For years we've been hearing about a persistent shortage of truck drivers. But what if we're thinking about it wrong? What if the issue is that the shipping industry systematically mistreats or undervalues drivers, creating an ongoing and unsustainable churn? On this episode, we speak with Gord Magill, a longtime truck driver and the author of the Autonomous Truck(er)s Substack, about one persistent problem: truck drivers wasting countless hours in "detention" at loading sites, a time for which they don't actually get paid. Magill explains how this is reflective of broader trends within the industry that devalue drivers and contribute to an inefficient supply chain. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Key insights from the pod:
How do truck drivers get paid? — 3:58
What is driver detention? — 4:50
How much time do truckers spend waiting? — 5:59
Why don’t truckers get overtime? — 10:40
Churning through truck drivers — 17:39
Shifting the operational burden onto truckers — 23:44
A slowdown in freight activity — 34:29
---
Joe Weisenthal: (00:10)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway: (00:15)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe: (00:16)
Tracy, you know, we've done a lot of truck driving episodes on the show by now, but it is kind of crazy that we haven't actually spoken to a truck driver
Tracy: (00:25)
All trucking all the time, except with the drivers themselves, apparently.
Joe: (00:29)
Yeah, it's kind of bad. We really, you know, because essentially people talk about poor conditions, they talk about poor pay, they talk about certain way, you know, there's a lot of talk in the industry about a so-called truck driver shortage, which is this talking point media has reported for a long time, but how can you discuss these things, you know, without actually hearing from a truck driver? Why perhaps the industry has had trouble hiring and retaining drivers?
Tracy: (00:53)
Right. But also just talking about some of the supply chain issues as we have been for the past two years or so. And all the talk about, you know, things being stuck at the ports, or things being stuck at rail yards and truck drivers getting caught up in those and having to wait hours and hours and hours to pick up or drop off a load. But we haven't actually spoken to the people who are living that very experience.
Joe: (01:18)
Right. So one dynamic, and we talked about it on a recent episode with Rachel Premack is this fact that truck drivers are paid by the mile. And you even see it on the back of trucks. Often when they're trying to recruit drivers, they talk about how much you can get paid per mile, which has the drawback potentially of you don't get paid for time and therefore if you're at a warehouse and you're depositing a load or picking up some goods, you can wait around for a really long time, potentially hours if the warehouse is inefficient or blocked or just sort of very crowded, which a lot of infrastructure has been over the last couple of years and you're not getting paid for that time. It’s detention, as they call it in the industry. And if it's really bad, if it's inefficient, that's just hours of your life wasted because it's not a mile.
Tracy: (02:05)
Right. And so the supply chain crisis has kind of shone a light on this practice. And the question now is whether or not it starts to change because clearly if you're talking about how difficult it is to get stuff from Point A to Point B, and a big part of the choke point is, well, people are just waiting all day to pick that stuff up at a particular port or rail yard or depot or whatever, then you could see people maybe want to start to alleviate some of that wait time
Joe: (02:35)
Right. And what happens, I think in a so-called like supply chain crisis is you notice various choke points or any efficiency that you maybe you tolerated private or previously or that weren't a big deal. And so, okay, we have this problem where people are wasting their time at the warehouses waiting to load or unload, but whatever, it's okay because things are still moving smoothly when you get the real seize up and you're like, oh, these are like dramatic inefficiencies and the cost of adjustment falls on the truck drivers themselves because they're the ones that have to essentially eat the cost by wasting time.
Tracy: (03:08)
Yeah, exactly. So when you get these choke points as you mentioned, it seems like a good time to sort of evaluate the process on a whole
Joe: (03:16)
And what can be done specifically to alleviate them. And you know, some people's like, ‘oh, it's apps and we need like algorithms like Uber and stuff like that and make everything more efficient.’ But, you know, at that point it's just speculation. So let's talk to a driver and let's find out what really is going on and how much time and waste and if there are any potential solutions to this issue of a truck driver detention.
Tracy: (3:38)
Let's do it.
Joe: (3:39)
All right. I'm really excited about our guest. We are going to be speaking to a truck driver and also the author of the Autonomous Trucker's Sub Stack, Gordon Magill. Gord, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Gord: (03:49)
Oh, hello, Odd Lots. Hi Tracy. Hi Joe. Thank you for having me on.
Joe: (03:53)
Thanks for coming on. Why don't you sort of give your summary, how does a truck driver get paid and what is detention?
