This study investigates two of the impacts that "deregulation" of an industry by the Federal government has had on communities. These impacts were first suggested by Clark, McKay, Missen and Webber (1992). The Congress of the United States passed the "Motor Carrier Act of 1980", which significantly reduced the amount of regulation of the interstate trucking industry. This research looked at the impacts that deregulation of the trucking industry had on local trucking earnings and workers.
The first research question looked at whether trucking firms compensate labor differently in a deregulated environment. Both Rose (1987) and Hirsch (1988, 1993) found that employees in unionized firms had traditionally higher hourly wages than their non-union counterparts. But non-union firms became increasingly competitive after 1980. In theory, non-union firms, to be competitive, needed to have a quality of workers approximately equal to that of unionized firms, and therefore needed to equalize total compensation. This research found that non-union firms are using profit sharing and incentive bonuses to increase total compensation packages. Incentive packages act as an offset to higher hourly wages offered by the non-union sector.
The second question investigated whether firms were decentralizing their operations within metropolitan regions. It was hypothesized that trucking firms relocated their operations to meet changes in the location of their customer bases. The research found that the industry first decentralized into non-central counties, then returned the central county, and is again most recently migrating to the non-central counties. In interviews with trucking industry executives and consultants, the following reasons for this cycle of behavior were; first, the initial expansion was a competitive move by old line firms to capture additional market share. The second period, of returning to central counties, was caused by a combination of unionized firm failures and non-union start-ups locating their first operating locations within central counties. Third, the most recent movement, to non-central counties, is based on new firm strategies that offer differing views of how carriers will use regional space.
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