Larry Stewart is a unionized truck driver — just like his father and grandfather before him. He knew, when he became a truck driver 36 years ago, that it wouldn’t be an easy way to make a living.
“You sacrifice your life,” said Stewart, who lives in Edwardsville, Illinois, some 30 miles outside St. Louis. “The money was good for the family, the kids and the wife, but they didn’t see me a whole lot.”
Union trucking jobs aren’t easy to come by, but Stewart managed to get one when he started at Holland in 1999. Holland was acquired by Yellow in 2005, when Yellow bought Holland’s parent company US Freightways. Stewart’s job began changing shortly after that.
Once a profession, trucking became just a job, and a poorly paying one at that. The numbers are stunning: “During the ten years immediately following deregulation (from 1977 to 1987), truck drivers’ wages dropped an astonishing 44 percent, forcing truckers to drive much longer hours.” The recession was a factor, but truckers were hit much harder than their blue-collar counterparts: “Between 1977 and 1995, the decline in truck drivers’ average real earnings was four times that of demographically comparable workers in manufacturing production.” Whereas the typical trucker in 1980 made around $110,000 in today’s dollars, 2021’s median trucker earned about $48,000 per year, a number that has hardly budged for more than a decade. A retention shortage has followed; large trucking firms have roughly 100 percent turnover.