This time last year many trucking companies had a yard full of idle trucks, not because they didn’t have ample freight, but because they couldn’t find enough drivers. Today, those trucks are back on the road.

It may be the only bright side to trucking's current troubles, but the nation's slowing economy and a record number of bankruptcy filings, caused in part by higher diesel fuel prices and higher insurance rates, have combined to create a driver pool of plenty after years of chronic driver shortages.
"For the first time in five years, finding drivers isn't a problem," said Donald Broughton, analyst with A.G. Edwards in St. Louis, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Eric Olsen, director of administration for USA Truck Inc. of Van Buren, Ark., said his company can fill the driver’s seats of its 1,750 trucks for the first time since 1996. The company has hired 350 drivers in the past two months, he said. This is indicative of other motor carriers, as well.
But the availability of labor comes at a price. The same weakening economy that produced the glut of drivers also has reduced the amount of available freight as manufacturers reduce production and lay off workers.
How long the labor supply holds is another question. In addition to the trucking-company failures that sent drivers to surviving companies, many idled workers from the struggling manufacturing industry found jobs driving trucks. If the economy rebounds--as some economists predict--in the last six months of this year, those workers will return to their former jobs just as the trucking industry enters its most active period of the year.