More logistic jobs will be coming to Maine as Governor Janet Mills announced “nearly $20 million in grant awards through her Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan to help Maine farmers and food processors address infrastructure needs to expand in-state production and processing.” These funds will help farmers “increase the supply of Maine-grown food, meet growing demand, create and sustain jobs in one of Maine’s iconic heritage industries.” Read more…
Pet Supplies Plus, a leading, full-service pet retail company, plans to establish a new distribution center in Orangeburg County with a $53 million investment that will create 275 new jobs, including “highly desirable logistic jobs.” Created in 1988, “Pet Supplies Plus, a subsidiary of Franchise Group, Inc., is one of the largest pet retail franchises in the United States, offering customers a wide assortment of natural pet foods, goods and services. Located in 40 states, Pet Supplies Plus has more than 630 stores, the majority of which are independently owned and operated by franchisees.” Read more…
Goodwill of Southeast Georgia and Savannah Technical College will be offering a new virtual reality pilot program that will help applicants that are interested in learning manufacturing and forklifting skills. The certification courses will be taught in a hybrid format with the goal of providing students with innovative, hands-on classroom training. These virtual reality training courses “will allow the college to increase its logistics and manufacturing class sizes from 15 students to around 92.” Read more…
Teresa Maki, owner of T Enterprises, a Pasco private trucking school certified in Commercial Driving License (CDL) training by the state Department of Licensing, exclaims that the trucking industry has exploded and enrollment in her school has nearly doubled since 2020. Maki goes on to claim that “employers hiring new drivers have increased significantly. Before, they could easily find someone with a little bit more experience, but now they just can’t find enough drivers.” Read more…
Though many trucking companies lament the fact that they are low on truck drivers, this runs counterintuitive to the fact “that there are many times more commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) issued than there are jobs in the industry.” With unemployment levels below 4%, it appears that many truck drivers are leaving the industry to find one with a “safe, steady job that will enable them to provide a reasonably comfortable life for themselves and their families.” Read more…
Officials predict 80 new logistics jobs will be coming to South Alabama as New York-based DC Safety and Averitt Express will both be expanding their operations to Mobil County, Alabama. Upon the announcements, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey exclaimed: “days like today prove why Alabama’s economic comeback is leading states around the country and why the Mobil area is a major catalyst for the entire state.” Read more…
While truck driver training programs help applicants find positions amongst the nation’s biggest freight haulers, quitting during these courses can often have severe repercussions. Despite the fact many of these programs fail to deliver the compensation and working conditions they promise, “drivers who quit early can be pursued by debt collectors and blacklisted by other companies in the industry, making it difficult for them to find a new job.” Read more...
Despite the claim of a driver shortage due to the pandemic, professor Jason Miller claims that they just don’t want to drive for mega carriers anymore. With many claiming that the mega carriers treat them poorly and pay them peanuts, some are becoming owner operators themselves or going to work for smaller carriers. Miller goes on to share BLD data “which shows that the average size of US trucking establishments plummeted from 10.6 employees at the end of 2019 to 9.4 employees in the third quarter of 2021.. Read more…
President Joe Biden addressed multiple important issues facing the trucking industry as part of an update on his Trucking Action Plan (TAP), including ensuring female driver safety from sexual predators and the lack of safe parking for big rigs. The plan initially launched last December by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and U.S. Department of Transportation was to “increase the supply of truck drivers by creating new pathways into the profession, cutting red tape to expand high quality training… and laying the foundation for improving job quality to keep people in the profession.” Read more…
Though preliminary numbers might change in the next two months, a two year streak of trucking employment growth has come to an end, “perhaps indicating the economy hitting the brakes after unprecedented consumer demand.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 5,000 trucking jobs were lost in March, which “marks the first month-to-month decrease since April 2020, when the start of the pandemic wiped out nearly 80,000 trucking jobs.” Read more…
