US retail giant Walmart has announced a program to recruit truck drivers for its logistics fleet, with some annual salaries reaching $110,000, along with the possibility of earning more depending on length of service. In addition, Walmart will provide training courses to pass the required exams for those who want to get into trucking.
Faced with a shortage of some 80,000 truck drivers, with many more due to retire soon, logistics companies are having to offer increasingly higher salaries, significantly more than the average for that profession. If your business depends on deliveries — in the United States, 75% of goods are hauled by road — you have a problem: right now, nobody wants to be a truck driver, so companies are having to pay salaries above the going rate in sectors like banking, which are traditionally much better paid.
It’s hardly surprising that driving a truck isn’t most people’s idea of a career: long hours behind the wheel of a huge machine, bored and dependent on the weather and other circumstances of the road. Then there’s the poor road infrastructure and the stress of meeting deadlines. As a result, burnout is rife. In short, this a job waiting to be automated.
And that’s another reason why so few people want to be a truck driver. The “Will robots take my job?” website says there’s an 87% risk level of automation in the road haulage industry. And there’s the paradox: while automation has been underway for some time and is progressing, it’s still far from complete and it will be some time before we see fully autonomous trucks, which is why some companies that depend on road logistics are being forced to incentivize truck drivers with very high salaries to bridge the gap.
This is a paradox we’ll see a lot of as automation spreads: occupations that fall into the so-called 3Ds (“dirty, dangerous and demeaning”) category, or are seen as having little future, will have to pay salaries above the norm. The average annual salary of a truck driver in the United States is estimated, in 2022, to be around $56,491 per year, but Walmart is willing to double that amount to ensure an adequate supply of drivers and so avoid strains on logistics, which is fundamental to its business.
These are the paradoxes of incomplete automation processes. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a short, but well-paid career in a dirty, dangerous or demeaning industry, there might be a job out there for you.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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