I had a press release from a PR woman last night, asking if I would be prepared to help in some promotion of truk driving for women.
This is what she wrote to me
I’m reaching out to you as I sent over a press release for one of my clients about their #DrivingForChange campaign this morning, and I’d love to have a quick chat about potentially getting their editorial featured.
There’s been a lot in the news about equality for women, but we can’t help but feel that these campaigns are aimed mainly at women in showbiz, or with roles that put them ‘in the spotlight’. What we want to bring focus to is the average working woman. The women who are fighting for jobs in male-dominated industry, and failing because of gender stereotyping.
If you think that you could help us spread the word about this campaign, I’d love to discuss it with you. I have attached below the press release for the #DrivingForChange campaign, which is an extension of the M6toll’s HerGV campaign to encourage more women into haulage driving roles.
If you think that there’s a more pertinent member of your team or person I could contact about this, I’d appreciate if you could either pass this message on, or let me know so I can contact them directly.
In the meantime, have a wonderful day!
And this is my reply:
Quite honestly, the reason there a so few women driving trucks is because it is such a poor job.
Most women have more sense than to choose a career where long hours and great responsibility are combined with an hourly rate which is little more than the minimum wage, and other conditions such as roadside facilities are so poor. Why would any woman want to drive a truck when the shared overnight bathroom facilities are usually to be found behind the hedge of the lay-by where she has to park?
At a conference I attended last year, someone from the FTA let slip that younger people who had recently acquired LGV licences were leaving the industry in greater proportions than any other demographic. One reason for this might be that Argos pay their counter staff a higher rate than they pay their truck drivers.
Sadly, until the industry realises that they need a root and branch reform of drivers terms and conditions, including a drastic increase in the basic hourly rate, then they are going to be scratching around for staff. Even the supply of drunken Poles with revoked licences is drying up.
Sorry not to be more positive, but there’s a reason why driving jobs are difficult to fill.
In my opinion, we need a return to Trades Councils, which were introduced in the early years of the last century by that well-known lefty Winston Churchill. This is how he explained the need for them in 1909:
“It is a serious national evil that any class of His Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions. It was formerly supposed that the working of the laws of supply and demand would naturally regulate or eliminate that evil. The first clear division which we make on the question to-day is between healthy and unhealthy conditions of bargaining. That is the first broad division which we make in the general statement that the laws of supply and demand will ultimately produce a fair price. Where in the great staple trades in the country you have a powerful organisation on both sides, where you have responsible leaders able to bind their constituents to their decision, where that organisation is conjoint with an automatic scale of wages or arrangements for avoiding a deadlock by means of arbitration, there you have a healthy bargaining which increases the competitive power of the industry, enforces a progressive standard of life and the productive scale, and continually weaves capital and labour more closely together. But where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad, and the bad employer is undercut by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes the trade up as a second string, his feebleness and ignorance generally renders the worker an easy prey to the tyranny; of the masters and middle-men, only a step higher up the ladder than the worker, and held in the same relentless grip of forces—where those conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.”
We now have ‘progressive degeneration’ in the transport industry.
Do feel free to pass this information on to anyone you feel might benefit from it.
Best wishes
) after they’d been ignored by the Brit awards.
