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The story the trucking industry has been telling Canadians for years is simple: there’s a critical labour shortage. Not enough drivers. Too few willing hands to move the goods that keep our economy running. The solution, we’re told, is to bring in more migrant workers. 

But a new report from Teamsters Canada blows a gaping hole in that narrative. The report exposes something far more familiar to anyone paying attention to Canada’s labour market: we’re not facing a shortage of workers, but a shortage of decent jobs. 

A Shortage Of Good Jobs

Drawing on federal data obtained through access-to-information requests, the Teamsters’ report finds that the annual number of Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) permits approved for truck drivers more than quadrupled between 2010 and 2024. In the latter year alone, the number of approvals was likely the highest ever on record, according to the union. 

The dramatic climb in the number of TFWs in the trucking industry should give us pause. If the industry were truly facing a temporary labour shortage, we would expect to see a short-term spike, not a decade-long structural reliance on migrant labour. Instead, what the Teamsters demonstrate is that transport trucking has settled into a business model dependent on workers whose legal status in Canada renders them vulnerable to exploitation and employer control. 

The report further argues that stagnant wages and deteriorating working conditions are driving Canadian workers out of the trucking industry. Rather than raising pay and improving labour standards to attract and retain drivers, employers have turned to the TFW program to fill the gap. 

This isn’t a labour shortage: it’s a refusal to create decent work. 

Like so many sectors of the Canadian economy — from agriculture to food services — the trucking industry has discovered that the easiest way to suppress wages and contain worker demands is to import a workforce that is barred from moving freely in the labour market and faces barriers to collective action. 

The Mechanics Of Exploitation 

At the heart of the problem is the structure of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) itself. Under the TFWP, work permits are typically tied to a single employer, meaning that workers risk deportation if they quit or speak out about abuses on the job. The Teamsters’ report, for example, describes how this arrangement leaves migrant truck drivers “acutely vulnerable to exploitation, wage theft, and the Driver Inc scam.” 

“Driver Inc.” is not just industry jargon — it’s a central pillar of the current political economy of transport trucking. Under this scheme, trucking companies misclassify drivers as independent contractors, often forcing them to incorporate as small businesses. 

In practice, these drivers work under conditions indistinguishable from employment, but without access to rights and protections like overtime pay, Employment Insurance, or employer pension contributions. While often pitched to drivers as a way to make more money running their own business, in fact, Driver Inc. is little more than employers evading the law and leaving workers worse off. 

The federal government itself has acknowledged the scale of the problem. In 2022, the government earmarked $26.3 million over five years to crack down on rampant misclassification in the trucking industry. In late 2025, Ottawa announced a further misclassification inspection blitz, targeted in particular at firms based in Ontario. 

Misclassification, the government noted in 2025, strips workers of minimum-wage protections, access to paid leaves and health and safety rights. 

In other words, the business model depends on pervasive employer law-breaking and the government is well aware. 

A Race To The Bottom 

The Teamsters’ report describes a “downward spiral” of eroding labour standards familiar across many industries. 

Low wages and poor working conditions push workers out. Employers respond not by improving jobs, but by recruiting more vulnerable workers (or pressuring governments to grant them access to do so). The presence of a more exploitable labour force undermines standards further, driving down wages across the board and putting pressure on the pockets of the market where unions and decent standards tentatively remain. 

As Omar Burgan, director of research and policy at Teamsters Canada, told Class Struggle: “Workers under closed permits risk deportation if they lose their job. They’re less likely to speak out against wage theft. They’re less likely to file a complaint about unsafe conditions. And they’re certainly less likely to sign a union card. That gives employers who rely heavily on closed permits a built-in cost advantage over companies that hire workers who have the right to quit. It’s a race to the bottom, and it drags the entire sector down, union [and] non-union alike.”

