What preceed the overseas delivery:
From finish to start: Overseas delivery, overseas clearance, port, airport charges, ocean, air freight leg, origin terminal fee, export declaration & trucking from the shipper.
Shippers reading our blogs have seen about each step as we generally describe them. Everyone can appreciate the intricacies & connections from one aspect of the transportation to the next. Truck drivers are in demand and may drive transportation price higher.
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Sourced by JOC, here is below a shorten article & to view the entiretyvisit JOC.com
Shortage of drivers may spark higher peak-season truck rates
Over-the-road shippers worried about peak-season capacity this fall need to focus on the front of the truck, not the back. There will be trailers available ready to receive freight, and enough
trucks to pull them. What may be missing is the key ingredient in truck capacity: the driver.
The escalating driver shortage has become the leading check on over-the-road truck capacity, and if freight demand continues to stay above 2013 levels, the shortage is likely to lead to sharp increases in transportation pricing, as carriers pull out all stops to recruit
and keep drivers.
Swift Transportation, the nation’s largest truckload carrier, already has signaled it will look to shippers to help finance a significant boost in driver pay, raising rates by higher percentage levels than Swift was able to gain from customers in the first half of the year.
Sometime in this quarter, Swift will give drivers the biggest pay increase in the company’s history, Richard Stocking, president and chief operating officer of the $4 billion company, said
in a July 25 conference call. He declined to say by just how much, but the company is aiming high.
“If current driver shortages continued, driver wages may continue to increase, but probably not to the extent of the increase we are giving this year to our drivers,” Stocking said.
Swift is one of the largest employers in trucking, with about 14,700 drivers and 19,600 employees at the end of 2013. The company also contracts with more than 5,000 owner-operators. So when Swift says its inability to “seat” more trucks restrained potential growth and contributed to a 2 percent year-over-year drop in truckload revenue — at a time
when freight demand was strong — the impact of the driver shortage becomes clear.
Although other factors and decisions affected Swift’s performance, including the rapid buildup of its dedicated business, empty truck seats meant loads, and revenue, went elsewhere.
The driver shortage is now a concrete cap on truck capacity and a prime reason U.S. domestic
transportation costs are rising at a faster pace in 2014. Trucking companies are buying more trucks this year — ACT Research actually expects truck capacity, as measured in Class 8 power units, to increase 1 to 1.5 percent in 2014, the first increase since 2007.
Carriers, however, are having trouble convincing drivers to climb behind the wheel. With turnover at large truckload carriers above 90 percent, there’s a strong suspicion that most companies aren’t recruiting new drivers to the business, but luring experienced drivers
from competitors, instead.
The last time a major trucking company stood out from the pack and decided to give driver pay a significant boost was in 1997, when J.B. Hunt increased its pay 33 percent on average at a time when a shortage of drivers was particularly acute. Annualized wages at the Lowell,
Arkansas, carrier shot from about $33,000 to as much as $46,000 that year.
Lately, trucking executives have been calling for a similar, though perhaps not as dramatic, boost in pay. In April, Kevin Knight, chairman and CEO of Knight Transportation, said carriers must raise driver wages 15 to 25 percent over the next few years to stay competitive.
“We are very aggressively taking a large portion of what we’re able to receive in terms of rates and making sure that we give that to our driving associates,” Knight said. “Our goal is to
continue beyond this path over the next two to three years to make sure that we’re competitive as far as what the job should pay and also as compared to other industries.”
At Swift, “We’re in the process of rolling out something larger than we have ever done in our line-haul fleets, and this was not contemplated when we gave our guidance last quarter,” Swift
founder, Chairman and CEO Jerry Moyes said. “We want Swift to be the carrier of choice for drivers across this industry. We want drivers to start with Swift in our schools and remain with Swift until they retire.”
Better paid and better trained drivers will take better care of customers, “who need us now more than ever” as truckload capacity tightens, Moyes said.
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A synopsis of recent news looks like this:
Lack of trucks prospective truck surcharge, Need of better highways, Port congestions in the USA & abroad, Labor union issues at the ports, Mega ships built to carry more containers Deepening of the Panama Canal seafloor as well as our US ports.
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