When Robots Take Bad Jobs

INDIANAPOLIS—James Ford worked at various printing presses for decades, eventually becoming head pressman at a bookbinding shop in Michigan. But the industry was changing, and as the work required fewer and fewer people, he searched around for his next career. He settled on truck driving.

“I want to see America and get paid for it,” he told me in December, in the cafeteria of Celadon Driving Academy, where he was completing a six-week driving course in order to get his commercial driver’s license (CDL). Celadon, which is also a trucking company, offers a job to everyone who completes the school and receives a commercial driver’s license.

Ford is one of thousands of workers going through schools like Celadon, which promise to get people out on the road and into employment in short order. Every year, the trucking industry makes a big push to recruit new workers like Ford, bemoaning a driver shortage in a booming