I am excited to share Episode 3 of the Savage Collective Podcast. We are releasing this episode in collaboration with the Gord Magill’s Autonomous Truckers substack. He will be linking to the episode and releasing it as his own episode soon. Look for more podcasts in the future released both independently and in collaboration with other friends. You can now access these episodes on Spotify as well as Substack.
Acknowledgements: University of Pittsburgh graduate student Branden Dutchess helped with editing and cleaning up the transcript. The introductory music was written by Joshua Goniea.
Truckers are the backbone of America’s economy, but working conditions within the trucking industry can impede flourishing. In this episode, Grant sits down with Gord Magill, a writer and a trucker who has worked in the industry for over 25 years. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The American Conservative, American Affairs, and Compact. Grant and Gord had a far-ranging conversation about surveillance, autonomous trucking, and why truckers are more likely than workers in other industries to be married with children.
Gord has lots of great ideas for improving the trucking industry. He recently wrote an open letter to the DOGE. The Savage Collective is officially endorsing Gord Magill for Secretary of Transportation within the next Trump administration.
Grant and Gord met at a recent gathering of Doomer Optimists in Margaretville, NY. You can learn more about the gathering in a recent Substack post.
You can listen to the episode here or read the full transcript below.
Transcript
Grant Martsolf: My guest today is Gord McGill (0:31). Gordon is a trucker and a writer who's worked in the industry for over 25 years. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, the American Conservative, American Affairs, and Compact. He even recently appeared on Tucker Carlson wearing plaid on plaid. And if you get a chance to find that interview, it's a lot of fun. He writes a Substack newsletter called Autonomous Truckers. Gordon and I met for the first time in Margaretville at a gathering of like-minded, anti-machine thinkers. If you get a chance, on our Substack newsletter, the Savage Collective, I wrote about that extensively so you can see the context in which Gord, and I met. So, we had a great time, a lot of conviviality, hanging out, talking, drinking beer. It was a really great weekend. So, Gord, welcome to the podcast.
Gord Magill: Thanks for having me, Grant. Yeah, I've been buddies with your friend Brandon and co-conspirator at the Savage Collective for a little while and he's always singing your praises. And thank you for coming out to the party. I had some small hand in helping Ashley organize that. And I'm glad everybody came, and it seems we've had some pretty rave reviews of it. So that's great.
Grant Martsolf: Yeah, it was really a transformative experience for me to sort of think even about my career and the work that I'm doing (1:50). So, it was so wonderful. All right, so we'll just get into it. We're gonna talk about trucking.
Gord Magill: Hey, but before you get rolling, seeing as how this is going to be co-released on your podcast and mine, I do host a little podcast called Voice of Gord, which is sort of about four truckers, but wanders off in various directions. Just give us a quick little bio for Voice of Gord listeners, Grant. Like, where are you from? What do you do? And why did you bring me here today?
Grant Martsolf: Sure. So, Grant Martsolf, I am a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. I'm actually in the School of Nursing. I'm actually a nurse, but I've never really practiced. I have a PhD in public policy, so I worked at the RAND Corporation for many, many years. So, I was deep, deep in the state, deep in the heart of the machine, for many years. I came to the University of Pittsburgh about six years ago to start a public policy research shop at the School of Nursing.
After receiving tenure, I made a major change in my research focus. I felt like the healthcare issues I was focusing on were not the most important issues affecting the United States. I was very convinced that college attainment, so whether or not someone has gone to college, is really the defining crisis in America right now in terms of outcomes.
If you look at well-being, health, voting patterns, whether or not people get married and stay married, whether or not they have children is really driven by whether or not you've gone to college. And I think that is overshadowed in political discourse. So, I was very interested in men’s outcomes. And then you look at the issues around death, the despair from overdose and suicide, that seemed to me to be the most pressing thing that was happening. So, I've drastically changed my research focus. And part of that was starting the Substack with Brandon called the Savage Collective. Brandon and I have been friends for many, many years. He's a mechanic, formerly a diesel mechanic, and now he works for a large gas station chain doing repairs and maintenance of their various mechanics that they have. Things like the coolers and the freezers and pumps. So, that's my background. Yeah, so this has been a major change for me and I'm trying to be creative in what it looks like to be an academic in the 21st century. So, I do a lot of podcasting and a lot of public writing. But I also try to keep some work that reflects what it looks like to be an academic. So, writing in research articles and major sociology and medical journals. I also have a podcast that I have run for many years called the Beatrice Institute podcast which is a fellowship of Christian faculty in Pittsburgh who are trying to put the Christian intellectual tradition in conversation with our various disciplines. So, this might actually go up there as well.
Gord Magill: I think I listened to a Beatrice Institute interview that you did once on Brandon’s recommendation. I don’t remember which one is was but the name rings a bell. I think the guest mentioned that you were trying to get Crawford on and so I went and had a glance through it. You’ll have to forgive my memory.
Grant Martsolf: One that might be particularly relevant for you is that I did an interview with a guy named Richard Reeves who is very concerned about the state of men in the 21st century. Particularly, working class men, as the economy has transitioned from industry and manufacturing to service a lot of men have been left behind. So, he is very concerned about outcomes for men. That was one that I did that you may find interesting (5:31).
Understanding the trucking industry
Grant Martsolf: All right. So, I want to start out with a little overview of the trucking industry. When I think about truckers, the first thing that comes to mind is long haul truckers going from coast to coast, working for a big carrier. But as I read your writing, I realized that that's not quite true. So, what would be helpful for me is a little taxonomy of trucking jobs and how those different types of trucking jobs differ between long haul versus local jobs. Or how large carriers versus small carriers work, independent carriers too? What's the taxonomy of trucking jobs and how that might impact trucker well-being and the types of jobs that they have?
