Truckin' with Tamie
Driver Turnover: Retention or bad job design?
Welcome back to Truckin' with Tamie! Does transportation really have a workforce shortage, or has the industry created jobs people simply don’t want to keep? As Driver Appreciation Week begins, I wanted to have a bigger conversation about what appreciation actually looks like across trucking, freight, logistics and transportation. For years, high turnover has been framed as a recruiting problem. We hear the same solutions over and over: find more drivers, attract younger workers, recruit women, recruit veterans, bring more people into the industry and keep filling the vacancies. But what if recruiting is not the real problem? What if the larger issue is retention — and the way many transportation jobs are designed? In this episode of Truckin’ with Tamie, I talk about burnout, workforce retention, driver turnover, workplace culture, detention, lack of control, constant monitoring, unpredictable schedules and the transportation industry’s tendency to celebrate toughness instead of asking why experienced people are walking away. Maybe we have spent too much time studying how to recruit people into transportation and not enough time studying what happens to them once they get here. And maybe the most important workforce question is not, “How do we find more people?” Maybe it is: Why are the people we already have leaving — and what would have to change to make them stay? Truckin’ with Tamie covers trucking, freight, logistics, transportation, supply chain issues, industry culture and the people behind the freight.
