Walmart offers starting salary of $110,000 to entice truck drivers

A Walmart spokesperson said Walmart is raising the starting salary for its truck drivers to between $95,000 and $110,000 per year, which exceeds the average starting salary of $87,000. The company said the internal training program will provide a 12-week course for workers in other Walmart roles to become certified truck drivers and join the company’s internal fleet.

The push comes as the trucking industry continues to face challenges in recruiting drivers as wages for truck drivers have risen steadily throughout the pandemic, although some data suggests freight demand may be cooling. Last month, the trucking industry lost 4,900 jobs, the first monthly decline in nearly two years, federal labor figures show. The decline was in contrast to job gains in the service industry, which includes the travel sector and other parts of the logistics industry such as warehouses.

Walmart and other large retailers have grown revenue significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic as demand for items including home goods and construction materials soared, creating a need for more supply-chain workers. At the same time, there have been supply-chain disruptions due to high levels of demand, production bottlenecks and port delays.

“We want to make sure we continue to attract drivers, but also retain existing drivers,” said Karissa Sprague, a senior vice president in Walmart’s human resources department. Walmart hired 7,000 drivers for its internal fleet during the past two years, hiring 4,500 last year, a spokesman said, the most in the company’s history. It employs a total of 12,000 truck drivers.

“You can pull up job postings and there are a lot of sign-on bonuses and shiny items out there, and we want to make sure our colleagues are taken care of,” said Ms. Sprague.

Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer by revenue, has long been known to pay its truck drivers more than the industry average, a holdover from the company’s early days when executives believed a The large internal fleet helped Walmart move freight more efficiently.

In the U.S., the median annual wage for heavy-truck and tractor-trailer drivers was $47,130, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most recent annual data available, and an increase of about 3% to 4% annually since 2016. happened.

Ms Sprague said more than a year ago, Walmart decided it needed to train drivers internally to keep up with the pace of business and add new promotional opportunities.

That said, Walmart has moved 17 workers from its warehouse operations through its truck-driver training program so far, and aims to add hundreds of drivers through the program by the end of the year.

He said it could cost around $4,500 to become an independent truck driver. “We know the industry isn’t necessarily building more drivers, but we want to be able to continue to grow our private fleet,” she said. “We need to find multiple ways to do it.”

This story has been published without modification to the text from a wire agency feed