Talk about a shortage, i don t want to get hung up on the terminology. clearly we have a issue with trucker capacity. we need not waste the time with the truckers we have. time is money for them. it s just one example of things we need to develop in this industry. if we want it to be the kind of sustaining career. that makes sense for workers and makes sense economically. at a time where our supply chains are getting so much attention. look, supply chains at the end of the day are made of people. literally driven by people. if you think about it, especially in the last two years, we have depended more than ever on truckers. they can t come to work by zoom. they need to be on the road. we have counted on them. when you order something online, it doesn t just descend from the cloud. it is brought to your home. it is brought to wear the warehouses. to get to your home. by a truck or. same thing with everything you see on a shelf in a store. and we have to make sure that this profession is
From labor and business in the trucking secular. one of the most interesting presentations was by an organization called women in trucking. the number of women has grown to 10%. that s a long way short of 50%. if we are living 50% of the country on the table when it comes to recruiting women into a profession where we clearly many more people. not that you have to be a woman to benefit from the childcare provisions from build back better. but there is no question that it is going to lead to more women to the workforce. which is many reasons why it s good for families and the economy. i want to hear one point your plan released today. that addresses would i was talking about in that time magazine article. about the working conditions of truckers. that makes the job so unattractive, which is one of the major problems in the industry. and your plan indicates that the department of transportation, the department of labor, will launch a task force to investigate predatory truck leasing ag
It is true of people are told, when they are invited into this profession. you talk to some truckers, they have had fantastic careers. good wages, benefits. that is especially true with the truckers that benefit from being a part of the union. we also got a lot of feel that this isn t the profession they signed up for. we have to fix that. or else are best recruitment efforts are just going to be filling a leaky bucket. the reporting in time magazine describes a dramatic difference in your life as a truck or if you are a unionized trucker, or if you are an independent trucker on your own. those unionized truckers have sensible work hours, and the independent truckers are just at the mercy of so many different crosscurrents. they are typically paid by an independent. by the load or by the mile. not by the hour. that means if they are out of port and it is operating in an inefficient way, or a warehouse, and they re being wit made to wait hours and hours to pick up or drop off a load
Established in the bipartisan infrastructure law. so that is already established in the law. how do you hope that will help strengthen the trucker workforce? we need to make sure that this is the most attractive job possible. on one hand, we are driving more recruitment efforts. because we do know there are a lot of people seeking to get into this profession. that is where some of the work we are doing, for example to cut some red tape out of the process and get commercial driver licenses. so important. more veterans and other efforts. we also have this, there are a lot of conditions that are unfair. or unreasonable, that truckers face. as long as that persists, it is going to be difficult to attract people and keep people in that profession. some of the arrangements in terms of how people are training, they might wind up on the hook after the cost of their training which can be problematic if they are not paired with a good income on the end of that. similarly with these leasing arr