Gord: (03:58)
There's numerous different ways truck drivers get paid. Some get paid by percentage of haul, some get paid by the mile, some get paid salary, some get paid by the hour. It depends on what part of the market you're in, what capacity you're working in, whether it's local, regional, or over the road. Or if you're like a dray trucker working on ports, there's many different pay models, but the pay is downstream of basically piece work and the quoted rate that the company you work for gives to their customer.
Tracy: (04:33)
So talk to us a little bit more about driver detention then. Why exactly does detention happen at all and have you, you know, personally noticed a change in the amount of time that you’re spending waiting to either pick something up or drop it off?
Gord: (04:50)
So detention, it can be caused by any number of things. I mean, you know, as they as the famous t-shirt and bumper sticker says, you know, ‘sh*t happens.’ So sometimes it's, you know, it's just mechanical breakdowns, personnel shortages, whatever. But with the distribution of freight in America, the entire system is set up and predicated on the fact that all of the time efficiencies and problems get downloaded onto the drivers because there's no cost associated with their time and there never has been. So you just end up sitting and waiting and it could be for any reason under the sun. And it's been like that basically since forever.
Joe: (05:43)
Do you have a sense of how much time you spend, like what's a week look like for you or a month look like for you? And do you have any sense of how much time you in particular and then maybe drivers as a whole waste in unpaid detention?
Gord: (05:59)
So there was this study done, I'm going to, I'm going to quote the science seeing as how this, you know, very popular thought-terminating cliché circulates around the internet and the discourse. There was a study done by, there's like a subdivision of MIT which studies logistics and freight, and they showed that the average trucker in America, although they're allowed to drive 11 hours a day, only drives on average about six and a half hours because their day gets sucked up with waiting to load and unload so much that they literally lose almost, you know, like 45% of their available driving time. There's been a lot of discourse as you guys mentioned in your opening about problems with the supply chain. Well, a pretty major problem is when 40% of your available trucking capacity is being held up.
Tracy: (06:54)
Right. So you mentioned the 11 hours there, and this was going to be my next question. So don't truckers and I apologize in advance for a very basic question, but don't truckers have like a certain limit on the amount of driving time that they can do per day, but you're saying that the waiting time doesn't factor into it?
Gord: (07:16)
Sure, so yeah, so it's called hours of service. And all truckers in America and most other Western countries are governed by HOS rules. In the United States, you're allowed to drive 11 hours a day and you get like a 14 hour window to complete those 11 hours, and then the other three hours are safe pre-trip inspections, loading, unloading, the other duties you have to take care of. But, you know, if those other duties exceed the three hours and then eat into the 11 of driving, you lose them. And that happens all the time. And again, as you guys mentioned at the beginning, the amount of time you sit cuts into the amount of time that you can drive, and therefore the truck, which is considered, you know, an asset and a part of logistics capacity, is now just sitting there wasting, not making any money, right?
Joe: (08:10)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the price of a trip or in the cost of a trip, there are sometimes attempts to compensate for expected wait times or if a shipper has a reputation for having inefficient warehouses or for long wait times picking up or dropping off, in theory they do pay more to the to the owner operator or to a freight broker who then in theory passes it along. Like there is some cost to them that sometimes factored into what they pay per mile for the trip?
Gord: (08:43)
Well, that's in theory, but again, because of the hyper competitive nature of the trucking business, you know, I was speaking with an owner operator friend of mine the other day and he, you know, mentioned, you know, he's always worried about the other guy, the other company that's willing to like forgo that cost. And it's always used as a threat. Yeah, if you guys charge us too much for demurrage time, we just won't use you and we'll use another trucking company.
So there's this, you know, playing off companies against each other to try and remove that. Some companies do pay it typically in specialized or niche markets, there's very low tolerance for waiting time. I drove a truck in New Zealand for a little while and because the cost of doing business down there is so much higher and the margins are that much thinner, they don't tolerate waiting time. And then in other countries it's mandated that drivers get paid by the hour and because you're paying by the hour, you can't waste those people's time because it's coming out of the bottom line of the company who's holding you up. Whereas in the United States, there's nothing to force anybody to account for drivers' time like whatsoever. So there's a very small minority of companies that will pay for that, but they're so inconsequential that the rest of the business, they just don't pay.