Gord Magill: Sure, so trucking, like the rest of America is very diverse, and I mean that in that there's a number of industries that services and interacts with a number of different customers, a number of different fields, and number of different geographic locations. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics is often quoted as saying there's three to 3.5 million jobs in America that require a CDL. About half a million of them do not involve trucking per se. That's like, you any truck over a certain weight requires a CDL. So, there's a lot of like occupational trucks, like your bucket trucks that the public utilities use. You have to have a CDL for that. You sort of understand that. An issue I've been alerted to about those statistics is that it doesn't count a lot of small owner-operators, guys that have one truck, sole proprietors, of which there are many. So it could be that there's actually closer to 4 million truckers in America. But within that, there are long haul truckers who do anywhere, typically overnight, like you go far enough away that you end up sleeping in the truck. You make your delivery somewhere and come back or do irregular routes. Maybe you're gone weeks at a time. And then there's local and regional drivers. Local guys work doing local deliveries. Short haul/ regional guys tend to stay within a certain group of states, and they might be staying away from home and sleeping in their trucks, but they don't go all the way coast to coast. So, there's a whole range of different trucking jobs with regards to like distance and time away from home and then, within that, there's two main bifurcations in trucking are TL and LTL. TL is total truckload like you load up one trailer and it's full with one delivery for one customer and it's all their stuff. They've got the whole truck. And then there's LTL, which is less than truckload and you have a trailer with a number of different deliveries on it. The LTL market has within it major players, which are companies that have large facilities for sorting freight. So, guys like the recently deceased Yellow Transport, FedEx, UPS, your parcel freight guys, SDs Transport, Old Dominion. There's all these companies that sort of have a hub and spoke model. They will have a yard and a cross-docking operation in major cities. And then they have a whole network of delivery guys and pickup guys that run around all day picking stuff up. They consolidate the loads into trailers that are going in a particular direction or to another city. Then they have line haul guys to take those to that city, turn around and come back. That's a major component of trucking. That's the, and within trucking, the LTL market is where you have most of your union representation. Trucking unions only represent about 5% to 7% of the trucking workforce. And of that 5% to 7%, it's almost all in LTL.
Grant Martsolf: Why is that?
Gord Magill: Well, it's easier to organize. There's facilities and the drivers come and go out of the same place every day. Whereas your truckload market, those guys are hither and tither and yawn and all over the place. And the truckload market has a lot more independent owner operators and small business fleets. The LTL market is typically very large companies where union representation would fit better.
What makes for good trucking jobs?
Grant Martsolf: Is it fair to characterize any of those types of jobs, whether they're long haul, local, LTL types of jobs, as better jobs? What's driving good jobs in the market (10:16)?
Gord Magill: Well, that's an interesting question. And I just wrote this piece for these guys, American Compass, answering a similar question to Orrin Cass, the sort of big cheese over there. It depends. It's a bit subjective, right? Some people want more money and benefits. Some people want home time. Some people want to go out on the road and pound the miles and crank out as much money as they can and work hard. Some guys sort of, you know, occupy that somewhat dead archetype of the lone wolf. I just want to be away from everybody and go wherever type guy, that sort of last cowboy. But most people want to have a decent enough pay and benefits package and that that thing sort of applies but truckers are an idiosyncratic bunch. So, if you put 10 truck drivers together you'll get 100 different answers about what a good trucking job is.
Deconstructing the trucker shortage narrative
Grant Martsolf: Right. So, in what ways is the driver shortage narrative true and false at the same time?
Gord Magill: Right, so the driver shortage narrative is a sort of phrase that some of us critics of the industry have come up with to describe messaging from certain large players in the industry that there's always this shortage of truck drivers and that can never get enough of them. And it's a bit of sleight of hand. That shortage has been expressed and talked about heavily since the mid to late 1980s after the effects of the de-regulation of the business through the 1980 Motor Carrier Act really started to be felt. And it has been ongoing forever and it's totally false. What the trucking industry has is a retention problem. It churns through people constantly because the conditions of the jobs suck and the material compensation is terrible relative to the number of hours worked and the sacrifices you make as a person, especially on the long-haul side of things when you're away from home.
There's been studies done in the last few years showing that truckers incomes adjusted for inflation are half of what they were in 1980. So that's not looking too good. And that hasn't really been improving. That's not to say there aren't exceptions. There are some trucking gigs that pay incredibly well, but they are small in number and they are within niches, within niches of the industry. And that leads to the part about where the driver shortage is true in a way. There's some nuance here. I'm a member of an organization called CDL Drivers Unlimited and they commissioned a study of all the state DOTs and DMVs to see how many active CDLs there were in the United States and they came up with a number that was around nine million, and that's adjusted, but basically there are three million jobs and maybe four-nine million active CDLs so there's at least two to two and a half to three times as many licensed drivers as there are jobs for them. Right? So, technically there's not a shortage but what happens is the return the retention and churn problem chews through so many people and so many people quit that it's more difficult for companies in niche and specialized markets, the types of trucking jobs that do pay well, that do require a higher quality level of operator. Those companies do have a hard time finding decent candidates and decent truckers because any potential trucker that would be really good at it will often get cast out of the industry because of this churn problem and they just say the hell with it, and they quit. So, there is a shortage and there is also not a shortage. And the not-shortage side of things causes a problem which makes the real shortage side of things real.
Grant Martsolf: Yeah, no, absolutely. And the nine million are probably driving wages down tremendously, I would assume.
