News & Press
Laid-Off Workers Fill Driving Schools
High unemployment rates lead job seekers to pursue commercial driver licenses. – September 16, 2010
By Anne Wallace Allen, Associated Press, Light & Medium TruckPorfirio Colindres has worked in construction and cleaning jobs long enough to weather several economic downturns, starting in 1989 when he moved to the United States from El Salvador. But the prolonged downturn where he now lives, near Boise, Idaho, has made steady work hard to find since 2007.
To improve his prospects, Colindres completed a 150-hour course to earn a commercial driver license and started looking for a truck driving job.
He’s jumping in at a time when the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects overall growth of 9% in truck-driving jobs between 2008 and 2018.
Considering the size of the trucking market nationwide, that works out to about 291,000 new jobs.
The Central Tech Transportation and Safety Education driving school in Drumright, Okla., has had an uptick in enrollment this year after falling by half during the recession, said school director Robert McClanahan.
“The companies were trying to hire the really good experienced drivers, and they’ve been able to do that for the last year,” he said. “But now that pool has dried up. Now, they’re starting to come back to the schools looking for entry-level students.”
“Things have picked up, and employers are much more favorable to entry-level students than they were, say, a year ago,” said David Wehman, coordinator for the truck driving program at Baker College in Flint, Mich.
McClanahan, a former truck driver, said most of his students are men changing careers in their mid-40s. “We’ve had people in here with master’s degrees,” he said.
Ralph Dean, who runs the truck-driving program at the College of Western Idaho, a community near Boise, Idaho, has seen many builders come in lately. He also has a taught a lot of people from Micron Technology Inc., a Boise microchip maker that laid off about 3,500 workers in 2008 and 2009.
“They’ve got a great background,” Dean said. “But they’re used to being home every night, so this is a real transition. There is good money, but they’ve got to be gone to make it.” That’s because longhaul driving jobs are often the only ones available to new drivers, which can put a crimp in their lifestyles.
It’s especially a problem for Colindres, who has three children. He doesn’t want to spend nights away from home, but “if there’s nothing else, I’ll do what I have to do,” he said. “When you have a family...you deal with a lot of guilt because you’re probably not going to there for every special occasion,” said Alice Adams of Austin, Texas, a transportation writer and author of several guidebooks and manuals for truckers.
Drivers with seniority can get better assignments, of course, but getting there can take a while.
After 32 years behind the wheel, Jeff Thompson now drives a tractor-trailer for FedEx but makes it home to his wife every night. Thompson, who lives in Kansas City, Mo., drives halfway from Kansas City to Chicago, where he meets a Chicago driver, trades trailers, then turns around goes home.
“It’s a good way to make a living, but it’s a hard way to make a living,” he said. “When I started out in the 1970s, we used to travel all over the country, all 48 states.”