Tracy: (10:13)
Well maybe this is a good time to talk about how we ended up with that system in the US because as you mentioned, it does seem strange. You know, for most people in the states, they work 40 hour weeks and then if they work overtime they'll get some sort of extra compensation, you know, to compensate them for that. But in the case of truckers, it seems to be different. So how did we end up with this system?
Gord: (10:40)
In 1938 during Roosevelt administration, they passed a piece of legislation called the Fair Labor Standards Act, which included the idea of paying people overtime and included the idea of the standard 40 hour week. And a few different occupations were exempted from that included transportation, and truck drivers were explicitly exempted from being paid overtime. And it's been like that ever since. So the entire industry has built its like rate structures, the way it does business, the way it pays people, the way it schedules things around the fact that, ‘hey, we don't have to pay these guys any extra for their overtime and that's fine and we're just going to keep doing that.’ So they've created like a two-tier system where, you know, you might be at a Walmart warehouse or whatever distribution center and everybody that works there gets paid overtime if they have to work 40 hours except the dozens or hundreds of truckers sitting outside in their cabs waiting to get loaded or unloaded.
Joe: (11:49)
So what would A) would it have to be a law that would change this? Like what would be a way out so that, well, okay, because what you, first of all, what you say makes sense that in countries in which if you have to pay truckers by the hour, then it becomes a real cost to the shippers if they're just leave holding you there for hours. So what would it take to get into a mode where that's how truckers are paid?
Gord: (12:12)
You make a good point, Joe. The system here, because there's no cost associated with the driver's time, it creates what they call a market failure. I lean a little bit libertarian, I used to be a pretty strident libertarian in the past, but like we're seeing this confluence of different factors where because it's not legally required and because there's so many humongous, so-called mega carriers in the market who have built their business model around turning and churning through drivers and not paying them what they're worth. And as you know, Professor Steve Viscelli said in his book, um the “The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream,” that it doesn't cost them any extra money to manage driver retention and driver churn. So these companies have essentially built it into their operating model that you just don't pay overtime and you don't worry about it.
So it just might be, you know, as much as the libertarian part of my brain doesn't want this, that the government has to basically say, look, this industry and the supply chain system that keeps America going is dependent on having professionals and safe people that are happy with their jobs and want to stick around. And this model of not paying them isn't sustainable. So maybe, and I could be wrong, but maybe it is the, you know, like the ‘Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act’ where there's that requirement that drivers be paid for their time in order to force all of these clowns to actually pay people what they're worth and to stop the ongoing churn retention cycle.
Tracy: (14:26)
Can I just ask a devil's advocate question because I think this comes up a lot, so in the states, truckers are paid by the mile or per trip, for the most part. And one of the things that comes up when you start talking about, ‘well, we should pay them overtime?’ is, ‘well, how are you actually going to track and monitor and then, you know, compensate that accurately?’
Gord: (14:48)
I'm so glad you brought that up Tracy.
Tracy: (14:50)
Just to be clear -- devil's advocate, but please give us your response.
Gord: (14:55)
100%. That is a fantastic question. And y'all went to grade school in high school before they had smartphones and some of those places, they taught you how to use this thing called a calculator . And then the calculator got turned into an app on your cell phone and on your laptop. And there's this little thing we can do called proration, and guess what? The government does proration on the miles you travel to figure out who to allocate fuel taxes to the states. Why can we not prorate miles to figure out what your average hourly mileage rate is, to then figure out what your base hourly rate would be based on those miles, to then calculate what your overtime would be?
This is so simple, but like I think that truckers have spent so many decades of just being abused and pummeled by all of these forces beyond our control. And then you have people like the American Trucking Association who represent these mega carriers that just go right along with it, that we can't imagine something as simple as a calculator being able to figure this out for everybody. Especially given that many trucking companies these days, much like Twitter, who Elon Musk just cut out all of these sort of like parasitical non-work people that don't produce anything, trucking companies have the same problem with like compliance and human resources managers and all these people that like have to basically make sure that the trucking companies don't get crushed by the DOT. So like, can they not operate calculators? Can they not figure out how to pay people? This is real simple.