Gord Magill: Well, I mean the wage suppression is a function of a bunch of different factors, obviously. So, here's my major critique. I'm known for making this argument everywhere I go about the retention problem. And that is that that retention problem has been pawned off on the taxpayer in a bunch of different of ways. I call it stealth corporate welfare. So, what happens is, the larger carriers, what we call in the industry megas, are companies with hundreds of trucks, if not thousands of trucks. They often have their own in-house truck driving schools to teach people how to get their CDL. Those schools, whether or not they're owned by these companies, are directly or indirectly subsidized or given grants by the state, right? Various levels of government: local government, state government, and the feds, and it's hard to get numbers on how much because states are kind of secretive about this stuff at times or they'll just give you a big blank number and you don't know how it got distributed but there's a fella at UPenn named Steve Viscelli.
He wrote this really great book called “The Big Rig: Trucking in the Decline of the American Dream”. And he's been investigating this for a long time. And he recently wrote a paper with another academic in which they studied the retention and training problem in the state of California, because the state of California is sort of like Department of Agriculture. They kept hearing from farmers and produce haulers and stuff, we can't get truck drivers. And so Viscelli and his colleague were brought into study it, they wrote this paper, they showed that the state of California was spending $20 million a year directly on truck driving schools, and then they just couldn't keep the drivers around. And in the paper, they make the same arguments that any truck driver will tell you that you don't pay us enough for the amount of work we do. We don't get paid for massive delays and loading and unloading times, which are endemic in agriculture and food distribution, especially refrigerated drivers, and so the state of California is throwing all this money into making new truck drivers and they just keep quitting. So, that's not just California, that's the entire industry and so my critique, what I would say to the government, is this, and this sounds very libertarian and it is, but it's the truth, it is not the responsibility of the taxpayer to continue throwing bodies at a problem that the trucking industry and its customers do not want to fix themselves.
Grant Martsolf: Right. So can you give me a profile, maybe a friend of yours or maybe a composite of friends of yours who are like, screw it, I'm leaving. What are they doing now?
Gord Magill: I'm sitting here talking to you, there's one. I mean, there is a sort of trope that's repeated by various labor market people about, well, if truckers get sick of trucking, they go into construction (17:52). That's sort of true. Construction is really hard work and sitting in a truck is not. It's two different kinds of physical labor. I don't know how true that is. I mean, I do it. Like I help people build houses and I've hung drywall and painted and built decks and I do HVAC work. I'm fairly skilled, but when truck drivers quit, they usually end up coming back at some point. They will quit and go into other work, that's true, but again there's a sort of cultural idiosyncrasy and a personality profile that lends itself to being a trucker and that expresses itself in many ways and usually you end up wanting to go back trucking. I mean I do, I'd rather be on road right now but I'm not.
Why truckers are well-suited for families
Grant Martsolf: All right, so this actually leads pretty well into the next set of questions and was actually the impetus for this interview. So, I recently completed a report for the Institute for Family Studies (18:53). I don't know if you know those guys.
Gord Magill: Yeah!
Grant Martsolf: It's Brad. Okay, you do know those guys. Great. So, it's Brad Wilcox. We wrote this report looking at family formation rates among working class men. So, men who haven't gone to college, we’re looking across industries, right? So, we compare folks that are working in the trucking industry. And so these are not people with CDLs. These are people working in the trucking industry. And they're more likely to be married with children than men in other working-class jobs. Two of the worst are food service and entertainment. In terms of family formation, they are some of the worst. But again, trucking is the best. And also worth knowing, this is independent of the money they earn and their benefits and stability. So, there’s something independent of the salaries, benefits and stability. How do you explain this relationship? Why is it that men working in trucking have been so successful in getting married and forming families compared to other industries?
Gord Magill: That's a great question (21:20). The answer to it is not visible to the world of spreadsheet brains and people who need metrics on things, right? Like it's beyond numbers. As you just said, it exists outside of job stability or salary considerations. And my answer ties into my criticism of how trucking is managed because one of the things I tell people about this business and why I think it's like going to shit is that they don't consider the human element, right? And again, truckers are an idiosyncratic bunch. They're all over. It is the number one job in 29 states or something for men. And traditionally, truckers came from farming communities, guys that worked on the farm, they would learn how to drive tractors and operate equipment. And then that sort of lent itself to driving truck. Agricultural products need to be taken to market. So, trucking is always, not always, but generally drawn from that demographic. And so, that demographic overlaps with traditional, for lack of a better term, red state types. They are people who value their community, value their family, possibly religious, people of faith. I went to the Mid-America Truck Show for the last two years and they have trailers with mobile chapels and there's a stereotype of truckers being kind of conservative. And it's not always true, but the stereotype does reflect a truth, right?
Grant Martsolf: Right.
Gord Magill: And I think that a lot of truckers, most of the ones I've ever worked with and ever met, have got a strong sense of family. They all want to be married and have kids. Even though trucking gets in the way of that, right? Like I myself did not get married till I was 34 and did not have children till I was 39 because trucking, just got in the way. And there's, as the kids say, many such cases. But I think because a lot of truckers come from rural areas, which typically again, farming backgrounds, very community minded people, very hard workers. And, you know, another thing to consider is that if you're a long-haul trucker, even if you're a short haul trucker, most guys that work local still work 10, 12, 14 hours a day. You're by yourself in that truck. And when you get home, hey, I've been alone by myself all day. I want to hang out with my wife. I want to have kids with her and enjoy those children. It makes sense to me.
