Ramstad: From trucker to economist, Morris professor tracked an industry in transition

MORRIS, Minn. — Stephen Burks in 1976 obtained a license to drive trucks by showing his driver’s license, passing a five-question test and paying $5.

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He had just left a doctoral program in philosophy at the Indiana University without finishing.

“I learned the job by doing the job because there was no formal training in those days,” Burks said. “I learned what not to do basically by doing it, by screwing up, and just by good luck not killing someone else or myself.”

Eventually, the long highway of his career would wind up here in Morris, home of the University of Minnesota’s small, liberal arts college, where he would become a national expert on the economic forces that shape America’s trucking industry.

Today at 76, Burks is about to retire from the university, where he has been an economics professor since 1999. His Truckers & Turnover Project, started in 2002, is one of the longest-running research programs in the country devoted to a single profession.

The co-founder of the project, Jon Anderson, a professor in statistics and data science at Morris, is also retiring and the program will end.

Through the years, Burks and Anderson enlisted hundreds of students to help study many aspects of the truck driving experience: how employers retain drivers, how drivers make decisions, why drivers are more prone to sleep apnea and whether compensation affects safety.

Trucking in the middle part of last century was essentially a government-sponsored cartel in which companies could work together to set rates. And Teamsters representation assured that drivers were paid around the same as skilled workers like electricians and plumbers.