President Biden Discusses United States’ Need For Truckers

At a White House event last week, President Joe Biden discussed the United States’ dire need to expand its trucking industry workforce and measures his administration is taking to address the truck driver shortage. Specifically, the Biden administration’s Trucking Action Plan to expand the trucking workforce by investing in recruitment and training and expediting commercial driver’s licenses.

According to The Hill, President Biden said 2021 was the best year in terms of trucking job growth since 1994, and that trucking job growth continued in the first quarter of 2022. Since January 2021, more than 876,000 commercial driver’s licenses required to operate trucks have been granted and that there are 35,000 more truckers today than there was before the pandemic began.

More needs to be done, however. Trucking costs rose 20 percent last year. The Biden administration’s Driving Good Jobs Initiative, outlined here, aims to:

• Expand opportunities for women in trucking by creating a Women of Trucking Advisory Board that will review and report on challenges facing woman drivers and those interested in joining the profession, such as on-the-job safety risks, mentorship, quality training, and opportunities for advancement.
• Ensure drivers entering the profession have a safe environment by highlighting whistleblower and coercion protections for individuals facing sexual harassment and unsafe training conditions.
• Address predatory truck leasing arrangements and identify actions that could make leases more equitable and transparent.
• Study driver detention time—the loading and unloading time that is often unpaid—and its impact on safety and compensation.
• Address the lack of truck parking by providing funding states can use to address truck parking and by requiring states to include an analysis of truck parking needs in their state freight plans.
• Coordinate across federal agencies on critical truck driver labor, employment, and safety protections, including releasing new guidance and information for drivers about their workplace rights, and employers about their obligations.
• Conduct joint outreach and education to employers and drivers about their rights and responsibilities under federal wage and hour law.