Joe: (16:48)
As an avid Twitter user who want the site to remain stable, I'm a little worried that he may have let go people who are crucial and not entirely all parasites. But nonetheless, I take your point. I want the site to remain functioning and high-quality engineers to work there, but that's a sidetrack. I want to get, you know, you just mentioned, the ATA and you know, for years you hear about the so-called truck driver shortage. But as you just pointed out, or as you argue, that for also years that the mega carriers have had this like churn mentality. They're like, ‘well, it's okay if a driver only stays in the industry for a few months or a year, etc.’ Can you talk a little bit more about that model? The churn, the like, ‘let's just churn through the drivers’ model and ‘it's okay if it's cheap,’ and how sustainable that is and what the cost of that is?
Gord: (17:39)
Well, okay, so the short answer is, A) it's not sustainable and B) it's not sustainable because of the costs that have been externalized, right? So the costs are on both the drivers themselves who again, enter these models working for freight companies where they go through some kind of truck driving school and often enough owned by the carriers themselves, and then either the carrier gets subsidized by the government in some way through subsidies or grants to hire drivers, or they offload the cost of the training onto the drivers through these like credit obligations with ridiculous interest rates. And then they have to sign a contract and stay with the company, but then the company abuses them and then they discover that they waste half of their life waiting at docks or being at the mercy of dispatch systems that are often wonky and nobody seems to care because you're at the other end of a surveillance technology like a Qualcomm or something in the truck.
And the companies don't necessarily care about where you are or what your time is. So there's a lot of washout and then there's also a lot of accidents. There was a report released here recently that showed since the imposition of the electronic logging device mandate that truck accidents continue to climb. So there's this cost sent to society. I like to call the driver shortage narrative, I've come to this recently, I want to call it the Pareto’s truck driver shortage . So there are companies who are short drivers, right? Like the guys, some people I used to work for in Canada have got 20 trucks sitting, but they're a specialized niche carrier and they need competent good drivers that know what they're doing. And so what happens is, because the other 80% of the business is stuck going through this retention problem and churning through drivers because they can get away with it, because the government subsidizes it and/or they offload the cost of training on to the drivers and get them stuck in this credit problem.
And it sucks in all kinds of people into the business who shouldn't be driving, that 80% basically turns off the number of people who would come into it, who are competent and who would graduate through the system, the pipeline, so to speak, from being a new driver to a good competent driver, to moving on to a really good paying job that's, you know, in a niche market say doing oversize or hazardous materials or some such other commodity that pays a little better. And then sticking with it.
So the, the 80% of the Pareto distribution that's walked in by this really bad model of churning through drivers, that driver shortage is fake. They just keep going through them. There's no shortage. There's tons of people with CDLs, they just end up quitting. And then at the other end, the 20% of people who are really competent, the companies in that part of the market, they can't get people because the people who would come through the system and graduate towards those good jobs quit before they get a chance because they're just like, ‘this is a sh*t show. Like, why would we stay here? Why would we stay in this business that doesn't value our time?’ And they end up quitting.
Joe: (21:13)
It seems like there's a really interesting sort of kind of perverse economic phenomenon where people hear about how there's a driver's shortage and they say, ‘okay, well why don't we subsidize going to driver's school? Why don't we make it easier to get your CDL to bring new people in?’ But the real upshot of that, essentially it sounds like it just sustains the churn model rather than anything else.
Gord: (21:34)
That's right. Because what they're doing is they're using these systems to take care of the bottom end of the problem rather than the top end of the problem, right? So instead of trying to keep people, like why pay people more, why treat them better? Why improve the material conditions? If you can just keep on going through -- and I hate to sound like you know, a snob or anything, but these systems suck up people who are desperate.
And one of the problems in our economy over 30, 40 years of, you know, Reaganomics, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it, shipping all of our manufacturing base to China and Mexico and whatnot. Well, you can't ship out the truck drivers. So the trucking industry as represented by the American Trucking Association -- may they burn in hell -- they've basically created this system where it's like, we can't get rid of the drivers, so somehow we have to make them as cheap as the third world places we've sent all of the other jobs to. And so they've created this system and now, you know, any suggestion of changing that system is met with like a wall of inertia, right? Like, ‘oh no, you can't do this because then it's going to cost the economy more money’ or, you know, it's going to affect the supply chains because now you're constricting the available drivers if you, say, make it more difficult to get a CDL or start paying these people more.
Tracy: (23:05)
Just on this point, and this is another sort of devil's advocate question, but I feel comfortable asking you this because you mentioned your libertarian roots. Is there like a tension between the deregulated trucking industry, low barriers to entry, you know, sort of maybe attracts a certain type of person to be a driver, someone who wants to work for themselves, who wants to have freedom, not have to jump through a red tape, and then actually reforming the industry, maybe putting in more restrictions, more training, more regulations. Is that like a tension?
