Driving Mr. Walton

Walmart is raising pay for its long-haul truck drivers and launching an internal training program amidst a global driver shortage, the company announced yesterday.

🚛 The deets… Truck drivers at the world’s largest retailer will now make between $95,000–$110,000 in their first year with the company. Walmart didn’t say what starting pay was previously, only that drivers made an average of $87,500 in year one.

• The company also started a 12-week program in Sanger, Texas, and Dover, Delaware, where people can earn a commercial driver’s license for free and join Walmart’s fleet.

📸 Big picture: The pandemic has made trucker shortages more severe, as the demand to move freight hits historic highs. The American Trucking Association estimates the US is currently short about 80,000 drivers.

• This problem isn’t unique to America, either. A big part of why China’s Covid lockdowns are currently impacting global supply chains isn’t the lack of production – for the most part, factories have figured out how to scale manufacturing down or up as necessary – but the difficulty around transporting the manufactured products to ports, and then shipping them to other countries.

📝 The bottom line: Autonomous trucking is likely still decades away from threatening the labor market – and currently, many companies have a “drivers wanted” sign hanging in the window.