Christmas Driver Shortage

[richard8]

xpc91:
As a young non-truck driver, I thought I’d chip in here…

I’m 26 and would love to drive a truck. Driving with my own company, music and seeing new places sounds fantastic. What stops me is:

-Self-driving trucks being talked about so often. These will no doubt be here before I’m 68, so it wouldn’t be a job for life. Few jobs are for life, but this one seems to have a massive shake-up on the way. There will always need to be drivers, but realistically how many? This is the main stopping point for me.

-Money. I’m only on £25k a year- less than what a lot of HGV1 jobs appear to pay. However I work flexitime and only have to do 37.5 hours a week to achieve that. If I do manage to fall asleep at my desk doing such short hours, its not going to kill anyone.

-Family. I barely see my girlfriend as it is as I work Mon-Fri but she works all sorts of shifts. If I was away all week or exhausted after working a 15 hour shift, I’d see her even less.

-Employers. We have in-house drivers at work who are all brilliant- I’m going to assume my work are very good to drive for. But external drivers for the most part seem to moan about everything and come across almost depressed- always very friendly, but never have a good word to say about the job. The bureaucracy and micro-management so many employers put on you guys is frankly insulting.

-As said in another post, authorities. You can’t drive here. You can’t park there. You’ve driven for 10 minutes more than your time. It looks like an impossible job, and with LEZ being the future of cities, its only going to get worse. And then theres outwith the cities- when my Seat barely fits down my street because of parked cars, what chance does a tipper going to the new housing development at the end of the road have?

The public- what do so many car drivers not understand about lorrys and roundabouts? They straddle both lanes because they need both lanes, not for the fun of it. Yet Mary in her Corrolla must squeeze into the half lane remaining because its her lane and how dare the lorry delivering her dinner for the following week need more space. Then there is dodgy lane changes on the motorway, going by a lorry, pulling back infront and jamming on the breaks. I could go on but you guys know it far better than I do.

I briefly thought about trying to become a planner, but after a few hours in a transport office and an interview with one of the managers. I decided it wasn’t for me. Planners should be salespeople and little more- selling the space on the truck. The planning should be left to the ones driving the trucks who know what they are actually talking about. And as for their manager- smug didn’t even cover it.

Hats off to you all- it sounds like an amazing job until you drill down into it and realise everyone just wants to make your life difficult!

It is an amazing job it’s the idiots that you have to work with that’s the problem and by that I mean other road users , RDC staff , Planners ect. Everyone is under such pressure to get pallet A to site X by a certain time that no one gives a monkeys about the poor drivers home life/ work balance.
Employers see the 90 hours driving limits as targets and if you don’t use your 15s up you have wasted an oppertunity to utilise the truck, the whole industry needs to be reviewed from wages, working conditions to tacho hours and regs

[muckles]

I think one thing touched on in the article is the sense of freedom, many of us older drivers enjoyed the fact we were let loose to travel around and if lucky some went off round Europe and further, very little chance of the same sort of freedom or tramping round Europe for most driver now. .

[jimmy_mcnulty]

Neverstress:
Why are hauliers not offering £15-20 an hour

Because if you do the maths, the vast majority cannot afford to pay that

[commonrail]

The thing that irks me the most is the overtime rates.
Recent thread on here about Thorntons.
My mate worked there,before DHL had anything to do with it…and he earn’t a small fortune at it.
Still banging the hours in,and still nighting out…but earning serious wonga.
He quit,as soon as DHL took over.

[grumpy_dad]

xpc91:
As a young non-truck driver, I thought I’d chip in here…

I’m 26 and would love to drive a truck. Driving with my own company, music and seeing new places sounds fantastic. What stops me is:

-Self-driving trucks being talked about so often. These will no doubt be here before I’m 68, so it wouldn’t be a job for life. Few jobs are for life, but this one seems to have a massive shake-up on the way. There will always need to be drivers, but realistically how many? This is the main stopping point for me.

