[pmcginn]

I'm in finished vehicle logistics, and I've worked directly with a wide variety of truckers, including three years in California. You are very right that the amount of cargo that needs to be moved will not change because of this law, but you are, in my opinion, wrong about everything else.

I don't want to stereotype truckers because it is a diverse group. But I will say that in my anecdotal experience, this is a job that tends to attract people who want to be left alone. These are people who value freedom and hard work above everything else and many of them will change careers or retire if they are forced to work for big corporations. The average trucker is 55 years old, and many of them will just sell their and retire if AB5 is not overturned.

Supplying a $150,000 truck is not at all a barrier to entry. There is a major shortage of truckers and employers are offering free training, big sign on bonuses, and high starting pay to attract talent. Walmart, which is certainly not known for paying its employees well, pays truckers an average of almost $88,000 per year--and Walmart supplies the truck. The people spending $150,000 on a truck are doing it because they want to, not because they have to. This is not a medallion situation.

As for your "wink wink" comment, ELD's have been mandated since the end of 2017, and even companies that are small enough to not legally be compelled to use one are often forced to comply due to customer contracts. (Shippers want the data the ELD provides to offer better ETAs to their customers.)

In my opinion, the most likely outcome of this law is that some truckers retire and sell their rigs to big corporations, some decide to work for big corporations, and prices go up for everyone who ships goods or buys shipped goods. Unless you're in asset based trucking and looking to expand, the chances are that AB5 is going to hurt you, not help you.

[nradov]

There is no "shortage" of truckers. Never has been and never will be. New truckers can be trained in a few months. Customers and employers just don't want to pay.

Claiming that there is a shortage of workers in a particular field is generally nonsense. Is there a shortage of gold? No, I can buy as much as I want tomorrow ... at the market price.

[jjeaff]

There is such a thing as elastic demand. If you can't find people to pick strawberries without paying $150 an hour, you are probably going to go out of business. That is usually considered a labor shortage.

[mycall]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2019/09/11/the-driv...

[BurningFrog]

Note that if trucking prices do go up, the amount of cargo that gets moved will go down.

[fzeroracer]

No, not necessarily. Correlation is not causation and what not.

If trucking prices go up, companies might opt to move more cargo at the same time (same amount of moved cargo, but less trucks on the road) or they might simply eat the loss (if they're already making massive profits) or any number of alternatives.

If we were to take your argument into absurdity, the best thing to do would be to reduce trucking prices to $0, because then we would fundamentally move a lot more cargo, which would drive down prices across all of the US benefiting a lot more than just the small minority of truckers.

It's an overly simplistic way of looking at things that reminds me of the assumption that raising the minimum wage would cause the prices on everything to hike up by the same amount.

[eloff]

Thanks for grounding the discussion with a little microeconomics.

[antisthenes]

Ceteris paribus, of course.

[bsder]

> In my opinion, the most likely outcome of this law is that some truckers retire and sell their rigs to big corporations, some decide to work for big corporations, and prices go up for everyone who ships goods or buys shipped goods. Unless you're in asset based trucking and looking to expand, the chances are that AB5 is going to hurt you, not help you.

So why won't the logistics companies simply swing this to: "A load is a starting point X. The destination is ending point Y at time Z. Bid for it."

The problem is that everybody wants to control the hours, control the price, etc. rather than letting people actually bid for things and control the variables themselves.

And, to be fair, if you want to impose control on the employee variables, well, that's not really a contractor now is it?

To be fair, I would much rather see a law along the lines of "for every 40 hours of contract work--you have to supply the equivalent benefits (healthcare/retirement/vacation) as one full time employee or get fined the equivalent amount of money." That way, the whole "We'll subcontract it because it's cheaper" actually gets whacked for being cheaper for fobbing off the externalities but not if cheaper is simply that subcontractors are more efficient."

[ropman76]

They already do. Many logistics companies have a "brokerage" area where try and get trucking companies (or truckers) to bid on loads going from x to y. I used to support software that did this. Not a fan of the software, but the people where blast to work with. In the area I worked with, it could get pretty crazy (lots of yelling across the room and the yelling at people on the phone LOL). They occasionally had less than ethical truckers holding loads hostage for more money....

[a3n]

Well said.

I would add, "setting their on schedule" likely refers to independents choosing which loads to take and where.

[trianglem]

Everything you said makes sense except for the part where prices go up. Why would prices go up?

[MaulingMonkey]

Less supply of able and willing truck drivers at their current level of compensation means companies will have to increase said compensation to try and keep or attract truck drivers to avoid decreasing capacity. Increased driver compensation means increased costs for the company employing said drivers, which in turn means passing on the costs to whomever wants things shipped. Econ 101 supply and demand curves.

[ska]

Net drop of supply (truckers) I think was the reasoning.

[mistrial9]

a bicycle ride in the Port of Oakland seeing idling trucks, shows many hundred very sketchy "contractor" truckers who I doubt have seen the kind of large, steady number of dollars you are quickly citing there.. the condition of their vehicle, their health, their English language skills and other superficial indicators would be the evidence

[refurb]

I think your “superficial” qualifier is key - none of them are proof the trucker isn’t making good money.