Grant Martsolf: Yeah. So, what's going on in this report is we're really struggling to determine which way causality runs, right? Is it that the job itself makes it easier to have a family? Because it surprised us when we saw truckers were number one in terms of marriage and children. I had this idea in my mind that these guys are gone for weeks at a time and how can they possibly have a family? And so, you were alluding to that. So, is it aspects of the job that make it easier to have kids and a wife, or is it that the men who are drawn to having family and children are also drawn to trucking? It seems like you're coming down on the ladder. And in fact, some of the material aspects of the job can stand in the way of those men who want a family in achieving that.
Gord Magill: Right, well, I'm gonna ramble here for a bit, but let me cook (23:42). I come from a family of truckers. My Uncle Bruce was a trucker, my Uncle Chris was a trucker, my dad was a trucker, my grandpa was a trucker and a mechanic. And I've been around truckers my entire life. Some truckers are home every weekend. They'll leave on Sunday and get home on Thursday, or they'll have some weird schedule. Some truckers are home every day because they work locally. And then, there's the weird, irregular haul line, you know, OTR guys. But no matter what, most guys still wanna have a family, right? And the other half of this equation, I think that your study should look into, is the women behind us. Every successful trucker family I know had a very strong woman who was willing to tolerate her man being gone and willing to take on the extra stress and work of raising kids when her partner's away a lot of time. And might not just apply to truckers that might apply to guys that work on boats, airline pilots, there's all kinds of people who have to be away for a long time. Truckers are probably just gone the longest and most frequently. And it's sort of understood in the culture, right? But again, it's hard to give a definitive answer that fits in any particular box or is visible to the metrically inclined.
Virtue development through trucking
Grant Martsolf: Yeah. So, one follow up question, do you think that there's something about trucking itself that creates virtue that then allows you to be a better husband and a father? And even just structurally too, like having that CDL realizing I can't be a drug addict because I'll lose my CDL. Is there something structurally in the job that creates virtue (25:19)?
Gord Magill: Yes. There's a bunch of structural things that create virtue. That's a great question. So, I grew up around some other friends in high school whose dads were truck drivers. It's a tight community and there used to be this guy, God bless him, He's no longer with us, named Barry, my friend Kenny's dad.
And Barry was telling me when I was a teenager, we would sit around and talk about trucking. And he says, you know, it's not a job. It's a lifestyle. And you have to want to do it. A lot of truckers have very crazy hours. They start at two or three in the morning or work 16 hours a day. It's not a job that you can just punch in, punch out, do your eight-hour day and go home. It just isn't that thing. So, you have to want to do it. You have to want to exert that drive.
You have to want to get down the road. You have to be quick on your feet and be able to solve problems. You have to be resilient enough to deal with bad weather, customers that delay you and treat you like crap, things change at the drop of a phone call in trucking. You could have a set plan to go do this load and then some other guy's truck breaks down and there's some other hot load and your dispatchers trying to make everything work and then they call you and say, hey man, we forget that plan. You're on plan B now. And then that plan is going to screw up your other plans for later in the week, or it's gonna run into hours-of-service regulations. It’s just the world of trucking and logistics is just full of pitfalls and screw ups and changes. You have to have the personality that can roll with that. And I think that crosses over with life in general and with relationships too. You're married, I'm married, and relationships aren't easy. They're dynamic and they require a lot of work and a of maintenance and a lot of drive to want to keep at it so I think that (27:37) the personality type that makes a successful trucker is also the personality type of the kind of person willing to make the sacrifices and do the work necessary to make a relationship function correctly.
Public policy for better trucking jobs
Grant Martsolf: Right, yeah, that's great. If you had 15 minutes with Trump, what would you ask him to do to improve trucking industry, particularly related to helping truckers form and maintain families?
Gord Magill: Man, wow. I don't know about the family formation part of it. I'm not sure that there's anything you can do. There's just some things that are intrinsic to the industry that you're just never gonna get away from. Like sometimes you gotta take a load from Maine to California and that's just the way it is.
Obviously, the wage thing sucks, right? So, in 2024, cost of living for people is a big issue. We just had this election, which was a referendum, obviously, on the previous administration across a number of different areas, one of which I think is that, in certain parts of the country, it's very difficult to buy a home. Costs of living have gone up for everybody across the board over the last few years. And, as I mentioned, truckers' salaries are frozen time in time. They are making half of what they were in 1980 on average. So, I would say to President Trump that he made a really good policy proposal, some sort of spreadsheet brain wonky types told me it was a gimmick and was no good but I disagree with them, about not taxing overtime, right? So, everybody pays income tax, there's no getting away from that. But your overtime hours that most workers in the economy are guaranteed after they work 40 hours, I would say to President Trump, yes, get that passed, and put more money in our pockets. And I would also say to him, there's a bill that's been sitting in Congress and keeps dying on the floor. It doesn't even get there, it dies in committee. It's called the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act. Truck drivers in the United States of America as in many other countries are exempted from overtime pay obligations. So, in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act passed by FDR, that set overtime rules for most workers in America, truckers are explicitly exempted because they thought that truck drivers are just going to keep working and working and working and then that's a safety problem. Well, we have hours of service rules that we're not allowed to go over. Like we're only supposed to work X number of hours a week depending on the sort of cycle you're operating under. We're now surveilled by electronic logging devices to keep us all in compliance. And the managers of trucking companies are more worried about compliance these days than getting anything done. So, it's not like people are out there cheating on this a bunch. You know, I'm sure there are edge cases, but in general, truckers do not get paid overtime. We just don't. Some companies do, again, in small niche industries, in certain states, some truckers get paid overtime, a very, very tiny number.
So, pass the guaranteeing overtime for truckers act and then if we don't have to pay taxes on that all the better, that'll put more money in truckers wallets. It'll be easier for them to buy a home. Women, when seeking a partner, are looking for someone that can provide for them. And if you're a girl that’s seeing a trucker guy or considering dating a trucker guy, and you're like, Jesus, guys only making like 50 grand, but he's gone all the time. Like, how's that gonna work? So yeah, more money please.
