One of my pet hates over the years.
Agencies have always been the ruination of the transport industry, they supply temporary drivers who have no security for lower pay than the full time employed drivers whilst charging each company higher hourly rates. To an agency a driver is just a commodity, something to use when it is needed, something they have no need to care about. The companies each agency supplies takes the drivers they supply at higher rates because they can then just not bother when the work load drops off, they have no legal requirements to supply benefits or job security, no insurance either. The problem is the drivers go to them in the first place. If they couldn’t get drivers to con they would be out of business in weeks. Drivers need to get together and refuse to work for them, I know it would be hard at first but if all those agency drivers got together and went to the companies such agencies supplied and offered their services as freelance drivers in a group they could cut the disgusting rates that agencies charge those companies and at the same time increase their own hourly wages. Agencies started to increase in the 70’s and started a downward spiral in drivers pay and conditions. If you stand your ground you will win over them, I know because I did so when I was made redundant from Fed Ex in 1994, I had some good mates at Tesco and was virtually promised a full time job at Tesco but had to go through an agency in order to get my foot in the door. I chose Park street personnel which had the largest contract but within a couple of weeks I saw how badly I was treated compared to some other drivers who went through ABC drivers agency, I applied with them and was told on the quiet by the transport manager at Tesco that Park street may cause trouble and he was right, I got phone calls in the middle of the night from the guy who owned the agency, he threatened me and told me I would never drive at Tesco again, I basically told him to make love elsewhere and if he called my house again I would personally find him and kick the s*** out of him even if he hid in his villa in the Med that us drivers had paid for. The next day I reported to Tesco as an ABC agency driver and was told that he had tried to get me banned, luckily Tesco knew I was a dam good driver and I remained working there for higher pay, holiday pay and sick pay until I did actually get taken on as a full time Tesco driver.
My point is that if you stand up to these thieving and money grabbing agencies you will come out on top, don’t let them intimidate you. Get agencies outlawed and make them pay.
2 things I’d like to see come in
Hourly rates and overtime rates/thresholds for each assignment MUST be confirmed in an e-mail to the worker prior to commencement. Over the phone not good enough.
Agencies should be subject to a strike system. Going over a certain amount of complaints to a regulatory body regarding not paying promised rates should result in automatic fines.
robthedog:
Agency’s are always going to be there when you’ve got clowns like this offering employment at these rates who in there right mind would work for this when agency’s are paying 33 percent more
that’s 90p less than what I get for class2 in same city 
The unemployment rate in Hampshire is currently 4.3%, the lowest since 1975. I doubt that they will be snowed under with applications.
Agency’s are sadly an element that will only expand over time in every manner of industry - the Government see them as a good thing in bringing down the unemployment figures. I don’t blame the man in the street for using them, even if it’s usually a paltry hourly rate because decent full time positions are on the decline. I hear a lot about people saying ‘if only people would stand together and not do these crap jobs, then the pay and conditions would get better’, the reality is many people don’t have a choice - if they did they wouldn’t take the job with low money etc.
As for unemployment figures: It’s always been a political point scoring exercise and is smoke and mirrors: The so called ‘Low’ figures you see don’t tend to factor in many people who are on various short term, part time, ad hoc jobs etc. You are constantly under threat of sanctions if you don’t do as advised by Job Centre staff such as sign up with agencies, don’t do it you’re sanctioned, agency offers you a short term, low paid position and you don’t do it, they tell the job centre, you’re sanctioned. Job centre tells you to go for an interview for a perm job that’s low paid and long/ unsociable hours and you don’t do it, sanctioned… and so on.
The Government don’t seem to be as bothered about how many people rely on supplement payments such as tax credits etc. to top up a crap income as they do about the unemployment figures.
As I say, the haulage industry is just one of many that have gone the agency route with scant regard to employees, they employ you from the neck down and want their pound of flesh… if you don’t play the game, there are many, many people waiting in a line to take over from you.
It’ll get worse in the future.
not so sure,rates seem to have gone up big time,been looking on indeed and total jobs,most jobs for class 1 are £13 to £16 pounds an hour,wasn’t like that last year and it’s not just for the run up to Christmas,to pay that kind of hourly rate what are haulage bosses paying the agencies,and if they can pay that why not pay that to the drivers instead of the agencies,must be a tax thing
Pat Hasler:
One of my pet hates over the years.
Agencies have always been the ruination of the transport industry, they supply temporary drivers who have no security for lower pay than the full time employed drivers whilst charging each company higher hourly rates.
Like I said, in almost quarter of a century there is just one place out of the dozens of agency clients I’ve been to where that has been the case for me and every other driver working at the agencies I’ve worked at.
Of course agencies charge more, they’re in business to make money and they have significant costs to pay for to run the agency. Quite clearly you’ve never run a city centre office in the UK. The entire profit from 4 or 5 drivers is likely to be used just to pay the business rates on the office. They also have to pay the drivers the following week even though it may be a month later when they get paid from the client.
