It’s not possible to book shipments anymore with some LTL carriers. Their capacity is full, and they don’t care if they get new customers. OnTrak (which delivers my vitamin pills) and Fedex recently said they were refusing new customers. The claims are that they are out of capacity– not enough planes, trucks and drivers— to deliver everything. There are other less visible bottlenecks, also, such as a shortage of trucks for sale due to the semiconductor shortage. There’s been a sort of crisis in drivers for trucks for quite a while, exacerbated by the recent enforcement of rules to prevent people who fail drug tests from getting commercial driver’s licenses. We wonder why employers don’t pay drivers more, and take more care to create working conditions more favorable to drivers.
Still, common carriers have an obligation to carry the freight presented. It will be interesting to see how far this goes, and when regulators will start crawling through these carriers’ records to see if they are unfairly denying carriage.
Eric Kulisch, Air Cargo Editor Thursday, August 19, 2021
Viewpoint: 2021 is the year of the freight service embargo – FreightWaves
