It all comes down to supply and demand. If there is a shortage of truckers, then trucking companies will respond by improving wages and working conditions to attract more people into trucking. If there is a shortage of pilots, airlines will respond by improving wages and working conditions to attract more people to work as pilots. Of course to the extent that trucking costs and air transportation costs are a part of purchased goods and services, those costs will be reflected in prices as the cost of shipping increases.
People get obsessed with the short term impacts. You can't increase the supply of truckers overnight. You can't increase the supply of pilots overnight. Addressing the shortages requires several years. In the meantime, there are disruptions because store shelves don't get filled, costs of materials goes up, etc.
A good comparison is with the natural gas shortages that occurred about 20 years ago. The price of natural gas skyrocketed, and many people were proclaiming catastrophe and how the old models were being destroyed. What happened was that with the increasing price of natural gas, people who used natural gas implemented projects to reduce gas usage. Meanwhile producers of natural gas now had incentives to develop new natural gas sources. The end result was that in five to ten years we moved form natural gas shortage to natural gas surplus. (Parenthetically, most of these predictions were being made by people who were pocketing nice fees for fearmongering about the looming catastrophe on cable TV, podcasts, and newsletters.)
If we give time, and we avoid well-intentioned meddling, this will sort itself out.
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There is a very persistent and heavy drumbeat nowadays proclaiming that to get a meaningful and rewarding job, you need a college education. So if you can't go to college, your objective should be to get a job that enables your kids to get a college education so that they can get a "better" job than you have. To my mind that is incredibly snobbish and elitist. Why is being highly skilled in a trade, as an electrician, welder, trucker, machinist, etc., less significant than having a college degree - which often leaves you overqualified to work in a coffee shop.
IMO, as we confront shortages of people to fill positions that don't require a college degree, maybe we will stop drinking the Kool-Aid put out by the educational establishment that the only way to really get ahead in the world is to pay them vast amounts of money to attend their schools to get a piece of paper that may or may not mean anything in the real world.
Saw a quip today that you can graduate from high school, learn a trade, and if you become competent you can be earning $100k annually in salary and benefits within four years of graduation, and with little to no student loans. Or you can go to college, get a degree in sociology, rack up $100k in student loans, and go to work as a barrista in a coffee ship.
