In this episode, we talk about the trucking industry in the U.S. and Canada, and why it s not as simple as it sounds. We talk about what's going on with trucking companies, and how they're using "backdoor" workers to get into the market.
00:00:00.000Gosh, we've seen it in so many streams, especially coming out of COVID, where it's like you've given an inch and people have figured out how to take a mile.
00:00:08.700Yeah, you have the big consultocracy, can efficiency culture the heck out of this?
00:00:14.220And I would very much like the opportunity here to do a McKinsey episode and to do a Dominic Barton episode and to go into this.
00:00:21.760Because what you're describing, too, I've written about this quite recently in the hub and part of my work with a group called Project Ontario.
00:00:30.360This also sounds like the student summer job market.
00:00:32.940This sounds like what's happening to young men or unemployment in Canada with young men and particularly Ontario.
00:00:39.160It's like at super duper record highs.
00:00:42.560And it's just why can't you just pay them a little bit more?
00:00:46.080Can I share something even more insidious that's connected to the trucking thing in the U.S.?
00:00:51.360absolutely and i believe it's going on in canada as well i just wrote about this on my substack
00:00:56.720these guys are so brazen now like you mentioned that there there was a you know a recruiter
00:01:02.880consultant you know immigration person that helped the singh guy get in even though he was an illegal
00:01:08.000yeah there are these small trucking companies now run by all these migrant groups and it's not just
00:01:13.600indians it's guys from russia uzbekistan central america all over the place they have just decided
00:01:19.200that the united states trucking market is theirs now okay they advertise in facebook groups and
00:01:25.120they are implicit if not explicit in their advertising saying we offer flexible elds
00:01:32.800the l eld electronic logging device in 2017 the american government was like we have to do
00:01:38.320something about road safety we are going to make all truck drivers have a government mandated
00:01:42.400electronic tracking device to monitor their hours put in their trucks canada now has the same
00:01:46.800it was immediately apparent that that produced the opposite because they didn't address the
00:01:52.960economic circumstances right so crashes go up speeding goes up aggressive driving goes up all
00:01:58.740these things go up what these foreign companies are offering is they're telling the people they're
00:02:03.900hiring we have backdoor guys that will get in and adjust your hours so that you can keep working for
00:02:10.36018 or 20 hours a day and if the cops pull you over we've taken it out of your eld for you oh and
00:02:15.820where are all of these ELD backdoor operations located? Serbia, the Ukraine, Russia, Colombia,
00:02:23.200the Philippines. These guys are everywhere interfering with the sort of safety monitoring
00:02:29.060that's supposed to be going on in the North American trucking industry. And when they hire
00:02:32.620drivers, they are telling them, hey, you can run 4,500, 5,000, 6,000 miles a week, right?
00:02:39.020And then when you call them, a fellow sort of trucking social media guy started calling these
00:02:44.220guys he comes to find out that he has to pretend to be somewhere else the first question all of
00:02:50.660these companies ask you where are you originally from