A Look in the Rearview Mirror

The trucking industry today is a haunting reflection of its pre-regulation past.

By Jacob Turner

The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 was not a narrow response to specific regulatory failures — it marked a wholesale rejection of regulation itself. The price of that shift is measured in the stability and safety of our supply chain. For nearly five decades, America’s highways have suffered the consequences of that short-sighted decision.

President Jimmy Carter was partially right when he promised in 1980 that “labor will benefit [from deregulation] because we’ll have new jobs.” There is no shortage of trucking work today. The real question is not whether a driver can find work, but whether those jobs are good ones. At most nonunion carriers, they are not.

That reality stems largely from deregulation’s free-for-all restructuring of the industry. Today’s carriers span a wide spectrum. Some are professional operations that invest in hiring, training, and maintaining safe equipment. Others are fly-by-night outfits where drivers land when reputable carriers will not hire them. Their trucks are easy to spot: rusty, dented rigs with hissing air lines, worn tires, and company names taped to the cab on paper printed at a truck stop.

Many carriers fall somewhere in between. But all carriers in America operate under industry standards ultimately dictated by the billion-dollar corporations that dominate freight.

Much of the modern industry is controlled by perpetually expanding mega-carriers like Swift Transportation. Deregulation allowed anyone with a commercial driver’s license and access to financing to enter the market, and new operators have appeared every year since. Many are built to fail — burdened by debt, funneling excessive revenue to ownership, and lacking any realistic path to long-term stability. When these marginal carriers collapse, mega-carriers often acquire them and fold the remnants into sprawling national networks.

Today, these corporations operate tens of thousands of trucks across dozens — sometimes hundreds — of subsidiaries, obscuring their true scale. Drive down any interstate and note the variety of company names on passing trailers. Look closer, and many trace back to the same parent company.

This consolidation has carried enormous costs. The industry saw just how steep they could be in 2023, when Yellow Corporation — a century-old freight carrier — collapsed into bankruptcy despite repeated concessions and bailouts by dedicated rank-and-file Teamsters. Decades of acquisition-driven expansion, financed by mounting debt, left the company unable to survive in the hypercompetitive post-deregulation market — a strategy that would have been far more difficult under the pre-1980 regulatory system.

Failures like that of Yellow’s mismanagement are not anomalies. Visit a used truck lot and you will find rows of liquidated equipment from defunct carriers — a graveyard of tractor-trailers waiting for the next hopeful owner willing to gamble against today’s freight market.

The resulting instability has transformed trucking from a durable middle-class occupation into a grueling vagabond lifestyle. Long-haul drivers live an almost monastic existence on the road, spending months and thousands of miles away from home. Annual turnover rates can approach 90 percent, placing relentless downward pressure on wages and working conditions.

That pressure, combined with corporate consolidation, has produced one clear winner: shippers. Companies such as Amazon, whose business models depend on vast logistics networks, benefit enormously from lower freight rates and cheaper labor.

The losers are drivers, forced into a system sustainable mainly for those without families or long-term stability. Carriers defend these conditions with familiar arguments: margins are thin, drivers will not stay, maintenance costs are rising, consumer prices will increase. These are the very same justifications that led Washington to regulate trucking in 1935.

For nearly half a century, oversight by the ICC demonstrated that stable, middle-class driving jobs were not only possible but sustainable. Deregulation did not transform trucking into a leaner or more efficient industry — it traded long-term stability for short-term cost cutting. What remains of the National Master Freight Agreement, preserved today by Teamsters carriers like TForce and ABF Freight, is more than a relic of a bygone era. It is proof that a different model once worked, still works, and could work again.

It is a reminder that it does not have to be this way.