-Money. I’m only on £25k a year- less than what a lot of HGV1 jobs appear to pay. However I work flexitime and only have to do 37.5 hours a week to achieve that. If I do manage to fall asleep at my desk doing such short hours, its not going to kill anyone.

-Family. I barely see my girlfriend as it is as I work Mon-Fri but she works all sorts of shifts. If I was away all week or exhausted after working a 15 hour shift, I’d see her even less.

-Employers. We have in-house drivers at work who are all brilliant- I’m going to assume my work are very good to drive for. But external drivers for the most part seem to moan about everything and come across almost depressed- always very friendly, but never have a good word to say about the job. The bureaucracy and micro-management so many employers put on you guys is frankly insulting.

-As said in another post, authorities. You can’t drive here. You can’t park there. You’ve driven for 10 minutes more than your time. It looks like an impossible job, and with LEZ being the future of cities, its only going to get worse. And then theres outwith the cities- when my Seat barely fits down my street because of parked cars, what chance does a tipper going to the new housing development at the end of the road have?

The public- what do so many car drivers not understand about lorrys and roundabouts? They straddle both lanes because they need both lanes, not for the fun of it. Yet Mary in her Corrolla must squeeze into the half lane remaining because its her lane and how dare the lorry delivering her dinner for the following week need more space. Then there is dodgy lane changes on the motorway, going by a lorry, pulling back infront and jamming on the breaks. I could go on but you guys know it far better than I do.

I briefly thought about trying to become a planner, but after a few hours in a transport office and an interview with one of the managers. I decided it wasn’t for me. Planners should be salespeople and little more- selling the space on the truck. The planning should be left to the ones driving the trucks who know what they are actually talking about. And as for their manager- smug didn’t even cover it.

Hats off to you all- it sounds like an amazing job until you drill down into it and realise everyone just wants to make your life difficult!

Opposite end of the spectrum

I’m almost twice your age and have been a driver for 20 years or so, not as long as some but more than others. I have paid for my licences and training myself my ADR I’ve paid for twice, for the last 12 - 13 years I’ve been on European haulage which includes Scandinavia, East Europe and the Balkans, my knowledge and experience and time away from home which can be anything from 3 - 5 weeks is compensated with approx £26k pa, and if you balance that against annual inflation I’m actually on less now than I was 10 years ago.
I have two kids a daughter of 18 and son 15 which I haven’t seen grow up, and no I’m not divorced.
I’ve thought about being a planner and have had several interviews, coming away having been told that while I have the qualities and experience of being a driver in my favour, I don’t hold the relevant office environment experience and to gain that I’d have to drop to £17k pa and become a trainee, it’s a joke.
The haulage industry has been over run with undercutting opposition from domestic runs to international, reducing the available pay to drivers, freedom of movement for EU workers allowing half arsed poorly trained EE drivers fill the underpaid seats has seen companies fail to increase wages because they see it as drivers are 10 a penny.

[eagerbeaver]

^^^^ Stop talking sense man. It’s Saturday am on TNUK.

You should be talking ■■■■■■■■

[rjan]

Jimmy McNulty:

Neverstress:
Why are hauliers not offering £15-20 an hour

Because if you do the maths, the vast majority cannot afford to pay that

The only possible explanation for that is because there are too many hauliers in the market undercutting one another. It will be in drivers’ favour if or when more haulage firms begin to go bust, because monopolies can determine market prices rather than being constrained by them.

That’s what trade unions used to do to employers in the past - pick winners with the best pay and conditions, and bankrupt the others with unaffordable wage demands and industrial action, in order to consolidate the marketplace and ensure that the remaining employers were able to afford decent wages and future increases (and the high road employers were happy with this, because it steadied their market, assured their customer base, and relieved them of low-road competitors paying less).

Every time you hear a right-wing politician talking about “improving competition”, “removing barriers to entry”, “free trade”, the “right to start a business”, and so on, bear in mind that the underlying agenda behind these is to attack workers, to create more roles for small-time bosses in the market (driving their pay and bargaining power up), to create more opportunities for capital investment (by those who possess capital and want unearned income from it), and to drive down wages and job security.

