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Walmart said it will pay its entry-level truckers $95,000 to $110,000 a year, which is 26% higher than what it previously paid and approximately even with what a junior banker on Wall Street might make even with their advanced degrees from an Ivy League institution. This is sure to upset junior bankers, who are probably putting in a lot more time in the office than truckers are on the road but may not provide as much benefit to society.
The compensation offered by the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer exposes just how uneven the labour shortage is these days. There is a dearth of truckers, painters, roofers, plumbers and others to fill blue collar jobs. Almost half of manufacturing executives are turning down business opportunities due to a lack of workers, according to a report last month from Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute. Although it may be true that banking is more highly skilled labor than trucking, there is abundance of bankers and you can’t fool the laws of supply and demand. A few months ago,
I heard of painters making $45 an hour in New Jersey, which comes out to about $90,000 a year. Doesn’t sound like such a bad deal.
One thing I was saying last year as the economy was reopening and businesses struggled to find workers was that if wages went high enough, people would get off their couches and go back to work. That seems to be happening. The labour force participation rate is just a couple of months away on its current trajectory from where it was in the years before the pandemic.
And wages are rising as the number of job openings exceeds the pool of available labour by a record amount. So, it seems likely that the unemployment rate will fall even further, possibly to about 2% from the 3.6% in March. That would surprise a lot of people. For years, right-wing pundits have been doing the Mike Rowe thing and telling people that blue collar jobs are dignified labour, and that maybe you’re better off trucking than you are going to college and running up a lot of student loan debt. That turned out to be somewhat true.
The US Chamber of Commerce estimates that if every unemployed person in manufacturing became employed, the industry would only fill 65% of the vacant jobs. The US has a shortage of 80,000 truck drivers, according to Bloomberg News, citing the American Trucking Associations.
—Bloomberg