DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently shared a short video where he interviews an owner-operator at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, California.
The interview itself is nice enough, if a bit pithy, but there's something just not quite right about it -- it's shot in January 2022, and the years have not been kind to it.
"We need to make sure more people understand this stuff," Buttigieg said of trucking to open the video.
That right there should tell you this video isn't really for the trucking world or owner-operators. It's slickly produced and essentially pitches trucking as fun, and important. Perhaps the idea was if savvy, successful Buttigieg shines a light on the industry, they can make a dent in that "driver shortage" we hear big fleets constantly complain about?
That's what's so strange. Spot rates in January 2022 sat around $3.15/mile, contract just under that, and both easing off the pandemic-induced highs. Around then, supply chain problems had become the new hot business story as locked-down Americans awaited their Amazon orders at home. (Things got so bad that rock 'n' roller Jack White would later in 2022 cheekily dub his performance series the Supply Chain Issues tour.)
Just a month earlier, President Joe Biden's administration launched the "Trucking Action Plan to Strengthen America’s Trucking Workforce," a central tenant of which included "asking industry, labor, and all levels of government to partner with us to address these trucking workforce challenges and begin building a next generation trucking workforce."
Buttigieg's interview with David Alvarado, an owner-op wearing a JCT Trucking t-shirt (he probably hauled for them at the ports at the time, and may still) should be seen in that context -- a pitch to get young workers into trucking, shot in an informal, almost podcasty style with the Biden administration's youngest secretary.