A lock of political will to improve trucking jobs
Grant Martsolf: Okay, got it, got it. What's your sense of what's killing this in committee? It seems like an easy win for lots of people (31:29)
Gord Magill: Well, you know, I don't know about how committees work. I was asked to write a letter for one by Thomas Massey back in 2018. And then that committee died during midterms. I don't know. I honestly don't have any answer that is specific to that piece of legislation. I can only imagine it's the sort of sclerotic movement of government in general. When that act, or the proposal of the act, has been discussed in the media and amongst policy people, the usual suspects come out of the woodwork and say, no, we shouldn't do that. The American Trucking Association is a corporate lobby group for large carriers. They want nothing to do with the act because then they would have to pay their drivers more. And then they would in turn their customers might have to pay a marginal amount more for their freight. And they don't want to do that. They want to continue the status quo of truckers being a separate case compared to everybody else where it regards pay.
Grant Martsolf: Yeah. So, I think I'm going to start a petition for Gord Magill for head of Department of Transportation. I mean, Trump is throwing all these wild cards. R.F.K. Jr. for HHS. Maybe you can replace Pete Buttigieg as the next head.
Gord Magill: So, there's some interesting discussions about that online. I mean, I'm pretty active on what's called FreightX, which is trucking Twitter. And there's a gentleman, there's two gentlemen, who are being forwarded with gusto for the position of Department of Transportation Secretary. One of them is a gentleman by the name of Craig Fuller, who is the proprietor of a website called Freight Waves, which is a trucking industry news organization. They have a bunch of different sorts of online TV shows, writers, investigative journalists, a lot of industry talk. And then they have this proprietary software called Sonar, which predicts where freight's gonna be and trucking companies subscribe to that, so they know where to put their trucks, where and when and what time of year. A very successful guy, his family was in the trucking business, he's grown up around it. He's being forwarded as a possible Secretary of Transportation. And then there's this other fellow out in Oregon named Kevin Rutherford, who's sort of an owner operator, small business guru and has these programs to help people stay in business and be successful as an owner-operator so either one of those guys would be great.
Lack of union representation in trucking
Grant Martsolf: Yeah. So, Sean O'Brien (34:17), the head of Teamster Union, made quite a bit of news recently. He refused to endorse a candidate and then he spoke at the RNC, which, I believe, is the first time a head of the Teamsters Union spoke at the RNC. But it seems like their endorsement is not as important as it used to be given the historic declines in membership. So why do so few truckers join the Teamsters? Would you find another union to be useful or is organized labor not in important as a determinant of good jobs and trucking. Are unions over?
Gord Magill: Well. There's a couple of different answers to that. The prevailing answer amongst other truckers, I hate to say for most, but like in general, there's a lot of latent boomer con attitudes amongst truckers, at least those who were sort of born and raised in the US. Maybe that's a function of like, know, zombie Reagan-ism or decades of these guys listening to AM radio or something, but typically truck drivers are not real big fans of unions anymore. I don't know if that's a psy-op as a result of the things I just mentioned or, no offense to Mr. O'Brien, but the Teamsters of today are a shadow of their former selves. They're nothing like what they were under Jimmy Hoffa when the Teamsters were the most powerful labor union in American history.
I'm ambivalent about unions. I'm neither pro nor against, right? I think that's up to each person whether or not they want to join one. I understand their usefulness in the past. I think Mr. O'Brien, at least in his willingness to speak at the RNC, deserves some credit for that. Given that in the past, Jimmy Hoffa was a staunch supporter of the Republican Party and openly supported Richard Nixon. And so, there's a sort of trope or a meme that the Democrats are the party of labor, which is currently in question due to talk of political realignment. I would say they're the party of public sector labor. Private sector unions have been like taking a hammering since the 70’s and 80’s and Reaganomics and all that. And as far as getting truckers back into unions, I don't know that I have an opinion on that other than to say that I know why they're not. Again, part of it is the ability to organize. It's easier to organize truckers when they're all standing in one spot, and they all work for the same company. Right? So, if you've got like a large trucking company such as the recently deceased Yellow Freight or UPS and you have all these guys working out of the same terminals all the time, that's easier to organize. There's probably a better use case for the union as a sort of collective negotiator with the employer (37:24). But so many truckers are independent or work for small companies that over and above whether or not truck drivers think it's necessary, a lot of them just wouldn't be into it. And I don't know if unionizing the mom and pop company with like eight drivers is gonna work.
The rise of surveillance in tracking
Grant Martsolf: Yeah. I just finished reading Karen Levy's ”Data Driven”, which was excellent (37:49).
Gord Magill: Yeah, a fantastic book.
Grant Martsolf: It was great. I knew very little about the trucking industry before I read her book, but it seems to me that the Machine and its commitment to surveillance is really penetrating all aspects of life. But it seems like in trucking, it's especially pernicious. So, I wanna talk a little bit about these surveillance systems within trucking. So, in what ways do surveillance systems actually make for less safe truckers (38:33)?
Gord Magill: Well, very good question. Karen answers that in the book. All credit to Karen. I read her book three times. I wrote this huge, long review of it for American Affairs Journal, had her on my podcast, met her in person here in Ithaca. She teaches at Cornell. Great lady.
