For hire: Trucking firms reach out to Hispanics
Nowadays, Frias and Rodriguez are learning to be long-haul commercial truck drivers while Lua has been driving big rigs for seven years, making six times what he brought home from the orchards.
"This is easier, this is better," Lua said, standing beside his bright red rig one recent morning at a company terminal in York, Pa. "I don't work (outdoors) in the hot weather or the cold weather. I'm in my truck, I have air conditioning and I have heat."
Their quests for more job security and better wages led them down a road that driver-starved trucking companies are hoping more Hispanics will follow.
Beset by an aging work force and high turnover, trucking companies that traditionally culled drivers from middle America are recruiting in urban Hispanic communities, advertising in Spanish, appealing to high-school students and setting up booths at job fairs.
"The truck driver has been the domain of the white male for years and years and years, and the face of the truck driver is changing," said Robert Lake, the executive publisher of Truckers News en Espanol. "And the companies that want to be profitable and fill their trucks have to look outside of that one individual."
Hispanics are the country's fastest-growing ethnic group, accounting for an estimated one in seven of the nation's 1.3 million long-haul truckers, the same proportion as in the overall U.S. population.
But that's not good enough for some trucking executives at a time when one in six long-haul truckers are nearing retirement and driver recruitment is lagging industry growth. The ranks of long-haul truck drivers expanded by 1.6 percent last year, according to federal data, while industry expansion is projected at 2.2 percent a year over the next decade. If those trends hold, a current 20,000-driver shortfall will balloon to 110,000 by 2014, a figure that doesn't include the approximately 219,000 truckers expected to retire during that period, according to a study commissioned by the American Trucking Associations, an industry group based in Alexandria, Va.
To close the gap, companies want trucking to be attractive to Hispanics, who are joining the broader U.S. work force at an eye-popping rate and filling one of every three job openings, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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