The barrier to entry to driving a truck is a few months of training so the amount of people that can become truck drivers is quite large. However, the social status of driving a truck is quite low and there is a constant threat of automating the job away. Not to mention the terrible working conditions.
The barrier to entry for driving a truck is greater than just the time it takes to do the training.
To pass the training you need to be a competent driver. It isn't as easy as you make it out to be and the pool of people who can become truck drivers is smaller than you think it is.
You can't just grab some random worker and hand them the keys to a truck. Truck driving requires a lot of expensive training, and it's a shitty job that not many people want to do anyway because it takes them away from home too much.
Driving trucks is more difficult. For instance trucks are mostly (all?) unsynchronized manual transmissions. They take skill and experience to operate.
It's also more difficult safely braking/turning/accelerating a very heavy load like a loaded trailer as opposed to a passenger vehicle.
Some local trucking businesses in my area are training people to drive since there's a shortage of drivers. It takes a while to get someone to the point where they can get their commercial driver's license.
People don't perceive driving their own cars to be a problem.
With trucks there is a big problem. Quality drivers with a CDL are hard to find. My brother-in-law who works in road construction tells me all about it: in Binghamton NY there is a bridge with a low clearance that some dumbass gets a truck stuck in about once a month.
"it doesn't take much in the way of skill to be a truck driver"
It's harder than you'd think to do a perfect 90 degree backup of a full-size semi into a loading dock without jackknifing, or to develop the temperament to pay attention to a boring stretch of highway for 8 hours at a time. You're being trusted with a lot of valuable equipment and cargo, to say nothing of the insurance risk should you flatten someone's Mercedes.
Truck drivers require a specific skill and license. There's a finite amount of those people at any point in time. If the number of jobs exceeds the number of workers, then we have an abundance of jobs in relation to the amount of human capital.
It's really not a difficult concept to understand.
I can't think of many worse jobs than truck driving. Long hours, low pay, threat to lose your job from self-driving cars, high risk... These guys deserve a higher salary and they should start looking for something else to do IMHO.
Yeah sure, you can make that after you are in the business for years, own your own truck, have a flawless record, and all that. What they don't mention is you not going home at the end of the day, or the hours you don't get paid waiting for other people to unload your or load your truck, or the social isolation, or the fact that a small misstep could cost you your entire career with your CDL and driving experience becoming useless.
The reason we lack truck drivers is because of pay, it costs a lot of money to get people to forgo a family, or a home, or sleeping in their own bed, waiting around in the middle of nowhere not getting paid just waiting, plus the costs of road food, the cost of maintaining and insuring your own truck, ect.
It’s not like many kids are planning to be truck drivers. It is a job that people wander into. The bigger problem will be those that are doing it when the job goes away, as well as continued pressure on the job market as a whole (what will pop up to replace the portion of the labor pool that would have driven trucks before).
Most people used to be farmers, too, but prohibiting industrialization was not the right call.
Driving trucks is a dangerous occupation that's terrible for your health, and often takes you away from your family for long periods of time. In a few generations when it's long gone as an occupation, no one will miss it. Getting from now to then is unfortunately going to be a rough transition for some people, but stopping that transition entirely isn't the right call.
"I still think driving a truck as a profession will be a thing of the past within 20 years or so."
I hope so. Trucking is one of the toughest professions for a person to endure that I've ever seen. It destroys a person's body and mind...and you're lucky to end up making minimum wage when you account for how many hours they spend working.
Is there really a shortage of truck drivers? Or are there enough people with the needed licences, but they'd rather work in McDonalds, because they pay more?
Truck driving has a incredibly high turn over rate. Not that many drivers will lose their jobs but a lot who would have entered the field won't have that option. The net result as far as number of truckers goes might be the same but it is easier to divert into something else instead of retraining after investing time into a career. Of course this necessitates there being something else to be diverted into, which certainly isn't guaranteed.
The national shortage of truck drivers in America does not support your argument. I heard from someone at 160 Driving Academy that you can make six figures with a CDL and the trucking companies will pay you to get one.
That's not even as hard on the body as other physical jobs. It is not a well regarded and the community of peers you interact with means that it isn't a very desirable job.
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