Probably the biggest change we will see in 2015 will be a large increase in the inability to find qualified people to fill open employment positions. The economy has been growing at a fairly steady and faster than normal pace. This means that finding qualified people to fill skilled/knowledgeable positions (non-trainee positions) will become harder and harder.
Be it Class A truck drivers to transportation-savvy customer service representatives to good salespeople with solid transportation backgrounds, it will become harder to fill the positions, leading to wage inflation in the transportation industry as a whole.
The second most important change I am (hopefully) expecting to see in 2015 is for the Southern California port complex to get back to some degree of normalcy. Between the labor unrest at both the driver and dockworker levels, the shortage of terminals able to unload "mega-ships" timely, the shortage of chassis that has developed since the ocean carriers stopped providing them, the union activities focused on converting drivers both from an Independent contractor status to that of an employee, and from that of an employee to a unionized employee, and the rail issues caused throughout the year because of poor weather back east as well as (again) the chassis and driver shortages in Southern California, the ports in Southern California have not had a recent year where things just operated "normally" (as they should).
I predict that things will get better, although I do not see that happening until the second half of 2015. The one major potential complication I see is, again, the shortage of skilled labor — in this instance drivers — which may end up delaying the ability of the region to cope with the increased container activity as the economy continues to grow.
Brad Dechter, President, DHX-Dependable Hawaiian Express; DGX-Dependable Global Express