In the realms of the public sector (which often acts like a consolidated firm in a consolidated market) which are currently undergoing this process, like education, you see teachers and lecturers pay being forced down, managers and owners pay being forced up, and the influx of a myriad of shyster owners and investors and corrupt “charities”. So too with Royal Mail, you see the same effect. So too with doctors and dentists, although that has been happening for some time.

It won’t be until workers get wise and start to rebel against these political policies that anything much will change.

[simcor]

commonrail:
The thing that irks me the most is the overtime rates.
Recent thread on here about Thorntons.
My mate worked there,before DHL had anything to do with it…and he earn’t a small fortune at it.
Still banging the hours in,and still nighting out…but earning serious wonga.
He quit,as soon as DHL took over.

Quite correct when Thorntons did their own transport the drivers did earn a lot more.

But what you don’t point out is how close Thorntons were to bankruptcy and would likely have closed down for good and ceased trading putting a lot of people out of work had they continued as they were.

DHL took over the transport and warehouse side on site to save Thorntons money and I believe in the first few years saved them something like 5 million on the transport side, I remember reading about how much money they had saved Thorntons in an article somewhere that helped them continue trading.

I’m not saying DHL are perfect but they have helped keep people employed.

Any business looks to find ways to streamline costs to make it more profitable when needs must.

[rjan]

Richard8:
It is an amazing job it’s the idiots that you have to work with that’s the problem and by that I mean other road users , RDC staff , Planners ect. Everyone is under such pressure to get pallet A to site X by a certain time that no one gives a monkeys about the poor drivers home life/ work balance.
Employers see the 90 hours driving limits as targets and if you don’t use your 15s up you have wasted an oppertunity to utilise the truck, the whole industry needs to be reviewed from wages, working conditions to tacho hours and regs

The answer, then, is to ensure that the pressure for a work/life balance is a greater pressure than all the other pressures. Usually this is achieved by stiff overtime rates, so that there is flexibility to keep the show on the road when required, but with proper compensation to the worker for the loss of home life and an encouragement for the employer (in monetary terms which they best understand) not to rely on it routinely because of its expense.

There is nothing to prevent, for example, minimum wage laws being amended to include minimum overtime rates, rather than a flat rate. That will benefit workers directly (except maybe those who counter-intuitively prefer to work long hours for low pay), and indirectly by creating pressure for employers to hire more workers (reducing the pool of unemployed or under-employed who compete down wages for those in employment). Many other countries in the world have such policies, including mainland Europe and I believe many states in the USA.

The current “full-employment” agenda of the Tory party achieves the opposite. By attacking social security, and by forcing workers into crap jobs, they have reduced unemployment by forcing the unemployed to compete with the employed by undercutting them, which is why wages aren’t rising, and workers don’t feel better, even though the official statistics say unemployment is low.

[tachograph]

It’s a story in the Sun about recruitment agency bosses saying they’re not able to recruit enough drivers for the pre Christmas season.

The Sun newspaper and recruitment agencies … now there’s a combination everyone would want to take seriously

[rjan]

simcor:
I’m not saying DHL are perfect but they have helped keep people employed.

But only on poorer pay and conditions. There is always employment available at lower pay and conditions than the current norm, because you can always get a job by working for less and undermining someone else’s job. But if you keep doing it, and others respond in kind by doing the same to you, eventually you’ll all be getting less in wages than you need to eat, let alone achieve a decent standard of living.

Sometimes it can be better to let a firm go bust, because by causing an employer to forfeit capital and reducing the number of employers in the market, you create market discipline, you create job opportunities for yourself in other firms (when they take people on to soak up the demand the bankrupt firm used to meet), and by consolidating the marketplace and eliminating competition you reduce the possibility of attacks on your wages in future.

Any business looks to find ways to streamline costs to make it more profitable when needs must.

And in a competitive market, the need will always be present.

