Biden to highlight administration's efforts to boost trucking jobs

Published Mon, Apr 4 20228:29 AM EDT

Rebecca Shabad

U.S. President Joe Biden announces the release of 1 million barrels of oil per day for the next six months from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as part of administration efforts to lower gasoline prices, during remarks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s South Court Auditorium at the White House in Washington, March 31, 2022.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Monday plans to highlight the progress made on his administration's plan to boost trucking employment in an effort to strengthen U.S. supply chains.

In afternoon remarks, Biden is expected to say that last year was the best on record for trucking job growth since 1994, the White House said. After the administration introduced its plan to boost trucking employment in December, the U.S. has had the best three-month stretch for long-distance trucking hiring since the 1990s, it said.

Biden will discuss the effort to expedite the issuing of commercial driver's licenses needed to operate trucks. The White House said that since Jan. 2021, states have issued more than 876,000 of those special licenses, and trucking employment now exceeds pre-pandemic levels by 35,000 jobs.

The administration has also made it a priority to hire more military veterans and women into the industry, which is dominated by men. As part of the plan, the industry has partnered with major veterans' organizations "to support the recruitment and retention of veterans and military family members in trucking," the White House said.

"Trucking moves 72 percent of goods in America and is a lynchpin in our goods movement supply chain," the White House said in a preview of the progress report. "Trucking costs grew more than 20 percent last year as a surge in demand for goods caused by the pandemic confronted a decline in trucking employment that preceded the pandemic. The low supply of drivers is driven by high turnover and low job quality."

To improve retention and prevent fast turnover in the trucking industry, the administration has nearly doubled apprenticeship programs for trucking through 100 employers and seven trade associations, the White House said. It also held multiple listening sessions with truck drivers, advocates and unions to understand how to make trucking jobs more appealing and high-quality.

The plan is part of a joint effort by the Department of Transportation and Department of Labor and stems from the infrastructure legislation that Congress passed and Biden signed into law last year.