A “Great Purge” Is Pushing Small Truckers Out Of Business At An Unprecedented Rate

Chris Tucker needed to move some hot tubs. It seemed like a good gig for his network of small truckers.

The Winchester, Kentucky-based owner of Full Coverage Freight, a truck brokerage, recently advertised to truck drivers on a load board that it had a shipment of hot tubs headed from Seattle to a small town in the middle of Wisconsin. The rate came out to under $2 a mile, which Tucker thought was low. He expected drivers to haggle with his company to get paid at least $2.50 a mile, or about $1,000 more for the gig.

Instead, his office was slammed with dozens of phone calls and hundreds of texts clamoring for the hot tub job — exactly at the rate advertised.

It’s not an ideal situation for America’s 2 million truck drivers. Too many truck drivers for the amount of work available means lower and lower pay. During the last major trucking recession in 2019, hundreds of trucking companies declared bankruptcy, unable to cover the costs of running a trucking company with deflating rates.

The last few months have made Tucker believe trucking is about to enter the “Great Purge,” or another spate of major bankruptcies. He predicted in a June 10 Facebook post on the Rate Per Miles Masters group, which hosts about 33,000 trucking professionals, that the many truck drivers who flooded the industry amid unprecedented truck volumes would have to shut down their operations. Ill-prepared brokers would also face the same doom, he wrote.- READ MORE