ATA vs FreightWaves

If the truth hurts, then the American Trucking Associations felt some pain last week. It howled and stomped its rhetorical feet in something like a teenage snit.

ATA lashed out at the online publication FreightWaves and its CEO and founder Craig Fuller, who had written that ATA’s so-called driver shortage was a myth.

Land Line has been saying exactly that for years, and ATA simply ignores us. More recently, other voices in trucking and trucking media have been questioning ATA’s driver-shortage claims. The organization has been ignoring them, too.

But FreightWaves and Fuller? Apparently, that was a different story. Yet the intensity and personal nature of ATA’s response hint at something more than just a disagreement over policy. We’ll come back to that.

If trucking had titled nobles, Craig Fuller might be a Prince of Chattanooga. His father, Max Fuller, who co-founded U.S. Xpress there in 1985, would be the Duke. Craig Fuller grew up in trucking and worked at U.S. Xpress (which was recently acquired by Knight-Swift) among other ventures before launching FreightWaves in 2016.

FreightWaves describes itself as “a price reporting agency” that provides all kinds of data for shippers, brokers and carriers in all modes of freight transportation. But it’s more widely known for its roster of digital publications, newsletters, podcasts and TV shows all about logistics.

Most notable among them is the FreightWaves Daily newsletter, a widely read source of news in the industry. That’s where Fuller’s article titled “The perpetual driver shortage is not real” appeared on Tuesday, Sept. 5.

ATA seemed truly pissed off.

At the top of its daily roundup of news from various sources on Thursday, Sept. 7, ATA posted an item under the headline “FreightWaves gets it wrong on driver shortage.”

“FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller calls the truck driver shortage a ‘myth’ in a recent piece of self-promotion,” the blog began, “but his assertion collapses under the weight of facts and data.”

ATA then unloaded a clumsy collection of “facts and data” on its poor readers. While they’re probably all true and may prove a thing or two – that few people apply for trucking jobs, for example – none of it comes close to contradicting Fuller’s assertion.

The assertion that pushed ATA off the ledge of public decorum began with this: “The seemingly perpetual marketwide truck driver shortage is not real, nor is it marketwide. While specific fleets can and do have driver shortages – i.e., unseated trucks – the trucking market quickly corrects.”

Using the oceans of data that are FreightWaves’ primary business, Fuller explained that owner-operators and small carriers account for an increasing share of freight, competing with the mega-carriers that run ATA. When demand increases and rates rise, he added, more small businesses enter the industry, and the nation’s freight gets delivered. That could not happen if there were a true shortage of drivers.

Fuller’s facts and data are cold, considering the human cost of people entering and leaving the industry in such large numbers, but they support his premise. He’s right.

ATA doesn’t even mention that premise, never mind refute it. It can’t.

Its willy-nilly facts and anecdotes prove one thing after another, but not that there is a shortage of truck drivers.

Fleets tell ATA they can’t hire enough drivers. Hence, goes ATA’s reasoning, there must be a driver shortage. I drove a truck instead of going to school, but I’m sure there’s an academic discipline that would define that as poor logic.

If you state things just a little differently, you get closer to reality: Fleets can’t hire enough drivers because drivers don’t apply. Many qualified CDL drivers don’t want to work in the available jobs. They’re too hard, too many hours and too many days away from home, all of which ATA acknowledges. But then there’s the big one: Too little money.

Of course, ATA cites pay raises over the past few years, but always in percentages (as though 18% of abysmal is a big deal). It can’t use real payroll numbers because, well, that wouldn’t fit its narrative of benevolent truckload carriers wringing their hands over how hard it is to get good help these days.

But there I go, chasing the shreds of ATA’s tattered argument. I’ll stop.

All its nonsense aside, why does ATA behave the way it does? Why does it maintain the driver-shortage fiction – even to the point of embarrassing itself?

In its response to Fuller, ATA put it this way:

“That’s why ATA continues to advocate for policies to expand the pool of talent and ensure our supply chain has the workforce it needs to support the economy.”

In other words, it’s ATA’s job to get governments to help shovel recruits into the mega fleets that have 100% turnover, that hire and then lose thousands upon thousands of drivers every year. If the American public truly understood the pain this creates for all those people and their families, no one would be listening to ATA.

This was not the first time ATA responded to driver-shortage deniers. It trotted out the same tangential facts and data when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics stated the truth nearly five years ago. Ho, ho, ho. Those silly bureaucrats simply don’t understand trucking like we do, ATA said in haughty disdain.

Which brings us back to ATA’s angry tone this time around.

Early in its rebuttal, ATA referred to Fuller’s piece as “self-promotion.” It finished with this:

“ATA isn’t in the business of pedaling narratives; that’s FreightWaves’ lane. Their bottom line is driven by story lines — and increasingly of the false variety.”

What did ATA mean by “Their bottom line is driven by storylines?” What does FreightWaves’ bottom line have to do with a disagreement over ATA policy?

And why was the ATA piece unattributed? I can’t imagine it appeared without the word-for-word approval of ATA President and CEO Chris Spear, yet there is no byline.

I can’t escape the feeling there’s more to ATA’s outrage than the driver-shortage debate. Here, ATA seems to hint at something unflattering about Fuller and his company. But hinting without saying is simply a backhanded smear.

It’s not hard to imagine trucking insiders who know what it’s about nudging each other and snickering. LL