[jimmy_mcnulty]

Rjan:

Jimmy McNulty:

Neverstress:
Why are hauliers not offering £15-20 an hour

Because if you do the maths, the vast majority cannot afford to pay that

The only possible explanation for that is because there are too many hauliers in the market undercutting one another. It will be in drivers’ favour if or when more haulage firms begin to go bust, because monopolies can determine market prices rather than being constrained by them.

That’s what trade unions used to do to employers in the past - pick winners with the best pay and conditions, and bankrupt the others with unaffordable wage demands and industrial action, in order to consolidate the marketplace and ensure that the remaining employers were able to afford decent wages and future increases (and the high road employers were happy with this, because it steadied their market, assured their customer base, and relieved them of low-road competitors paying less).

Every time you hear a right-wing politician talking about “improving competition”, “removing barriers to entry”, “free trade”, the “right to start a business”, and so on, bear in mind that the underlying agenda behind these is to attack workers, to create more roles for small-time bosses in the market (driving their pay and bargaining power up), to create more opportunities for capital investment (by those who possess capital and want unearned income from it), and to drive down wages and job security.

In the realms of the public sector (which often acts like a consolidated firm in a consolidated market) which are currently undergoing this process, like education, you see teachers and lecturers pay being forced down, managers and owners pay being forced up, and the influx of a myriad of shyster owners and investors and corrupt “charities”. So too with Royal Mail, you see the same effect. So too with doctors and dentists, although that has been happening for some time.

It won’t be until workers get wise and start to rebel against these political policies that anything much will change.

Think its further up the food chain where the consumer demand for lower and lower prices drives down prices throughout.

Whilst I would agree there must be too many hauliers in certain sectors of haulage, there are also gaps in others that will become more of an issue in time, particularly the one man band owner driver and small haulier.

[carryfast]

carryfast-yeti:
if i was a young lad looking at becoming a ‘trucker’,my main concern would be working a 15 hour shift,9 hours off…then back behind the wheel again for another long shift.

^ This.Bearing in mind that there is a limited fixed rate in the job which means those hours result in a low hourly rate of pay and/or can’t even be reflected in the form of high over time payments.

Combined with almost factory levels of monitoring.A UK industry which is now mostly all about long hours doing relatively boring zb work.No job without ‘experience’.Leading on from a political environment which is hostile to road transport in which the object is to remove as many trucks and therefore job opportunities from the road as possible.In addition to race to the bottom foreign competition.

Why would anyone of any age prefer that than just looking for a job driving a bus on an out of town route or delivering/collecting cars for a local garage based on around 40 hours per week.If not hoping for a job driving a train.

[simcor]

Rjan:

simcor:
I’m not saying DHL are perfect but they have helped keep people employed.

But only on poorer pay and conditions. There is always employment available at lower pay and conditions than the current norm, because you can always get a job by working for less and undermining someone else’s job. But if you keep doing it, and others respond in kind by doing the same to you, eventually you’ll all be getting less in wages than you need to eat, let alone achieve a decent standard of living.

Sometimes it can be better to let a firm go bust, because by causing an employer to forfeit capital and reducing the number of employers in the market, you create market discipline, you create job opportunities for yourself in other firms (when they take people on to soak up the demand the bankrupt firm used to meet), and by consolidating the marketplace and eliminating competition you reduce the possibility of attacks on your wages in future.

Any business looks to find ways to streamline costs to make it more profitable when needs must.

And in a competitive market, the need will always be present.

Not too mention there were I believe 5 different companies tendering for it at the time and DHL got the tender.

It’s a fact of life that businesses have to restructure at times of need and cut costs wherever they can, something has to give.

So it would have been better to let an over 100 year old business cease trading and make a lot of people unemployed than cutting costs wherever needed?

Just the same as MG Rover was allowed to go bust at the time loosing 6000 jobs and far wider job loses to suppliers etc.

The same goes for all the businesses that have gone bust because the government didn’t step in and bail them out, but it’s OK if your a bank then the government will step in bail you out to the tune of billions most likely.

