Better Trucks Make for Happier Drivers
By Jim Park
Corliss Resources’ new seven-axle 12-cubic-yard mixers boost productivity, while automatic transmissions keep drivers coming back for more. Photo: Jim Park
“>
Corliss Resources has been in business for 99 years, and hasn’t had to really worry about staffing – until recently. The company is a fixture in Pierce County, Washington, with aggregate and concrete comprising its core business. It has seen booms and busts, and occasionally suffered through slow winter off-seasons. But since emerging from the Great Recession in 2010, Corliss has seen steady growth, fueled by a tech-sector expansion in the Seattle area, a half-hour to the north.
“There’s a lot of migration from King County down to Pierce County,” says Steve Corliss, vice president of operations. “As home prices have gone up, it just pushed people further and further south, and a lot of industry has moved down here into this area – warehouses, manufacturing. From what we’re hearing from a lot of economists, things are going to be really healthy through 2020 and 2021.”
And that’s keeping Darrin Rousseau, Corliss’ safety coordinator and fleet supervisor, awake at night. He’s watching his driver pool age and he’s painfully aware of the challenges of bringing in new talent.
“They’re getting to about that age where [retirements] will start happening in the next 10 years,” he says, and “it’s hard to find a younger person these days that wants to drive a truck when they can go play on their phone or sit behind the computer screen and make more than a truck driver.”
Corliss has one advantage over long-haul companies: The work is all local. Drivers are home at the end of every shift and they operate six days a week, so there’s plenty of earning potential for home-starved highway drivers.
Related:
The company has sweetened the pot recently with a higher pay structure, …Read the rest of this story
