Georgia Truck Accident Lawyers Blog

By 2014, trucking companies in the United States could potentially face a 30 percent surge in wage bills amid a trucker shortage and an increased demand for freight shipments. In efforts to meet demands, drivers are taking on more hours, longer trips and heavy loads, which is leaving us all with increased risks of being involved in a trucking accident in Georgia.

Our Georgia trucking accident attorneys know the trucker shortage is growing critical and is expected to double by next year. Trucking companies will have 300,000 open full-time positions -- about a third of the workforce.

The increase in demand is a good sign that our economy is slowly recovering from the July dip. For company owners to keep drivers, they're increasing wages for their employees which in turn increases prices for customers. A Georgia-based trucking company recently upped its employee's salary by 2.5 percent, which resulted in a $10 million increase for the year.

“The truck-driver population is growing at less than 1 percent a year,” said Jeff Kauffman, a Sterne Agee & Leach Inc.

With more and more regulations being placed on the trucking industry, drivers are proving to be more and more difficult to come by. Regulations limiting driver hours and trucking loads are causing companies to make more, shorter trips. Shorter trips shorten the paychecks of these drivers.

New regulations that make a driver's history more available helps to weed out bad drivers. While that's good news for us motorists, that's bad news for companies who have to get deliveries to destinations on time.

With all the new criteria, the pool of potential hires is growing smaller and smaller.

Another strike against these companies is the cost for new, more fuel efficient trucks that are required to meet federal emission rules. Add that to the rising costs of diesel and we're talking a pretty penny here, just to make a single delivery. This year's cost of fuel is roughly 30 percent more for each gallon than it was during this time last year.

“If it was purely a decision based on price, I probably already have moved to rail. But the flip side is, there’s a service difference favoring truckers because of their greater speed," said Kauffman.

It’s even hard to believe that drivers are hard to come by with an average unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent in the United States. Drivers typically spend about three weeks traveling with a truckload carrier at a time and these are some of the longest hauls in the delivery industry. Each trailer only has items for one customer at one time.

Regardless, drivers are spending too many consecutive hours on our roadways trying to make these deliveries in a timely fashion for these companies. The problem is that the shortage in drivers in leading to overworked current employees and increasing risks for fatal, and preventable, accidents on our roadways.