When business go bust it has far wider consequences than just it’s employees at that company.

I’m sure Ferrero since acquiring Thornton’s have streamlined the business to make it more profitable. But again it keeps people employed.

[stanley_knife]

TiredAndEmotional:
Can you see the contradiction in your statement there? If it WAS a decent agency then they should have told those surplus drivers they couldn’t provide enough work and they should look elsewhere but being a typical agency they want people on hand just in case they have work come on. Three days a week long after the January downturn? They’re [zb] crap not decent!

His idea of a decent agency is one that has good quality work, doesn’t force you down the Umbrella or Ltd route but accepts paye, pays holidays, allows you to float around or stay on the same job as is your wish, etc. He’s been with them a few years and has probably been too loyal, but that’s his nature, and whilst the agency haven’t lost any work they haven’t got rid of drivers either. After 30 years of driving he’s had enough and was probably looking for a way out anyway - and one has dropped right into his lap.

He doesn’t blame the agency for this past year, he blames the industry for what it has become.

[grumpyken52]

TiredAndEmotional:

Stanley Knife:

Quinny:
Can’t blame him for knocking it on the head though. I reckon he is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

He’s in his late fifties working for a decent agency. He’s been told frequently throughout the year that there isn’t the volume of work to satisfy all on their books.

Can you see the contradiction in your statement there? If it WAS a decent agency then they should have told those surplus drivers they couldn’t provide enough work and they should look elsewhere but being a typical agency they want people on hand just in case they have work come on. Three days a week long after the January downturn? They’re [zb] crap not decent!

There are a couple of agencies out there that actually pay a decent hourly rate and will not take on work where drivers are abused or treated like crap for minimum rates .
Not many about but there are a few .

Sent from my SM-G903F using Tapatalk

[stanley_knife]

Jimmy McNulty:
Think its further up the food chain where the consumer demand for lower and lower prices drives down prices throughout.

Always seems to arise from self-centred traits;

I deserve a decent pay rise because I’m worth it but you can’t have one because it will affect my standard of living.

[andrewg]

eagerbeaver:

Richard8:
I have not driven in four years but I often get the urge to do the odd shift as I now work a 37.5 hour working week it feels strange (but good) to have my weekends free, there’s something about driving that’s in my blood from going out with my dad as a young boy but i bet that being stuck in an RDC for 4 or more hours would cure my hankering.

You are bang on with that comment Richard. I am also a lorry drivers son and I was just about to pack in lorry driving after only 3.5 years

General haulage/RDC’s had just about finished me off, but I managed to get a start on a really good job and now I almost enjoy driving the wagon

General happened to be and still is my favourite work but RDC’s, just by what i read on this very forum alone seems extremely depressing work. Security/ FLT cabbages along with the naziesque warehouse mongs, keys being handed in, being confined to a room and having to sit on a plastic chair for hours on end would i imagine be enough to do anyones head in if it was a regular occurance…

[grumpyken52]

My thoughts on why the industry is less appealing these days .
Wages , on paper some look attractive but if not hourly paid at a good rate then the hourly rate can end up barely above minimum wage .
Cost of training and little guarantee of work at the end of it .
Management. Very few of the people you deal with have any training or qualifications in the transport industry and most have no management or man management qualifications, all have no recent driving experience.
Facilities, the facilities for drivers in the UK are in my opinion the worst in Europe .
Respect , truck drivers are treated as 2nd class citizens by most of the public .
Authorities, we are virtually the only industry with our own policing authority .
Regulations , the biggest thing catching drivers out and this is what causes even experienced drivers the most problems . Time the rule book was torn up and rewritten to simplify it and ONE set of rules to run to .

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[andrewg]

grumpyken52:
Time the rule book was torn up and rewritten to simplify it and ONE set of rules to run to .

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^
This all day long…
I’d actually prefer it if the rule book was just torn up …end of…

Tongue in cheek before i get jumped on…