ATA walks back “driver shortage” claim — now says it’s about “qualified drivers"

For nearly a decade, the American Trucking Associations (ATA) sounded alarms about a so-called “driver shortage,” claiming the U.S. needed tens of thousands of new truckers to fill empty seats. Headlines echoed the figure, 80,000 missing drivers, and lawmakers responded with calls to relax age, immigration, and training standards to attract more workers. But independent research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) painted a different picture: there were millions of licensed CDL holders, just fewer willing to endure stagnant pay, long hours, and unpaid detention time. The narrative of a missing workforce, critics say, benefited large carriers seeking cheaper labor while ignoring why so many drivers were leaving the industry.

Now, ATA’s own language has shifted. On its official website and in reports from 2017 through 2022, the group admits the challenge lies in finding enough qualified drivers, not simply drivers. Their 2022 “Driver Shortage Update” and labor development pages explicitly refer to “a shortage of qualified drivers,” signaling a quiet acknowledgment that the issue stems from retention and working conditions, not a lack of people with CDLs. The rewording may seem small, but it marks a major narrative reversal. For years, truckers blamed the “shortage” rhetoric for depressing wages and justifying policy changes that hurt them. Now, ATA’s own words confirm what many on the road have said all along: America never ran out of truckers, it ran out of reasons for them to stay.