Managing the Migration

DAN BAKER
National Speaker for Truckers

The old adage that you can’t put your foot in the same river twice still holds true. Yes, our current day and time is the same river, but it certainly has a lot of new fish in it. More and more, people ask me how we can function in trucking with people who don’t seem to have a work ethic, and I have no pat answer. But I do know that our newest generations in the work place are alive and well.

Our dilemma is simply that the movement seems to be from the work ethic to the leisure ethic; from accountability to accommodation; from deferred gratification to immediate gratification; from demand to suggestion. As an ex-Methodist preacher, I love to tease the Baptists. They say that the more conservative Baptists have ten commandments, and the more liberal Methodists have six commandments and four suggestions. Well, I sense that today, the movement seems to be in that direction: more suggestions.

With this migration of leisure ethic people into our traditionally work ethic trucking industry, we must stay vigilant to this metamorphosis of available talent. These new folks are smart, quick to learn, creative, and will certainly find new ways to do our old tasks, with probably a lot less worry, work and erosion. Yes, we will still have to haul freight in trucks from point A to point B, on schedule, at a profitable rate. But I suspect that there may be new ways for doing it, and I think the young folks will figure it out.

Somebody once said that the guy who knows “how” will always have a job, and the guy who knows “why” will always be his boss. Before we come down too hard on the youngsters, maybe a sobering thought is that someday we will work for them!!