Sharing Economy

With a shortage of workers in all areas of the logistics organization, from IT personnel to truck drivers and warehouse operatives, it is time to rethink traditional labor models.

One way to offer more reliable, attractive jobs to scarce talent is through labor alliances with companies in the same or in a different industry. A logistics company could work with a manufacturer, for example, allowing employees to work in the warehouse during peak periods but switch to the manufacturer’s production facility through the remainder of the year. This form of employee sharing can be extremely beneficial in times of crisis. The model was established in China during the Covid-19 pandemic, when workers from crisis-hit industries such as hospitality were able to find work in other industries such as e-commerce. With this type of shared workforce model, the original employer provides insurance and other benefits along with a share of annual salary while the other employer pays its share of the annual salary. Due to the success of this model, Alibaba's subsidiary grocery store chain Hema Fresh has opened a B2B network platform supporting employee sharing in the future.

Although this model is relatively new and not yet widespread, it offers great potential for logistics companies and could also be applied for office jobs in the area of IT or project management.

In the EU alone, about 1 in 5 of all freight transportation vehicle-kilometers in 2020 were comprised of empty runs. The sharing economy in the form of shared logistics transportation offers a solution. Although logistics marketplaces attempt to tackle empty runs by providing transparency of available vehicles and routes, they do not typically support collaborative bidding. The problem is that competing companies avoid collaborative transportation as they are reluctant to share sensitive data, such as transportation routes and volumes, with potential competitors. In the long term this may be outweighed by the advantage of shared transportation (better truck utilization) which leads to lower costs and an overall reduction of emissions.

Within the framework of a project called ‘Exchange Mechanisms in Logistics’, two Austrian universities – the University of Klagenfurt and the University of Vienna – are exploring how to remove barriers to horizontal collaboration in order to implement shared logistics transportation on a broad scale. The focus is to develop a solution for the fair and cost-effective distribution of transportation orders between logistics providers with as little information exchange as possible.