In the book, she says the ELD mandate, these electronic logging devices which became the law of the land in 2017, were never going to work for their stated goal of increasing road safety because they didn't address the underlying economics at play. Which is to say the incentives that drivers face. So, all they did was basically make it that much more difficult to massage your hours around the vagaries of the job because now you're being monitored by the state directly. They can bring it up at any time. They can issue you fines after the fact because they can audit you with the press of a button on the computer. They don't even have to come to your trucking company's office. They can just have it sent to them, and they can just audit you remotely and issue fines after the fact. So, they made it very difficult for drivers to make maximum utility of their hours, which runs into the problem of truck drivers in many areas are constantly facing delays. You show up at some distribution center to get unloaded, you have an appointment, they don't get you in the door for two or three hours, and then they take another two or three hours to unload you or maybe a whole night. Maybe you go somewhere to get it, pick up a load and it's not ready until the next day. You go to a field in California somewhere, you spend all day waiting for the farm workers to load your stuff up. There's just a zillion and one ways that truckers are delayed, but then you're paid by the mile. You don't get paid for any of that delay time and then you have to face the pressures of this ELD thing so what ended up happening, and there's been studies that have shown this, the electronic logging device mandate made roads less safe because it didn't deal with the incentives all. They just punish drivers for forces beyond the drivers control and then made it so that drivers were getting less money. So, what did they do? They started driving like maniacs with just terrible driving. Now, I have an argument about why drivers who drive like maniacs get into the industry in the first place and, that's separate from Karens, but it's pretty incontrovertible that the ELD mandate actually caused the inverse of what it was claiming to fix. The receipts are in, and it was totally the wrong thing to do.
Grant Martsolf: Right (40:59). It's funny, I've seen parallels, I don't know if you read Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, After Babel, do know Jonathan Haidt?
Gord Magill: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Grant Martsolf: Okay. So he's had these series of things that have shown basically EdTech has been a total disaster and has actually been opposite of the intention of improving education. And I wonder if there's going to be any walking back of these tech fixes that we thought would be so helpful. But it just seems that's the way the Machine goes. It sorts of marches forward.
Gord Magill: Right, no, and on that point, so the regulatory agency that oversees trucking in the United States is called the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, in conjunction with the United States DOT. The FMCSA, their head stepped down recently. This woman was in charge of it for a while named Robin Hutchison. When presented with these studies by various trucking groups and trucking media people at a press conference, they brought it to her and said, look, we have the studies now. We have the numbers. The ELD mandate has failed at its intended purpose and has caused drivers to lose money and invaded their privacy. This thing's just not working. Robin Hutchinson said, we're not changing it and we're not going back.
Like literally, she was shown the facts, here are the statistics, this thing you did is wrong and it's the government. They just do not give a shit. The machine doesn't care.
Grant Martsolf: Yeah, yeah, it's for its own sake.
Gord Magill: Yeah.
Having agency as a trucker
Grant Martsolf: Can the average trucker repair his or her own truck (42:40)? And if not, why is this important?
Gord Magill: Right, well, there's levels of repairs, I’m sure your colleague Brandon would discuss, there's various small things that are easy to fix. Stuff like changing a headlight, putting on a new fuel filter, basic maintenance stuff that is pretty easy. Those should be requirements for getting a CDL, the ability to do basic maintenance, but they're not. Then there's stuff that truck drivers used to do. I'll give you a scenario or a comparison, I should say, between the American trucking industry and the Australian trucking industry.
So, in America, back in the day, you used to have to change your own tires, right? They didn't have networks, like Bridgestone and Firestone, Michelin, Roadside Service, know, tire guys all across the nation like they do today. Back in the day, you would carry a spare, a 20-ton manual, hydraulic jack, tire irons, all the stuff to change your own tires. That is almost unheard of in America today.
Go to Australia, where I worked for a couple of times, and I did a stretch for about a year and a half driving road trains in Western Australia. And when you're 700 miles north of Perth in the middle of nowhere, in the least densely populated part of the country, Western Australia, which is one third the size of the United States and has a population of two and a half million people, most of whom are in Perth, nobody is coming to help you.
Or in the Northern Territory or outback Queensland or anywhere in South Australia north of Port Augusta, you're on your own. So, truck drivers in Australia still change their own tires. They carry two or three or four spares on each trailer on their road trains, couple of hundred feet of air hose, carry your own rattle gun or tire irons, whichever way you want to do it (44:43). And that's done by you, the driver. It is that standard. You are expected to fix your own equipment. You have to. There's no getting around it. Whereas in America, we've gotten soft. Now that's not to say that the drivers necessarily got soft, but the system got soft, right? Now we've got all these tire companies that'll do it for you. Then you also have insurance and then workers comp considerations. A lot of trucking companies don't want their drivers to do the tires on the side of the road because if something happens, then they get sued by their driver's family. If there's an incident or the guy doesn't do it 100% correctly and hurts his back, they can sue. A bugaboo of mine is that we don't have the skill and quality level of driver anymore to even do that but what came first, the poor-quality driver or all the systems put in place to make up for that, right? It's like a chicken and egg question.
Grant Martsolf: Yeah. So, in what ways is being a trucker fundamentally different from being a drone operator (45:42)?
Gord Magill: Wow. Interesting. Are you referencing this idea from some of the autonomous companies that want to have remote assistance operators?
Grant Martsolf: Yeah, exactly. Like the Aurora group.
