[yyy888sss]

Yep. Without regulations that restrict people from taking new jobs, any labour 'shortage' can be solved by offering better conditions and/or higher pay. Take it to a hypothetical extreme: if truckers were offered $500k/yr and had to work 20 hours a week there would be no shortage.

[aazaa]

There would be an instant shortage of schools to train and credential the new drivers. Then there would be a backlog at DMVs to issue licenses. And on and on.

Kind of like we're seeing now.

[kennywinker]

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/05/25/999784202/is-t...

> And according to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, state governments issue more than 450,000 new commercial driver's licenses every year. A large fraction of those drivers enter the long-haul trucking industry.

> "It's just simple math," Spencer says. "If every year there are an excess of over 400,000 brand-new drivers created, how could there possibly be a shortage?"

> In a 2019 study published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists Stephen V. Burks and Kristen Monaco investigated claims by industry leaders that the trucking labor market was somehow "broken" enough to create a decades-long shortage. Standard economics says if you don't have enough workers, you raise wages and within a reasonable amount of time, presto, no more shortage. Is trucking somehow different? A thorough investigation led them to conclude that the trucking labor market is not different. It is not broken. Yes, they say, the trucking labor market is "tight" — meaning that companies are competing to fill open jobs — but it functions in the same way as any other labor market.

[inetknght]

I'm not sure but there might be a correlation to the fact that millions of babies are born every year but we somehow aren't seeing population growth to match...

Where there's an entrance there's also an exit.

If there's 400,000 new commercial driver's licenses every year then how many existing commercial driver's licenses expire / die / move to a different job / whatever?

[kennywinker]

The article I linked to talked about retention being the major issue in the trucking labour market - Which only re-enforces the grandparent's (yyy888sss) point - the issue is with the pay-to-work match, not some pipeline issue. In fact, the pipeline is probably so good that it prevents the industry from needing to solve the retention issue. If there are always fresh truckers to burn out, there's no need to pay better.

[doikor]

> If there's 400,000 new commercial driver's licenses every year then how many existing commercial driver's licenses expire / die / move to a different job / whatever?

I don't know how the licenses work in US but here in Finland a lot of people have truck drivers licenses and the permits to do it commercially (2 different things here) but do not actually work in trucking in the traditional sense.

For example got a friend who has those as he works construction as a crane operator. He needs the licenses/permits to be able to move his crane which is classified as a truck when driving on the roads to move it from site to site. Another one works in selling earth/dirt. He needs the licenses to drive his own truck to move stuff around the quarry (required as it is not fenced and gated off from public roads). Also loads his loader on the truck to move it between the sites he owns as needed.

Also a lot of people go into the field for a year or two and quit as it is hard work with long/bad hours and thus miss out on family life etc.

[billfruit]

It could also be solved by government resorting to issue large numbers of an easy to get, "lorry driver" temporary visa for example of 1 year duration.

[Talanes]

I've never heard the phrase "lorry driver" in a context where I had to think about what it meant. I think I've been picturing taxi drivers and not delivery drivers.

[maccolgan]

Yes, solve social problems with immigration, and then what?

[knownjorbist]

Reap the benefits? Immigration is a net gain overall, we're basically taxing ourselves at the moment with arbitrary immigration controls.

[biaachmonkie]

I would expect a significant number of the immigrant drivers in this scenario would live extremely modestly, like sleeping in their cabs all the time. And they would send as much money back to their families in their home country, this behavior is seen in other such scenarios with imported labor.

It's tough on the worker, but good for their family and home country. It's cheap and compliant labor for the employer. But for the host country as a whole is it good? All that money being sent out of the country instead of spent locally can't be good for the host country vs a native worker.

[billfruit]

Higher margins for employers and lower prices for consumers. Isn't that benefit enough?

[aahortwwy]

Not true.

Markets take time to find new equilibrium points, during that time there can be shortages.

Not to mention that there is an upper limit on supply of labor in almost all markets.

[bostonsre]

> Not to mention that there is an upper limit on supply of labor in almost all markets.

You don't think the hundreds of thousands or millions of workers that work at jobs like an Amazon warehouse and make 15/hour would switch to being truck drivers for 500k/year? My job is easy but shit, I would seriously contemplate becoming a truck driver for a that much.

It's supply and demand. Supply is low, increase pay and supply increases.

[aahortwwy]

Do you know how to drive a truck? I don't. It takes time to learn. Increasing wages for truck drivers doesn't make it faster to learn how to drive a truck.

> It's supply and demand. Supply is low, increase pay and supply increases.

And demand decreases. But sometimes demand _can't_ decrease, and that's another source of shortages.

If there's not enough food to go around you can't just raise prices to solve the problem (well, you can, but it's not really an acceptable solution).

Point being, shortages are a real thing.

See also: HN's favorite topic, housing in the Bay Area.

[legulere]

There are a lot of people with a truck driving license that work in other fields. With good incentives you could get them to become tricky drivers again.

[dragonwriter]

> Supply is low, increase pay and supply increases.

“Supply” is the function mapping price to quantity supplied. With normal shape of a supply curve of a good or seevice in an idealized Econ 101 economy with no sharp supply constraints but the usual increasing marginal costs, increasing price increases quantity supplied.

[Ericson2314]

The economy as a whole never reaches equilibrium. Think "eventually consistent".