Gord: (23:44)
Sure, that is a tension. And that's a very good question and I'm glad you asked it because what happens with that tension is, so there's been a lot of discourse around about the downstream effects of the 1980 Motor Carrier Act signed into law by Jimmy Carter and the effects that's had on the trucking business and, you know, the downward pressure on rates and wages. And that's a thing that's true. And it was a first identified academically by this guy named Michael Belzer, who wrote a book that was published in 2000 called “Sweatshops on Wheels.” And a thing that Belzer identifies in the book, which I have also seen and a lot of other truckers have also seen, is that instead of regulating the business side of it, like freight lanes, how much your rates are going to be, all that side of the business, they now over regulate the operational side.
So they regulate the drivers, right? And there's going to be another book being published next month by an academic at Cornell named Karen Levy, which is called “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance.” And she has spent 10 years studying like the effects of all of the regulatory imposition on the driver through surveillance technology, driver-facing cameras, ELDs, all of this stuff that's meant to regulate us because of the public's fear of, you know, drivers driving tired over their hours, all this stuff, which is an effect of the fact that the market's been pummeled by deregulation. So there's this regulation question, but it's not looked at correctly, that they've deregulated the market, but they just moved the regulation from the operations of the companies and the rating and the business side of it, and they've moved all the regulation onto the operations and onto the driver, which is another reason people wash out.
Because if you're somebody like me who's been in the business my entire life, my dad was a trucker, both my uncles were truckers, my grandpa was a trucker. I was helping mechanics fix trucks and driving around when I was a teenager after school. And I'm one of the sort of last of the big game hunters. I know what I'm doing. If somebody is a professional and knows what they're doing, they don't want to be told how to do their job by some human resources harridan, or a health and safety pencil neck person that's breathing down their neck. And that's a factor.
Another thing, and this applies to more than just trucking, is like the psychology of people who work for a living. Most people that work for a living just want to do their jobs and be left alone. And we have this management mentality where like every single thing has to be done exactly as the computer models tell us and as safe as possible. And they're trying to impose theory on material reality and it drives the people actually doing the work insane. So, you know, you want to end driver churn and driver retention? One of the factors causing that is that they've overregulated the people doing the work rather than the people in charge of the markets in which the work is being done. Does that make any sense?
Joe: (27:20)
Yeah, and that's an incredible point, and I hadn't really thought about this before, this idea that it’s like, okay, the business of trucking, the business of pay, etc., [it’s] increasingly deregulated even as more burden gets shifted to the driver in the truck and the idea of monitoring. And so essentially sort of redistributing the imposition of where the regulation happens. And I hadn't really thought about it before, but it sort of leads me to where I was going to go with my next question. And you know, one of the things that Tracy and I have talked about, and we interviewed the CEO of a freight brokerage, kind of is this attempt to make it even more computerized, like the Uberization of trucking. That all deals or all gigs are an app and you put in your requirements and then a job shows up. What have you seen in terms of how that affects you, this attempt to essentially apply this sort of algorithmic Uber model to your industry?
Gord: (28:15)
Well, that, that model can work in certain sectors, but not all of them. So trucks move everything, right? And not all commodities, not all products get moved in the same type of truck, right? Right now, I haul logs. You cannot do anything with the logging trailer I pull, except haul logs. That's it. That's all it's good for, right? A really good friend of mine, owner operator, his name's Chris, he works for a company that does bulk pneumatic stuff. So it's like bulk commodities that are either powderized or small pellets and they get blown in and out of his tanker trailer with a vacuum or a pressure system. You can't just put that on Uber. The Uberization of trucking is only for like freight where you have a box trailer with doors on the back and everything comes in and out on a forklift. And so the trucking industry, because it's so diverse and there's so many different angles on it, like the Uberization thing only applies to certain parts of it. Does that make sense?
Joe: (29:26)
Yeah, absolutely. Mm-hmm.
Tracy: (29:28)
Can I ask for one more like specific example? I was reading your blog, which is great by the way, but you mentioned that in your three decades of trucking experience, that you had one experience with someone who actually paid you overtime for trucking. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like why would some people pay overtime versus the vast majority who are not paying extra? How does that work?