The consequences of this cycle are clear and measurable. As the report notes, the average age of truck drivers continues to rise, with fewer young workers joining the industry, and those who do largely entering through temporary work programs. Trucking companies, particularly small and medium-sized firms, are being approved for hundreds of TFW permits, suggesting that what was once framed as a temporary stopgap has become a permanent workforce strategy. 

Even mainstream industry analyses have reached similar conclusions. A 2023 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers pointed to the need for higher wages, improved working conditions and better work-life balance to attract drivers, recommendations that have largely gone unheeded by employers. 

According to Burgan, “After nearly 25 years of wage stagnation in trucking, many private consultant reports are all saying the same thing: make the jobs better and workers will come back.”

The situation has become so bad that even some employer associations have called repeatedly on the government to crack down on widespread misclassification and the sweated labour conditions that undermine fair competition in the sector. 

And yet, the wild west of transport trucking persists, with workers paying the price. 

A Very Human Cost

Behind the statistics about work permits and labour standards violations are workers navigating a system designed to keep them silent. 

Reporting from across Canada has documented widespread worker abuse in the sector, particularly among migrant workers. Cases have surfaced of drivers going un- or under-paid, being denied overtime compensation or forced to work excessive hours under threat of losing their immigration status. 

Meanwhile, enforcement has lagged far behind the scale of the problem. Despite the vast majority of federal labour standards enforcement work already reacting to pervasive issues in the sector, workers are still frequently left without their rights protected. 

To its credit, the federal government has begun to acknowledge the scale of issue. At the same time, the government’s various reforms and inspection blitzes over the past few years are a tacit admission that the existing regulatory system has largely failed. 

At this point, more inspections and stronger deterrence mechanisms targeted at bad employers, while steps in the right direction, won’t fix a system that is increasingly built on the structural vulnerability of workers. 

Don’t Blame Migrant Workers

There is a predictable temptation to direct public anger about economic and labour issues toward migrant workers themselves. This kind of racist backlash is becoming all too familiar. In the trucking industry, it’s no less on display. Suggestions that foreign drivers are the source of transport accidents, racist and xenophobic social media outrage, and calls for tighter immigration controls are all notable manifestations. 

The Teamsters’ report rejects this framing outright. 

“Don’t blame immigrants,” said union president François Laporte. “Blame the politicians for believing everything companies say, and for allowing the trucking industry to use migrant labour as a substitute for paying far more competitive wages.” 

It’s an essential point. Migrant workers are not driving down wages; employers are. The latter’s strategy relies on exploiting the vulnerable legal position of migrant workers. The real issue is a policy framework that allows bosses to impose the costs of poor working conditions on a workforce with fewer rights than Canadian-born workers. 

Solutions lie in transforming the conditions of work and raising standards for all, not in pitting workers against each other. 

An Agenda For Change 

If the goal is to fix the transport trucking industry, and protect the workers who keep it running, the solutions are not complicated. They do, however, require political will, and perhaps most importantly, workers and unions organized and willing to fight. 

The Teamsters are calling for: a reduction in closed work permits that tie workers to a single employer; a meaningful wage floor and enforcement to ensure pay for all hours worked; pathways to permanent residency for migrant workers; stronger enforcement against employment misclassification and other labour violations; and recognition of truck driving as a skilled trade. 

All of these proposals would raise standards for migrant and Canadian-born workers alike, and should form the basis of solidarity. 

What’s happening in the trucking industry is not unique. It’s part of a broader pattern in the Canadian economy whereby employers refuse to accede to demands for better pay and working conditions (even when their own cost-cutting produces a qualitative labour shortage), instead depending on a supply of precarious and exploitable workers. 

As the Teamsters’ report makes clear, we are faced with a choice. We can continue down the current path, where labour shortages are solved not by improving jobs, but by making workers more disposable. Or, we can raise wages and improve work as the foundation of a better economy. As Burgan put it, “Trucking can’t be outsourced abroad. These jobs are here to stay. So let’s make sure they’re good jobs.”

The trucking industry, like so many others, doesn’t have a labour shortage. It has a shortage of good, union jobs.

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