[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks for joining us for the start of another busy week. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. By now, you've heard the stories about the international supply chain, it's in disarray. As labor shortages across multiple sectors have made it harder to load, ship, and unload the goods, so many are now seeking as the holiday shopping season gears up.

Ports, cranes, shipping containers, all are critical links in the supply chain. How do the goods in those shipping containers end up in your shopping cart? Trucks. Truckers are the foundation of the US economy, hauling more than 70% of goods coast to coast across American highways. Right now, the trucking industry is short by as many as 80,000 drivers. One solution under consideration, the American Trucking Association is backing proposed legislation to test allowing people as young as 18 to drive. Now, as the mom of a 19-year-old driver, I must admit that this was my reaction when I first heard the proposal.

Male Speaker: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Trucking is an overwhelmingly male industry, but that is slowly changing.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: A 2019 survey for women in trucking shows that 10% of over the road or long haul truckers are women. That's up from 7.8% the year before.

Gretchen Waters: Yes, here we go again. Can you imagine having to be at work all day and listening to this beeping sound?

[beeping]

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Gretchen Waters. She's an over the road truck driver and travels all over the country making deliveries. Right now, she's hauling dog food from Joplin, Missouri to Atlanta, Georgia. Now, that beeping sound is a motion detector and it goes off anytime a car cuts her off, but despite that regular annoyance, Gretchen genuinely enjoys driving trucks.

Gretchen Waters: I really like it. It's a job that you get paid the same no matter what you look like, no matter what age you are. All they really want is for you to be on time, communicate effectively, keep all the tires pointed in the right direction. That is not hard to do. It really isn't.

Male Speaker 2: [inaudible 00:02:38] breaker 19. This is Rubber Duck. You got a copy on me, Big Ben. Come on.

Male Speaker 3: You got 10-4 on Big Ben. [crosstalk]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Trucking is not just about working on the road. It's about living on the road.

Gretchen Waters: It's like working from home in that you're living in this little studio apartment situation. Personally, I sleep up on the top bunk for safety. If somebody were to break into the truck in the middle of the night, I would much prefer to be up above where they might not be expecting me and where I can try to deal with the situation from above.

I have a piece of finished plywood on the bottom bunk, which allows me to cook, allows my dog space to be, and it allows me space to roll out my yoga mat and work out and work on some of my arts and craft projects and stuff.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that Gretchen is doing yoga and arts and crafts on the road, but supply chain delays and worker shortages not only affect consumers. They also impact workflow for drivers like Gretchen.

Gretchen Waters: It just means that it's a lot harder to manage the personal aspects of my life. It's harder to manage my time because this job really is a lot about discipline and time management. There really are only so many hours in a day to be able to live out all different parts of who you are as a person. That has to get worked into a lot of unknown variables which already includes construction traffic, urban traffic, breakdowns and equipment. Out here, you just really have to be ready for literally anything.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: While she does love her job, she acknowledges it can be draining.

Gretchen Waters: A part of the reason that there is a truck driver shortage is that this job is not for everybody. It really requires an incredible amount of personal endurance and stamina. A lot of solid support it in your home life. It really is a big deal to have a stable situation at home. I know a lot of people get off the road because they cannot be present for what's happening at home, which is just as important to them as what's going on out here, but the sacrifice that truck drivers make is that you are never anywhere.

You're also never really at home, and that's a big reason why a lot of people can't stay in the industry and why it's hard to attract new people.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Moving hours, requiring stamina, endurance, and sacrifice just might be part of the story of the truck driver shortage. You know Car Talk, well, this is truck talk now on The Takeaway. Jennifer Smith is a reporter at The Wall Street Journal covering logistics and the supply chain. Thanks so much for being here, Jennifer.

Jennifer Smith: Hi, great to be here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tierra Allen is a long haul trucker who's known as The Sassy Trucker on social media. Thanks for joining us, Tierra.

Tierra Allen: Hi, thanks.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tierra, I want to start with you. What kind of driving do you do and what do you haul?

Tierra Allen: Currently, I'm over the road and I haul exotic cars. I'm a car hauler.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do you enjoy your job?

Tierra Allen: I love my job. I like the fact that I can travel. I like the freedom and experience I get to have while traveling. I also love driving, so I really do love my job a lot.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Did you do other kinds of work before getting into this? I'm just wondering what drew you to trucking.

Tierra Allen: Before trucking, I was a CNA. I worked in a little small nursing home and I take care of elderly people. I enjoy that as well because I also enjoy attending for the old people. I love that as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are there downsides to the job? I hear you on driving. I hear you on being on the road, having a little bit of freedom. Are there aspects of it where you're thinking ever, "Why am I still doing this?"