Gord: (29:57)
Yeah, that one employer was based here in the United States and I'm not sure if that was a function of state law or just the fact it was like hazardous materials and they wanted to be able to keep people around and it was seasonal.
Tracy: (30:13)
Oh, interesting.
Gord: (30:15)
Right. The commodity I hauled was propane and a lot of people in the north use propane to heat their homes and it gets really busy in the winter, busy to the point where you're working 75, 80 hours a week. And if they didn't [pay] overtime they probably wouldn't get anybody to work for them. Whereas other companies I've worked for, it was either straight mileage or percentage. And you know, I learned very early on in my trucking career that, you know, the freight market, you know, pulling a box trailer, it's because of all the factors we've just discussed, it's not the place you're going to make tons of money.
And I've always done oversized loads, heavy stuff, bulk commodities, hazardous materials. I’ve haul a lot of fuel, logs. I've tried to stay away from the freight market, but, I mean, it's easy enough for somebody who's been in the business long enough like me and who is competent to say that, but we still have to have something for the vast majority of drivers who are stuck in this freight market that just won't seem to heal itself and correct the factors which make it underpaid, churn through drivers, cause accidents, offload all of these costs onto society, insurance claims for accidents. There's this whole discourse around like, oh, what do they call it? Nuclear claims, or nuclear verdicts where, you know, there's an accident and some people are killed and then the judge just goes crazy on the trucking company in question.
And then there's another issue in the trucking business with self-insuring. A lot of these large mega carriers, they're so big and they have so much throughput and they make so much money that they self-insure. And when you self-insure, you're not playing by the same rules as other insurance companies who might want to vet drivers better or impose experience limits, right? So there's just all these different factors affecting the business that make it very difficult to say, you know, here's one solution that's going to work for everybody.
Joe: (32:43)
I want to get to just sort of the current state of sort of market and the economy and diesel prices, but one last sort of very, just a detail question, what do you do while you're waiting there for hours? What do truck drivers do while you're waiting in detention? Do you like honk your horn and complain and say, ‘hurry up?’ Seriously, I don’t know.
Gord: (33:03)
You know, the few times back in the day when I hauled freight, I just carried lots of books with me and I read. Some guys polish their wheels, some guys catch up on sleep, some guys, I mean, you know now there's smartphones, so they just scroll, read, catch up on sleep, whatever. And I mean, it should be noted that during the Covid regime where everybody was like scared of this marginally effective virus that many distribution centers and facilities across America and Canada wouldn't let drivers in to use their facilities. A lot of them don't as a matter of course, anyway. There's this whole problem with like distribution centers not letting you use their lunch rooms or bathrooms or anything. They just expect you to stay in your truck the whole time. So you're basically being treated like a pariah as a matter of course, it's just sort of an industry standard thing and then Covid like cranked that up to 11 and made it even worse. So you basically spend a lot of time sitting with yourself.
Tracy: (34:05)
Why don't we broaden it out a little bit and talk about the general environment for trucking at the moment because, you know, this has garnered quite a lot of attention. People like to look at freight rates as indicative of where we're heading in the economic cycle. So what are you seeing in terms of, I guess, load activity and also the rates that you're actually being paid?
Gord: (34:29)
I'll give you a good reference. my friend Jamie Hagen, who's very active on Twitter real good Twitter follow @hellbenthagen, he's an owner operator, has a bunch of his own trucks. He made a tweet on the weekend about watching the spot load market load boards drop almost instantaneously. Like he would try and book a load and like a load might pay a $1.50 a mile and then it would all of a sudden drop down to a dollar a mile. And we had a conversation about this and he mentioned that, you know, typically trucking gets really slow in January and February. There's always this like post-holiday lull and that happens regardless of whatever the other economic circumstances are. It's sort of like a truism in trucking that, you know, January and the early part of February are slow.
We're seeing now that that drop off and slowness is happening now when it should be peak season, loads being moved in advance of Christmas, holiday shopping, you know, people ordering things from Amazon. So, you know, there was an article on Freightwaves recently about like, FedEx is furloughing drivers, but it's only mid-November, right? So the market, such as it is, seems really unhealthy right now. Plus, you know, where I live in upstate New York, $6.05 a gallon seems to be fairly average around here for fuel. That's unsustainable without significant fuel surcharges added to freight bills. I can't speak for the rest of the country, but like, you know, we're not looking at a very good time.
