ALBANY, N.Y. — Bob Lingyak’s job is a lot easier these days.
For years, Lingyak, head of recruiting at trucking company Gypsum Express, had to take what he could get when it came to long-haul drivers amid a shortage of workers qualified to handle the big rigs and willing to spend weeks on the road.
But as the cost of diesel fuel soars and the economy slows, hundreds of small to midsize trucking outfits are folding — leaving legions of trained drivers looking for work.
“It’s turned around quite a bit,” Lingyak said. “It used to be the drivers who could pick and choose. Now we can pick and choose.”
Trucking companies have long lamented what they say has been a chronic shortage of long-haul — or over-the-road — drivers. A 2005 analysis by Global Insight estimated that by 2014, the industry will fall about 111,000 drivers short of the 1.7 million expected to be needed to keep the nation’s long-haul freight moving.
Analysts blame an aging driver workforce and difficulty attracting people to take on a job that requires them to be away from home for long stretches. The core demographic group that provides more than half of big-rig drivers — middle-aged white men — also is shrinking, compounding the problem over the long term.
But in the short term, the labor crunch appears to have eased.
Soaring diesel prices — at a national average of $4.69 a gallon compared with $2.79 last year — and increased price competition among trucking companies are running thousands of the nation’s 18-wheelers off the road.
These days, it costs upward of $1,100 to fill up a big rig with a pair of tanks that hold 250 gallons. That’s up from about $700 last year.
Truckers have protested rising fuel prices at the U.S. Capitol and elsewhere, urging Congress to end large oil-company subsidies and release fuel from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, among other things.
During the first three months of this year, 935 trucking companies filed for bankruptcy, according to research by investment firm Avondale Partners.
That’s the highest failure rate seen since the economic slump of the early 2000s, said one analyst.