Gord Magill: Right. Yeah, they're not the only ones. There's a bunch of different companies. Well, the difference being, okay, so what I think Aurora is doing and, they said this explicitly in their investor prospectus, is that as they launch these autonomous trucks, they want to have a backup remote operator to be there in case something changes on the road. But the problem is, you can't get a feel for traffic, right? So, something that’s illegible to the machine. This is not something with metrics. You have to be sitting in the seat, and you have to have a lot of experience doing it. If you're a trucker, you start to be able to read patterns in traffic. You start to be able to make out that there's a certain look for certain vehicles and certain behavior patterns in other drivers that are repeated all over the place. And you only learn that by being in the seat. You only see that, again, through experience, and you learn how to avoid these situations entirely, right? One of the best ways to not get in accidents is to not get in accidents. It sounds trite in circular logic, but when you're in the seat and you see how everyone else is moving, you can say, wow, that guy's probably going to slow down in front of me. This person I can see coming up in my mirror is driving way too fast. I'm going to move over a little bit. That person's weaving. They're probably drunk. I'm going to slow down, let them go. You can see how waves of traffic come and go and react to different stretches of road where certain interchanges and exits are. There’s just all of this stuff that happens on the road. That I don't think you can teach a machine to see. I don't think a drone operator, and again Aurora has said, well we want to be able to have one remote operator for a hundred of our rigs. They showed it in a graph in their investor perspectives. How is one person going to be able to do that with a hundred trucks? I couldn't do it with two, and I've been doing this for 25 plus years. They're out of their minds.
Grant Martsolf: Yeah. So, in the opinion of Aurora, who's liable when one of their trucks plows grandma and her grandkids (48:20)?
Gord Magill: Well, that's a good question. I had an interview where I sought out an insurance industry professional to come on my own podcast last year.
And that podcast is no longer available because again, this speaks to the litigious nature of our society and the question you're asking, he mentioned the name of an insurance company in passing. It was not in context. He was not accusing them of anything or saying that they were partaking of anything. He just like mentioned that he had worked with them or something. That insurance company had some kind of robot scanning podcast, heard their name on my show and the show of another trucker podcast, who both heard this insurance guy mentioned that company's name, and he said, can you please take that off the internet for me so I don't get sued? They've threatened me with legal action simply for mentioning their name.
Grant Martsolf: Wow.
Gord Magill: Right. So, the one of the questions I asked this gentleman, I said, what do you think about the imposition and development of autonomous technology on the roads and he started laughing and he said, the lawyers and the insurance companies can't wait because they know that behind the automotive, or the automated truck companies, are a bunch of investors. There's a bunch of big tech money. There's a bunch of VC capital and they're just waiting for the first time one of these things gets into an accident and has to answer these questions because the lawyers, the plaintiff’s lawyers, and anybody who gets injured, they're incentivized to go for the bag. That bag is held by the VC capital behind the automated companies so that's where they're gonna. So, again, this is gonna be very interesting to see what happens the first time one of these things gets in a major incident.
Grant Martsolf: So, in one of your Substack articles, you describe a presentation given by representatives of this autonomous trucking company, Aurora. Why do you think more truckers didn't show up in protest or threaten this man's life?
Gord Magill: I think truckers, for the most part, are fairly mild-mannered guys. I'm not, but you know.
Something else I mentioned in that that American Compass essay was the fact that the Mid-America Truck Show puts on all of these talks by different agencies and industry groups and product manufacturers and service providers and some of them are more well attended than others but in general there wasn't tons of truckers that wanted to check out some of these things. Some stuff was very poorly attended relative to the rest of the show. So, I think that either they didn't know or there's a there's a tendency amongst truck drivers who do know about the development of autonomous technology to dismiss it. They view themselves as having some kind of value add to the service of trucking that is not going to be taken by a robot. I'm not saying all truckers believe this like I don't. I know that they're gonna come for certain types of trucking jobs. They won't be able to get all of them, but they're gonna come for certain types. But not enough truck drivers understand that and a lot of them still believe that they're good or that they're good to go for another 15 or 20 years. So, no pitchforks and torches yet.
Rise of autonomous trucking
Grant Martsolf: Right? What's your serious expectation about the extent of infiltration of autonomous trucking in the next 15 years (51:49)? Whatever time frame you want to use.
Gord Magill: So, Aurora was claiming that they were gonna get some of these things on the road fully autonomous, without a safety driver, at the end of this year. They have since altered that and now it's been pushed off into 2025. I think that they are going to get some of the industry. They're gonna come for the easy stuff, which is pin to pin line haul, right? So you take a truck, you put it on the interstate on a flat piece of ground in a place that's got fairly decent weather most of the year, point A to point B, doesn't have to tackle any mountains, it's just driving in like a straight line. I think they'll get that. And I think in those parts of the industry, and in those parts of the country, they're going to make major incursions sooner than a lot of guys think.
It's coming and they have the technology to do it. I'm skeptical of the technology in certain applications. Again, I'm skeptical of this notion of the remote operators. I'm a little concerned about how they teach these systems to learn the things that a human learns over time, but I think they'll work out a lot of those kinks. Trucker salaries are a big bag. I think they were estimated to be a $200 billion a year cost to the trucking industry and their customers whose freight they're hauling. That's a big chunk of change. So, this is why companies like Aurora and Too Simple and Kodiak Robotics and Plus AI want to get that bag and I think they've got some very smart people that are doing it. They're also testing this technology in other countries. The automated trucks thing is going farther and faster in China, in part because they have a sort of authoritarian-dictatorial-quasi-communist government where truckers don't get to say no or object and local governments, state governments like what the CCP says goes. So, they're doing a lot of that testing over there. I don't know how much more advanced they are, but like it's certainly more widespread in China than it is here.
Ethics of truck leases
Grant Martsolf: Are truck leases a form of indentured servitude and should they be outlawed?
Gord Magill: Boy, yeah. I'm of a couple of minds of that one (54:31). So, some of your listeners and certainly labor academics would have heard of a piece of legislation in California called A5. And then the Biden administration tried to put something federally similar called the Pro Act. And AB5 was meant to, I guess, stop the abuse of what ought to be, under the law, considered employees but instead they are listed as independent contractors, right? So, there's legitimate cases for people to be independent contractors but some industries have figured out how to get around having employees but actually still functionally treat those people as employees while having them as contractors. AB5 was supposed to address that.
