There’s many solutions, all of them involve incentivizing people to become drivers. If people want their Amazon orders so bad, they’ll end up paying. And if they don’t, then they have to re-prioritize what they want.
The disruption is these "moving pods". They are more expensive, but they are well advertised, and one fears that the established small players will be driven out of business.
Trains also aren't that much cheaper. I'm not sure why this is, but my hunch is that much of the cost in transportation is pick up from origin and drop off at destination and this essentially has to be done via truck. So, if you're shipping via train, you incur an additional pick up and drop off, since the goods need to go from the trucker's hub to the train, then from the train to the trucker's hub. That probably erases a lot of the savings that you see when you just calculate costs based on the physics of truck vs. train.
Railroads, on the other hand, pay all their own track maintenance, and even have to pay property taxes on the track. The whole system is tilted against railroads.
If they removed those minimums, the price would go up substantially - your model doesn't include that cost on the train side, it would incur it on you as a shipping aggregator, making your costs uncompetitive.
Just a guess, I haven't done an analysis.
And you can't just say 'there's lots of people for whom $200k would be a lot of money' because there's a lot of people who whom $50k is a lot of money and those jobs aren't filled either.
Short of literally offering a million dollars a year, it's got to be more complicated than how much you offer.
The $50,000/year jobs that aren't being filled have one of:
1. Require years of non-transferable training.
2. Have insane working hours, that make your real pay closer to minimum wage.
3. In especially shitty working conditions.
4. Are in locations where $50,000/year isn't enough to live on.
5. Destroy your body after a few years on the job.
6. Have better-paying, better-work-condition alternatives that use similar skill-sets.
7. Or, more typically, two or more of the above.
That said, if it paid $200k/yr (median or even 75th percentile), the shortage would disappear post haste. The vast majorly of other jobs that pay that much tick boxes 1, 4, or both and are thus logistically out of reach of at least half the population.
If there are alternatives available that use less or cheaper labor, then people will use those instead.
There's no cap for any price. And if the alternatives are cheaper, then maybe that type of business doesn't need to exist in the economy.
That's supply and demand.
I think the job has a very high incident of obesity and heart disease, as it's so sedentary, and a high incident of divorce because it's anti-social.
Driving a truck paid well and the carriers got fat.
After a series of deregulation acts beginning in the 70’s there was a race to the bottom on prices. Many carriers went out of business. Driver pay dropped (all though you could still make a good living doing certain types of OTR.
Swings in the economy are felt in transportation.
Until the trucks drive themselves there will forever be too many/few drivers. It’s the nature of a deregulated industry that moves with the economy.
Every swing in a labor market is not a social crisis. Although we can all probably foresee some real social crises’ related to driver labor in the future and not of the “too little” kind.
Because to do so is a tactic for maximizing the amount of money they get, that being their self interest.
When you see this sort of 'workers are fussy and childish even though they're treated and paid incredibly well!' business, it's safe to read it as 'reality has come knocking, and the reports of wonderful conditions and pay are greatly exaggerated'. It's like asking what's wrong with millenials that they're not buying enough diamonds.
Logistics is a profit centre, not a cost.
What is the goal of just exaggerating and debating a thing no one says versus just debating what people are actually saying?
So where people don't have much leverage (or are perceived to not have much leverage), they move slowly. Trucking is low leverage (the training is a couple months and a large proportion of people will be able to obtain a CDL). Around here they've moved to offer paid training, which wasn't the case a year or two ago.
As for this particular case, truck driving is a crappy job, with its long term prospects darkened by self driving technology, and equal paying professional jobs in decent supply. If you're motivated enough to be a professional, you can usually find a better career. And there's a fairly hard cap on how much long haul trucker drivers can be paid before rail becomes more economic.
No, I don't think that they are.
It's just that the subject is extremely important, though it's seemingly not related to 'truck driver shortage'. Part of the problem with seeking to first justify the way our economics are structured, and then explain the outcomes, is that it ignores externalities that can be important.
You could take the opposite tack and begin from 'wealthy people are inherently evil' and probably be almost as wrong, but then you'd be arguing a deeply anarchic position where leadership is only dominance and subjugation. That ignores things like Elon Musk's elaborate, sci-fi goals which are clearly that of a nerd writ large, and not simply a pointy-hair CEO guy wanting only wealth.
The truth is a lot simpler: value is what you're able to make happen, but compensation is sheer social engineering. CEO pay has absolutely nothing to do with whether they're more useful as a class than truck drivers. I think some of them are more useful than truck drivers, and some are not.
Like selling and leasing back real estate, which often pumps up cash flow for a few quarters and then cripples the company with operational expenditures instead of appreciating as land tends to do.
But CEO salary has nothing to do with the `Talent`. Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella all replaced their predecessors pretty well and will be replaced by someone better in future too.
The real reason for high CEO salaries is mostly about risk associated with replacement. Sundar Pichai got paid $100M in years 2015. Which looks high but when you realise there are 20M shares of Google it is merely $5 per share.
If you are a Google shareholder would you risk Google's steady growth for a $5 dividend per year ? Will you waste your time saving $100M or rather focus on empowering Sundar to find next $10B market to disrupt ?
CEO salaries are high and they will soar with time too as corporations become large and government regulations increase. As regulations and size of corporations increase a person friends with Ajit Pai would matter more than a person willing to take a pay cut.
As a free market person I have no problem understanding it. Whether it is desirable, good or bad those are value judgements but there is no magic or hidden conspiracies at play here.
P.S. : I think Sundar is getting paid really pennies. Justin Bieber made $80 Millions in year 2016. He is just a singer (and a bad one at it). Sundar on other hand is spearheading a company that forms the brain of our civilisational progress at the moment, responsible for employing millions across the globe and saving billions for entire humanity.