US supply chain failure

An interesting article on why the US supply chain is in such shambles:

Quote:

Why Trucking Can’t Deliver the Goods The yearly turnover rate among long-haul truckers is 94 percent. And you wonder why you’re not getting your orders on time? THE PLIGHT OF THE PORT TRUCKERS may seem extreme, but the plight of the great majority of long-haul truckers is dismal as well. It wasn’t ever thus. Until 1980, long-haul truckers were generally employed by regulated companies whose routes and rates had to pass muster with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Under the terms of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act, the ICC kept potential lowball, low-wage competitors out of the market. Drivers were also highly unionized, under a Master Freight Agreement between the Teamsters and close to 1,000 trucking firms. For which reasons, truck driving was a pretty damn good blue-collar job, with decent pay, livable hours, and ample benefits. The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 changed all that, scrapping the rules of the 1935 act so that startups, charging far less than the pre-1980 rates and paying their drivers far less as well, flooded the market. Facing that competition, established companies dropped their rates and pay scales, too. By 1998, drivers were making between 30 percent and 40 percent less than their pre-1980 predecessors had made. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, following the steep decline in wages in the decades after the 1980 deregulation, trucker income has flatlined for the past 20 years. The median income of long-haul truckers who are employees was roughly $53,000 in 2018; for contractors, it was $45,000—though drivers in both groups had to put in many more than 40 hours per week to reach these totals.

https://prospect.org/economy/why-tru...ver-the-goods/

Neoliberalism gutted the once respectable profession of trucking, making it an underpaid, overworked hell-job. Like most of these "nobody wants to work anymore" stories, low wages and terrible workplace conditions are ultimately to blame. So much of our society is based on huge swaths of barely making it impoverished workers living extremely precarious lives, and the shock of covid completely wrecked everything.

Specifically in regards to no-shows at the Port of LA, widespread and illegal miscategorization of truck drivers as independent contractors has placed all the burden of delayed shipments on truckers, who often find themselves waiting for shipments for hours without pay. No-showing is the obvious response to the prospect of working without pay.

Quote:

Perhaps one-fifth of port truckers actually are independent contractors; nearly everyone else is, like Alvarez, misclassified as independents. Over the past decade, dozens of lawsuits from misclassified drivers have resulted in judgments affirming that they’ve been misclassified and awarding them compensation from the companies that misclassified them. XPO recently paid a $30 million fine to a large number of its drivers. But neither XPO nor any of the other fined companies have stopped misclassification. It’s cheaper for them to pay a fine than to pay their drivers a living wage. Not surprisingly, given the long waits and meager rewards, a lot of drivers have simply stopped showing up. According to Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of L.A., fully 30 percent of the port’s 12,000 drivers no longer show up on weekdays, a percentage that rises to 50 percent on weekends. Once the waits exceed six hours, as they now sometimes do, drivers would run the risk of exceeding the 11-hour federal limit on trucker workdays if they then were to actually get a load—which means the port must turn them away, and they’ll have spent an entire workday for no pay at all. And you wonder why the supply chain isn’t working very well?

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/twTvD39