Tierra Allen: Sometimes, but other than that, I enjoy it a lot.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Stick with us. Don't go away. Jen, I want to turn to you because I'm interested in what's behind the truck driver shortage.

Jennifer Smith: Well, that's a big question and it's one that's debated a lot within different parts of the trucking industry. You'll hear big trucking companies saying at times particularly times like now when the demand for transportation appears to be exceeding the supply of trucks, that there's a big driver shortage.

Then you have a pretty vocal contingent of folks, a lot of independent truckers who say, "If you paid people or if treated them right, they wouldn't churn in and out of the industry or hop back and forth." From a strictly numerical standpoint, the industry did lose a lot of people on its payrolls when the pandemic first hit, However, those levels have built nearly back. Right now, we're down about nearly 8,000 workers in the trucking sector compared to what we were two years ago before the pandemic.

A shortage may be in the eye of the beholder, but what's happening right now is you have all this freight demand, all these imports jamming in the west coast ports, there's a lot of unusual demands on the system that usually move good around, so the truckers that they do have are spending a lot of time waiting around at warehouses, at port terminals to get loaded and unloaded.

That's also overall biting into capacity and that's what's causing-- if you're a person trying to hire a truck, you might say, "Why am I having so much trouble hiring it?" Maybe they need more truckers, but they also need to use the truckers they have better than they are.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's an interesting point. Tierra, have you noticed that kind of workflow disruption where you're waiting longer in order to load the vehicles that you are transporting?

Tierra Allen: Yes, sometimes I have to wait like a day or two to get things done because that's part of the reason why there's not many drivers because we have to wait for a very long time. Sometimes we don't get paid to wait for those [unintelligible 00:08:43] and things like that. Sometimes, it leads people to quit and not want to work because we're not getting paid what we deserve having to wait that long.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, that's an interesting point. Jen, talk to us about how pay works. When drivers are waiting, they're not on the clock?

Jennifer Smith: There's a range, but many drivers are paid by the mile. What's customary in the trucking industry-- and some truckers don't like this. What's customary is the first two hours waiting to get loaded and unloaded tend to be free and that the trucker isn't getting paid for that time. Then after that, sometimes a thing called detention pay kicks in, which is an hourly rate. Sometimes truckers claim it. Sometimes they don't.

Sometimes the trucking companies they're driving for will pay them or the brokers who arrange the loads will pay that or they won't. Either way, it's often not a equivalent to how much money they'd be earning if their wheels were rolling. People like the head of the Owner-Operators Independent Drivers Associations say that the problem with trucking is that there's no value placed on a driver's time. That comes down on people like Tierra.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. I want you, Jen, to help me understand that just a bit more, when you say-- You used a couple of phrases, I want to be sure that both I and our listeners understand. One is owner-operator. Can you help us to understand how many truckers actually own their own vehicle, how many are leasing, or maybe even not how many, but what that generally looks like? Then when you talk about the value of time, how that gets played out in the industry?

Jennifer Smith: Sure. The trucking industry, there's a couple of different ways that drivers are employed. Some drivers work directly for a trucking company, and they're called company drivers. A few of those drivers might get paid by the hour, but often, the model is you get paid for mileage with maybe some ancillary compensation for waiting around. Then there's a pretty sizable group of truckers who either own or lease their own vehicles, and that's why they're called owner-operators.

Some of them might have their own trucking business with a DOT number and operating authority that allows them to move freight for other people. Other folks have or lease a truck, and they work as contractors for big trucking companies, and they take loads from them.

This is all a little bit detailed, but there's a couple of different ways that it works, and that's why you have some disagreement within the industry about things like whether there's a shortage or whether drivers are getting paid enough.

Because you have the perspective of, say, a big publicly-traded trucking company that's trying to make sure it's got enough margins to deliver a profit to investors, and then you have folks who are running one truck or two trucks, and they have a quite different view of how things are working in the industry.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tierra, you really are The Sassy Trucker. I've seen you on Twitter and Instagram. Talk to me a little bit about what it means to be a woman, and a good-looking young woman, who is driving trucks. Are people surprised when you get out of the truck? Are they helpful and happy, or do you face discriminatory practices?

Tierra Allen: Me being a young female truck driver, a lot of the people are surprised when I get off the truck, and some people are very helpful. Sometimes when I'm at the shipper getting loaded or unloaded, they may offer to help me back up the truck. Sometimes they may even ask me, they would like to buy me lunch. With me, sometimes I love that because I like the attention that comes with it and the benefits.

Also, I like how sometimes I'm at the fuel station, they even come over to offer to pump my gas. Since I do YouTube and I share my stories along the way, a lot of people from social media, they notice me at the truck stop and say, "Hey, you're The Sassy Trucker, I watch your videos all the time. I like how you inspire other women truckers to become truck drivers as well."

