With rates ‘nowhere near sustainable’ for independent truckers, debate stirs over ‘re-regulating’

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an especially confounding event for independent truckers. I had a conversation yesterday with TBS Factoring Service President Jennifer Lickteig. Asked for her thoughts on the position of her owner-op and small fleet clients through it all, she invoked the sort of rock and a hard place situation Daniel and Phyllis Snow and so many others have voiced. Lickteig said she’s become “much more concerned with the general health” of trucking. Rates she’s seeing on clients’ factored invoices in many instances are troubling, she added, and troubling “on a number of levels.” They’re “nowhere near sustainable” for independent owner-operators. “I worry about the burden these drivers might feel — public sentiment is as high as its been in a long time” for the work truckers do, and “now some might feel like they have to take these rates. And some of these men and women, this is exactly what they’ll do, and we’re not doing enough to take care of them” as an industry.