasionally get caught in port limbo, and that added time to load or unload freight wound up costing somebody,” Oswald said. “That doesn’t happen so much anymore.”

Diane Sergeant, manager of Pelican Transportation in Charleston, said, like her counterparts at other small trucking companies, she is doing the best she can with this overabundance of cargo going in and out of the port.

“Right now, I’ve got 22 drivers, about half of whom only do local deliveries,” she said. “That way, they can haul freight and still make something of a living. My other drivers do longer distance hauls, but even in their case, we try to stay within the southeastern United States so that they can get home in a day and not be hurt economically.”

Despite admitting sometimes feeling overwhelmed by the crush of cargo surging through the port, Sergeant said she thinks the transport industry will eventually achieve a happy medium.

“These are just growing pains,” she said. “And I’m sure anyone will tell you they’d rather have growing pains than any other kind.”

But to overcome the growing pains, Gianoukos said it’s a simple matter of Economics 101.

“The bottom line is the work has to be stable and it has to be profitable,” he said. “You allow a driver to make a living wage and don’t stick him with fuel costs by allowing only minimal fuel surcharges, and he’ll go back into business. Give a person a way to make a living, and they’ll be there for you.”

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@ charlestonbusiness.com.

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