Melissa Harris-Perry: I wonder, Tierra, do you ever worry about personal safety? As a result of that, we were talking with another woman driver who was talking about if someone were to break in, for example. I just wonder, when you're driving by yourself, do you still feel secure?

Tierra Allen: I feel secure because my truck has a little alarm on it, a button, it's called panic mode. It's in the back of the sleeper. If someone comes near the truck, it'll just go off and it'll alarm my dispatchers that there's someone near my truck. That's one thing that I do like about it. Also, I use the seatbelt technique where you put the seatbelt around a door, so if someone tries to get in, they won't be able to get inside of the truck.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love it. You've thought about those things. Jen, I'm wondering, in an industry like trucking where you have such a high percentage of men, very few women, and we know that so many women have been pushed out of the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, if one of the things that's happening is that trucking companies might actually be seeking to recruit women, and if so, what they're doing in order to make that possible.

Jennifer Smith: Trucking companies have been trying to recruit female drivers for some time, and in part, that's because they tend to have slightly better driving records, which maybe I don't know if Tierra has some thoughts on that. They've been pushing for a long time to try and get more women in the industry. For the reasons that were outlined at the opening of the segment, you're away from home a lot.

One of the reasons women have been pushed out of the labor force during the pandemic is because the lack of childcare. I know that trucking companies, they're certainly trying very hard to get women, they're trying to get younger drivers, they're trying to get veterans because a lot of veterans both have discipline, and many of them might have driven heavy-duty vehicles during service.

They're trying to get all these groups in, but that's something they have been trying to do because retention in the trucking industry has been a problem for a long time. It's something that the pandemic is really exposing and showing some of the tougher parts of the job, including conditions where maybe you're delivering freight and you're not allowed to use the bathroom and you have to use a porta-potty because of concerns about infection.

The pandemic is exposing issues in the industry that have been happening for decades. I am sure they would love to hire more women. I actually did speak with a young woman who had just started trucking recently in the last couple of months and she loves it. There may be more folks like her and Tierra out there.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jen, I want you to walk through just one portion of that a bit more. When we look at what's happening, for example, in the restaurant industry, I can see the ways that restaurants are paying higher prices and they're reducing hours. There's ways where even on the consumer side, you can see how the labor shortage is affecting businesses, and businesses are needing to respond in part by raising wages.

Something that restaurant workers have been asking for for a very long time. I'm wondering, when you talk about some of these conditions that are being exposed, if the shortage and the high demand of the holidays creates a situation where truckers may get some of the things they've been demanding for a long period of time.

Jennifer Smith: This is indeed the moment where issues in the trucking industry-- if trucking companies or drivers have been wanting more pay or saying, "Hey, you've got to be quicker loading or unloading my drivers, you've got to make sure my trucks are on the road faster," because there's such demand for transportation right now, this is the moment to press those issues. This happens when capacity gets tight.

It does happen, but what you have been seeing really over the past year is that pay for drivers has been increasing fairly substantially. I think one estimate said that they're probably going to have across-the-board gains of about 8% this year. That's something, and you see the market responding to that by the number of drivers and other employees that the sector has been adding in recent months.

There is this sort of response, but what does happen is you'll increase the shipping rates that you're charging customers, retailers, or factories to move their freight around, so that can sometimes translate into higher prices for consumers. It's part of these supply chain costs that have been rising over the past year, along with the increased cost for moving stuff over the ocean in big ships, those prices have risen, and also the increased price of raw materials. All of that could play into what you are seeing on the shelves at stores.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tierra, I'm wondering in your conversations, either on the road or in social media with other truckers, if there are things that you all as professional drivers are requesting, are wanting to make your jobs better, more sustainable.

Tierra Allen: Yes, better pay, more home time because home time really plays a big factor for us, because we're out here on the road 24/7. I stay on the road for about two months at a time due to the truck driver shortage. Me being on the road longer, that means that I'm out longer, and we're not always getting paid what we deserve. We put in extra work so that we can make more money. A lot of us, we want to get paid more, definitely, and more home time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are you going to be working all through the holiday season?

Tierra Allen: Yes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Out on the road?

Tierra Allen: Yes, I'll be working on the [inaudible 00:18:06] .

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tierra, we all appreciate the work that you and that other truckers are doing to keep our economy open and to help to address these questions. Jennifer Smith, reporter at The Wall Street Journal on logistics and the supply chain and Tierra Allen, a long-haul trucker also known as The Sassy Trucker on social media. Jennifer and Tierra, thank you both for speaking with The Takeaway.

Jennifer Smith: Thank you.

Tierra Allen: You're welcome.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.