Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Trucking Companies with High Turnover Rates Need More Employees?

There are many industries with shortages of workers or qualified potential employees. And those industries change and trade within a range. Some industries and their shortages come and go based on business cycles and industry sector economic rotations, while others really seem to be perpetual or longer term, often due to demographics, or the flows of our civilization.

In the past decade we've seen shortages in IT, Nursing, Aviation, Pharmaceutical, Communication, Automotive, Mortgage Brokers, and Trucking. Obviously, some of those are still having challenges, and others hardly need any more people just yet, especially since our economy is changing with the information age and we've yet to fully recover from the last economic recession.

There was an interesting article recently in the Journal of Commerce June 23, 2011 titled "Truckload Driver Turnover Rate Hits 75% per Year" by William B. Cassidy

"The driver market is tightening and we hear nearly every day from fleets who cannot find enough drivers to meet demand. As driver pay and benefits increase, truckers tend to jump from carrier to carrier. In addition, carriers tend to focus recruitment efforts on experienced drivers. The turnover rate increased most at large truckload carriers. Smaller truckload fleets saw their turnover rate rise 50%. That is still the highest turnover rate for small truckload carriers since 2008."

Okay so, this is nothing new in the trucking industry, as it has been dealing with all of this for quite a long time. In fact, before retirement I drove my motor coach which is basically a NASCAR truck and trailer rig built into a mobile command center around the country for seven years. Each time I stopped at a truck stop, I would see all of the pamphlets, and recruitment magazines laying around. They often offered rewards for truck drivers who would sign up, and yet they were purposely recruiting from other trucking companies.

Indeed, I've met repossession drivers who would do nothing but drive around and wait for calls from trucking companies where a driver got mad at a dispatcher, pulled off to the side of the road with a full load, and walked away from his job, only to be hired by another trucking company the same day. Things got pretty out of control when our nation's unemployment rate was only 4.2% under the presidency of George W. Bush.

It appears now, the trucking industry will relive the past, and the truck driver shortages will continue. At one point back in 2006 and 2007, there was a shortage of 220,000 truck drivers, and growing. That was before the economic crash of late 2008. Here we go again, round and round it goes. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it. And if you need a job in the trucking industry, they will pay you to sign up, today.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 23,777 articles by 7 PM on June 27, 2011 is going to be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..


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