We all know there is a severe shortage of US truck drivers, which is only going to get worse over time, right?

SCDigest regularly reports on this topic, noting the often near 100% turnover rate at truckload carriers, according to quarterly ATA data, carriers regularly lamenting the lack of drivers in quarterly earnings calls, frequent pay raises in recent years (at last), etc.

The cause? In part, it is widely believed, a lack of interest in younger workers in driving a truck, driven in part by a tough lifestyle on the road.

There is some truth in all that – but maybe not quite as much as most in the industry probably believe. That is clearly the conclusion of a new report from the US Labor Dept. that analyzes market for truck drivers.

The report is written by economists and reads that way, but we wrestled with enough of the data to make some sense.

Why study the market for drivers? As the report notes early on, “The trade press covering the US trucking industry often portrays the US labor market for truck drivers as dysfunctional, citing persistent driver shortages and high levels of firm-level turnover and predicting significant resulting constraints on the supply of motor freight services.”

Given the huge role of trucking in keeping goods and the economy flowing, taking a deeper dive makes a lot of sense, the report notes.

In addition, the report cites the believe among many in the industry that the market for truck drivers is somehow structurally broken, and thus does not behave the way a normal labor market would.

After looking at the data, the Labor Dept. disagrees, noting that in general “it is unusual for a market to be consistently out of equilibrium in the direction of a shortage over more than a decade,” which many in the industry claim is the case for drivers, with the shortage really started taking off in about 2005 and persisted ever since.

As a baseline, the report says were approximately 1.75 million heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in the United States in 2017, along with 877,670 light truck or delivery services drivers and 427,000 driver/sales workers.

One interesting and not often made point is that drivers who are engaged in any aspect of interstate transportation are not subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime provisions, which govern the majority of other private and public sector occupations. That lack of overtime pay has a big impact, as the report says most tractor-trailer drivers work far in excess of 40 hours per week.

Demand for drivers has been strong since 2003, which does indicate a tight labor market. That while jobs in most other “blue collar” occupations such as manufacturing in the US have declined over the same period.

Heavy duty truckers on average made about $44,000 per year in 2016. That was a couple of thousands of dollars per year more than for all blue collar workers, which in turn earned a couple of thousand more per year than all truck drivers, including local delivery drivers and long haul.

Given all the reporting about driver turnover, perhaps the most surprising data in the report are those showing the percent of drivers that stay in the job from one year to the next.