ETS:
Rjan:
Do you still support more working hours rather than higher hourly rates, though?
We’ve reached this point because every time the bosses bend us over on hourly rates, some seem to respond by demanding more hours of being bent over, rather than the dignity of standing up straight with an adequate hourly rate.
I never said I support more hours, regarding this very topic I was lamenting the fact that you can’t extend your weekly driving hours one week at the expense of the next one like reducing your weekly rest one week doesn’t mean you’ll do more hours/shifts overall, only that you’ll have to do less hours/shifts the week after.
Agreed on that point.
You’ll never have adequate hourly rates as long as drivers’ time is wasted waiting in a queue to be loaded/unloaded or walking around searching for that vague address 20 times a day. Look at some of the posts here, people complaining about 12/15 hour shifts while they can’t even come close to 45 hours driven in a week. Low productivity = low wages. You can’t spend 50% of your time doing nothing and demand £20 per hour none the less. Well you can but not as a driver
But part of the reason why the bosses will waste your time in queues, is because you will tolerate long hours and low rates whilst doing it.
When waiting causes howls of anguish in the payroll department, suddenly there is impetus to invest in better (or more) equipment and staff, to eliminate unreasonable waits and get work done like clockwork. We then suddenly acquire the productivity which justifies the levels to which our wages have been forced.
One way is to create artificial shortage by racking up training costs / increase medical criteria / add some other arbitrary requirements, other than that it’s a dying profession and if rates were to go higher this would only serve as a further incentive to speed up the implementation of autonomous trucks
That’s great. Once we have re-secured redundancy terms and pensions in our work, that means a large payout or early retirement.
The reality, as I’ve talked about on other occasions, is that autonomy on British roads is some way off.
But do you really want to spend your days down in the dirt, buying your way into a job that doesn’t really need doing? If the bosses can automate your job, they’ll generally treat you like dirt and drive your pay to nothing anyway, and they’ll often automate anyway in the end, because you’re doing nothing more than an inanimate machine can do.
When machines can do almost everything, then workers will either have to move to doing what machines can’t do (such as designing themselves, maintaining themselves, and applying themselves to a human purpose), or ensure that they have access to the fruits of the machine which it produces for free.
This is why the Labour party is talking about forcing up wages whilst forcing down working hours, and investigating a universal basic income, to ensure that any mechanisation and automation which does occur is captured as a benefit to workers, rather than being captured by bosses as super-profits and causing higher unemployment and competition for fewer jobs with unnecessarily long hours.
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…keep them up, you’re comedy gold mate. 