There are truck driver shortages too. It’s a crappy deal for a truck driver to take a load which they don’t know it’s risks/payout or how long of a drive they will be taking, what they’ll do at destination, or if they’ll have a return trip.
Odds are you could offer truckers a special premium flat rate to clear the blockage - but it wouldn’t be sustainable.
California emission standards also disallow a decent portion of truck fleets from operating in the state. Source is an extended family member who owns a small trucking company in Midwest.
The Twitter thread said that the crackdown on illegal immigrants hit the California trucking industry hard since so many companies were using undocumented drivers to cut down on their costs.
Ah well, I guess that’s a nice opportunity to quote and paraphrase the meme: if you can’t make a profit while paying a living wage, the problem is not with minimum wage but with your business model.
Arguably this is more true in shipping than other disciplines. There are great economies of scale in shipping, and drivers/operators will be required regardless of wage. importing goods from low-cost areas, transporting goods with underpaid workers, and selling them in minimum wage stores doesn't seem like a great business model.
Do shoes need to cost $20 or do the workers need to be paid $20/hr to afford $60 locally produced shoes?
This is literally the same argument for why Uber/Lyft/Doordash drivers need to know the details of a fare before accepting, but a couple of orders-of-magnitude higher.
my understanding is that not all containers pay the same (since they are different weights, have different destinations, etc.) and so this mostly screws over the driver who loses the ability to select the best offer.
Not only do containers not pay the same, but containers to the same location often don't pay the same. So many variables and often the driver is the one that ends up getting screwed in the process. I completely understand why so many simply refuse certain loads. And getting assigned a load you know nothing about before it's on your truck is a no go for most drivers.
I mean the rhetoric of free unregulated market is that the “homo economicus” would use total information and make fully conscious decisions.
Seems like some are withholding information to push other actors to make bad deals, externalize losses and generally speaking skirt from supply/demand dynamics.
No, it isn't. Most, or at least a very high percentage of independent truckers bid for cargo runs. Your cargo needs to get from point A to point B and weighs X amount and needs pickup and delivery at certain times. Truckers bid on the those routes and the the winning bidder gets the route.
If you don't want a delivery you don't bid on it or you set your bid high enough to make you want to take it. If no one bids on a delivery then the shipper raises the maximum they will pay and the process starts all over. Delivery location or pickup location a horrible place? Again, don't bid or bid high.
This is exactly the definition of a free market. Telling an independent that they must take the next load available without letting them decide if they even want it is not. That's being an employee. And shipping companies have spent years getting rid of their own fleets and drivers to push the cost to the individual drivers. And yes, there are a LOT of apps for this.
This is such an obvious thing. Do they really have people so incompetent they didn't think of that? Wow