Article snippet: Since early 2017, “we’ve had to increase wages [by 10 percent and] we anticipate next year will be similar to what this year was,” company President Nicholas Hobbs told a group of Wall Street investment analysts on Oct. 14. The pre-inflation pay raise of roughly 20 percent for truckers’ follows last month’s decision by Amazon to offer a $15 per hour starting wage to all of its warehouse workers, and it raises the pressure on the many CEOs and investors who have fiercely resisted wage hikes in President Donald Trump’s go-go economy. Trump’s low-immigration/high-wage “Hire American” policy is forcing reluctant CEOs to compete for willing American workers because Trump has rejected corporate pleas for more immigrant blue-collar and white-collar workers. For example, Trump has drastically lowered the inflow of refugees, which previously had provided trucking companies with many new workers willing to work at low wages. In response, CEOs and investors have helped block Trump’s more ambitious immigration reforms, and are now backing a proposal by Kansas GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder which expands several blue-collar and white-collar visa-worker programs. The proposal is hidden in the 2019 budget for the Department of Homeland Security and will be voted up-or-down in the lame-duck Congress during December. Bloomberg reported: The company has almost 10,000 trucks on the road. The company’s share value was $80 before the 2016 election, and it has grown to $113 by October 2018 amid... Link to the full article to read more