My view is that AB5 specifically regards trucking I can't speak to other industries because I've never worked in most of them, but specifically to trucking, I think AB5 was a sledgehammer when what was needed was a framing hammer to tap in a small nail. There is abuse in the trucking business with these lease programs. Steve Vicelli's book was an investigation into these arrangements. And, you know, sometimes it works. There are people who get into lease-operator deals that do very well. My friend Wes Harmon's been doing great with it with this company called Prime, who, ironically enough, were the subject of a major lawsuit because Prime uses that lease operator model.
I think that the lease operator model with certain tweaks, regulatory safeguards, and with a lot of mandatory education, can work better than it has worked in the past. I wouldn't necessarily eliminate it but the people who push the lease-operator model have got to acknowledge that the washout rate from it is very high and that if we're going to keep using it, it needs to be adjusted.
The influence of foreign agents in America’s supply chain
Grant Martsolf: What proportion of our supply chain, particularly the trucking chain, is controlled by foreign agents (57:03)?
Gord Magill: Good question. We don't know. And that's something I think that our friends at the FMCSA have been a little bit lackluster in their performance, to put it mildly.
So, America's a big country. 330 million people here that we know about. Obviously, we've had a major problem with illegal immigration at various stages under various administrations. Obviously that problem got really, really bad under Biden, which is why so many people voted for Trump. And trucking is not immune to that. There are certain groups from certain countries that have abused the loopholes in trucking and the fact that like it doesn't have very high barriers to entry. Anybody can sign up for an MC number and get registered with the government to have a trucking company with no experience. And you can register it to a post office box. There are people who own trucking companies in the United States and own actually less the trucking side of it or in the industry lingo, the asset-based side. There's a cottage industry in trucking called load brokers, freight brokers. And those people act as an intermediary between companies that want things moved and truckers that actually have trucks. A lot of freight brokers are located overseas. They're not Americans and they parasitize themselves on the industry. Some of them are honest, they provide a service, they wheel and deal, whatever. Others of them also co-own asset-based carriers in the United States that take advantage of their co-ethnic homeboys who are sent to America under dodgy arrangements, often without work visas. They get fake licenses, our friend who is at Margaretville, Matthew Crawford, wrote an article about the one party rule of California and he used these various examples of corruption within the DMV and he cited one DMV office in California that got busted giving out hundreds of CDLs without the drivers having ever shown up or been tested. And that happens not just in California. So, the amount of illegal immigrants or indentured servants working in the trucking industry is not zero. What that number is, we don't know because the FMCSA is not doing its job. And the immigration people, under the Biden administration, have not been doing their job. So, there's tons of anecdotal evidence about it. It's also a major problem in Canada, with these sort of temporary foreign worker visas, and then a particular part of the sub-community of trucking in Canada have been abusing what are called provincial nomination programs.
So, they come to the province, say British Columbia or Ontario and say, there's not enough truck drivers. Me and my associate here, who immigrated here from India 10 years ago, legally, and started our own trucking company are going to bring drivers from India. Please, province of Ontario or BC, give us this number of visas through your provincial program. And then they have these agents in India who bring peasants from India to Canada, who don't speak English or have never driven a truck, and they go to some dodgy truck driving school in Vancouver and then they get thrown out on the road with very little training and no grasp of English. Then the people that brought them here hold the visa over their head and say, look dude, you don't want to work for us and go to Toronto in the middle of this snowstorm? Then you're going back to India. We'll just cancel your visa. That happens and the government is doing nothing about it (1:01:13).
It's been happening for so long that Canada's biggest newspaper did a full-blown expose on it like five years ago. Trudeau's done nothing about it and the same thing is happening in the United States. There's a lady who works for Freight Waves named Clarissa Haas who has investigated parts of that, but Freight Waves doesn't have the imprimatur say of the New York Times. Or there was another guy at USA Today who did a focus, not necessarily on the indentured servitude arrangements, but on the use and abuse of Central American truckers in the port operations at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California back in 2017. It was a major three-part investigative journalism series in USA Today. That was seven years ago. What's come of it? I don't know, nothing.
Doomer optimism
Grant Martsolf: Last question for you, and this doesn't have to do with trucking. How have you been impacted by your association with the Doomer Optimism community (1:02:21)?
Gord Magill: I've been impacted greatly. I’ve made some really good friends. Ashley asked me to help her organize the Margaretville thing. She invited me to another event she organized last year in Wyoming. I got to meet Brandon and yourself.
I think the Doomer Optimism collective has been a really good way for people of like mind to get together and address various problems we see in this society, specifically with the machine. And I mean, the DO guys also focus on the environment and agriculture and stuff, but my life has been made better by the Doomer Optimism people. So, thank you.
Grant Martsolf: Yeah, same here. So, Gord, those are all my questions. This has been a really fun conversation. I'm so grateful that you took some time to chat with me and hopefully I'll see you, well, hopefully before then, but at the very least, maybe in Wyoming and at the end of June.
Gord Magill: Right, yeah, no, I hope to get to Pittsburgh before that. There's an open invite here to come to Ithaca and hang out. I keep telling Brandon he's got to come here and we'll drive around and have a look see, yo u know, so.
Grant Martsolf: That'd be great. That'd be wonderful. All right, well, Gord, well, thanks again. I appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to continuing conversations about these important topics.
Gord Magill: Yeah, awesome. Much obliged and way of the road.
Grant Martsolf: Alright, take care (1:03:45).
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