Joe: (36:14)
So I just have, I guess one last question here. But whether it's, you know, the sort of broader, the sustainability of existing trends, the current macro climate and sort of all of it put together, do you see any prospect for change positive in the industry and or internally or self-motivated, or is it all sort of going to, like setting aside whether things even improve or whether there's a new pay model, which is probably not going to happen for a while, what do you see as lasting changes from the sort of the ructions that we've seen during all the supply chain stress during Covid?
Gord: (36:53)
Well, that's hard to predict, but I mean, the nice thing has been the sort of level of awareness and I want to, you know, credit you guys with this a little bit, You know, since the whole Covid thing for the last couple of years, a lot of people being that they're sort of stuck at home and the brighter amongst them are wondering how everything is still moving while the keyboard warriors and email case stays at home. Is that like there's this new, there's some attention being paid to the material economy, whether or not that attention manages to last and whether or not, you know, people like, you know, representative Andy Levin who's been primaried out and won't be in Congress next year and his Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act bill keeps moving forward, remains to be seen, but, you know, a lot of these problems have been highlighted.
I don't know whether or not I should be optimistic about this because, you know, the truck drivers are deeply cynical people, right? Because the exemption to us being paid overtime has been around for so long. The sort of like the just nature of the business and so many different factors affecting trucking and making logistic, you just kind of sort of shrug your shoulders and say, it is what it is. And I know that's not like a complete answer for you and your audience, but it's hard to tell, but I am sort of heartened somewhat at the interest shown to this business in the wake of the Covid stuff.
You know, guys like yourselves and the popularity of people online such as like Huntsman and various logistics specialists, you know, that's good. Whether or not that translates into legitimate attempts to fix the business, I don't know, but one of the reasons I wrote my latest substack about the American Trucking Association is if normies and like, you know, NPR American podcast listeners keep coming to the American Trucking Association….
Tracy: (39:09)
The Odd Lots normies. No, no one has ever like alluded to us being normal before, so thank you for that.
Joe: (39:15)
Well, we had Gord on before we had an ATA rep, so at least…
Gord: (39:19)
Right. Okay, good. Yeah, that's good. That's good. No, but like, it's good that you guys spoke with me and I think speak with more people on the ground, you know, to borrow my friend Oliver Bateman's phrase, doing the work. Like doing the actual work of the material economy and like the last 30, 40 years of whatever you want to call it, Reaganomics, neoliberalism, Clinton, whatever, globalism, global homogeneity, whatever you want to call it, has shifted so much attention away and concern away from the working class if you keep focusing on those people, keep having these conversations, you know, as they say the devil is in the details, and we're the folks on the ground actually doing things. Keep that up and you might actually start fixing things.
Joe: (40:09)
Gord Magill, such a treat speaking to you. Really appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk and hope to have you back on at some point. That was really fantastic and thank you so much.
Gord: (40:22)
No, thank you guys. And like I say keep it up. I appreciate your fetishization of freight nerdery and logistics and whatnot. It makes us all feel good.
Tracy: (40:32)
Thanks so much Gord, appreciate that.
Joe: (40:48)
I thought that was a fantastic conversation with Gord and just extremely, in a short time, extremely illuminating about some of the pain points in trucking that I hadn't fully appreciated before.
Tracy: (40:59)
Oh, absolutely. I also, I hadn't realized that we had not actually spoken to a truck driver. I'm pretty sure sure we've spoken to some informally at various conferences over the years, but not officially on the podcast. But I also thought, you know, the point he made about, if you are concerned about supply chain issues, choke points at ports and depots and things like that, the idea of having an actual chunk of your trucking capital tied up waiting and not being particularly efficient, I thought that was a good point
Joe: (41:32)
And I really thought it was interesting, you know, I hadn't thought it's like, okay, there's a shortage of, you know, people keep talking about the truck driver shortage and on some level, fine, we can accept that. But I hadn't really thought it's like, okay, it makes sense. Like make it easier to get a CDL, make it easier to go to truck driver school, make it easier for people to come into the business. But I hadn't thought about this idea that what that does ultimately is it just sustains a churn model where yes, you solve the problem of people coming in, but you don't solve the problem of truck driver retention.
Tracy: (42:02)
People actually staying in the industry. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, plenty more trucking episodes to come, I'm sure. Shall we leave it there for now?
Joe: (42:10)
Let’s leave it there.
You can follow Gord Magill on Twitter at @DriverAutonomy.