If agencies disappeared then sure, haulage companies would hire more drivers but they’d pay them less because of the rate of utilisation due to the fact they don’t have enough work all year round to make full use of the drivers they have.
God knows how much Agency’s have to pay out in damage fees
tango boy:
God knows how much Agency’s have to pay out in damage fees
Maybe it varies depending on the enveloping weight 
truckman020:
not so sure,rates seem to have gone up big time,been looking on indeed and total jobs,most jobs for class 1 are £13 to £16 pounds an hour,wasn’t like that last year and it’s not just for the run up to Christmas,to pay that kind of hourly rate what are haulage bosses paying the agencies,and if they can pay that why not pay that to the drivers instead of the agencies,must be a tax thing
It’s not the same.
Employers can pay a premium to agency drivers because they don’t cost them anything outside the hours they work. No NI contributions, no pension contributions, no holiday pay, no staff benefits, duty of care like paid time off for bereavement, no/less ongoing training, etc. etc. and when it’s quiet, they can bin them off whereas they still have to pay the full timers a full weeks wage.
robroy:
Rjan:
…I do agree with a lot of what you say, but the immigrant analogy is a different thing, it’s a syptom of a situation,.where as agencies are a part cause of a situation.
I’ve never really jumped on the bandwagon of thinking that immigrants keep wages down anyway, there have always been drivers in this game who will work for certain rates and conditions if another won’t, and immigrant drivers at my place work for the same (admittedlly not great) rate that I’m on anyway.Anyway to get back on topic, Agencies are a different matter for the reasons I’ve already stated.
I’m not sure agencies are anything but symptomatic of the problem, which is the a priori freedom of employers to engage workers in a particular undesirable fashion or at unjustifiably low rates. Many agencies are one-man-band affairs, and none of them are bigger than the employers they cater for - in structural terms they are really just the recruitment arms and shell companies of the employers.
Failing to acknowledge that it is the legal dysregulation of the employers, and failure to recognise that the power and initiative on bad employment practices rests with employers, simply leads to people blaming the wrong people, or attacking the system in the wrong place.
The judges might have declared that the employers are not (generally) the legal employers of agency workers, and right-wing lawmakers might have spent decades doing nothing about the erosion of employment rights - but that doesn’t change the economic reality, in which we all know exactly who the employers are, and we all know that decades of right-wing governments have been assailing the laws which regulate them.
However badly agencies behave, they are in the end merely the messengers for the employers - the big employers could put an agency out of business overnight simply by blacklisting them for any bad behaviour towards workers, whereas the agencies can’t put the big employers out of business (because the big employers would just set up another agency, run by their own managers, or hire direct, if the agencies tried to do that). Even when the employers are not telling agencies to behave badly, they are allowing them to do so either as a cost-saving measure or as a means of establishing how far the workforce can be pushed.
If you don’t accept that the root of all problems is the behaviour and policy of the employing class, rather than other workers or recruitment intermediaries, then you’re going to be hidebound in doing anything about it.
At worst, if agencies were completely outlawed, then the first thing the employers would do would be to start spinning off small satellite haulage firms (either capitalised with a loan from the core firm, or more likely with their premises and equipment loaned directly to them from the core). They would then hire workers directly to provide services to the core firm. These satellite firms would not meet the criteria of an “employment agency” which was outlawed. Any sign of trouble, they end the contract with the satellite firm and let it go bankrupt, and let the other satellites take up the slack. And all the time, they spin off new satellite firms under new names, and trawl for workers willing to accept less than the going rate or willing to put up with the worst treatment.
This partly resembles the current marketplace anyway, with it’s proliferation of tiny, third-rate hauliers, all begging for scraps thrown from the table of larger firms or freight networks. But the very existence of these small firms represents a huge ballast in the marketplace against the ability of workers to strike for better pay, ready to be drafted in to keep goods moving for the “customers” (i.e. against the core employers, against whom secondary picketing is legally prohibited).
In this way, by attacking the agencies which are symptomatic of the initiative that employers hold, you just leave them free to deploy their initiative in another way to assault workers, because the real employing organisation remains at the centre of the web, untouched.
btw I did say my question was rhetoric… but cheers for answering it anyway.
Why, there’s nothing I like more than to give answers to rhetorical questions! 
Pat Hasler:
Drivers need to get together and refuse to work for them,
In a market characterised by an over-supply of drivers, and appalling social security, how can drivers simply get together and refuse to work? If drivers who are out of work refused to work for agencies, then the surplus drivers would probably be unemployed and facing penury.
I know it would be hard at first but if all those agency drivers got together and went to the companies such agencies supplied and offered their services as freelance drivers in a group they could cut the disgusting rates that agencies charge those companies and at the same time increase their own hourly wages.
And why would the employers choose to deal with this self-organised, self-confident freelance bloc? (Unless they had to.) Those in the bloc would still have to find a way of distributing a limited amount of work amongst a relative excess of drivers - there would have to be an overtime ban, for example, and an end to 80 hour weeks, to ensure that there was work available for every member.
And if the employers had to pay the freelance bloc the same (or more) as their existing employees, they’d just stick with the existing drivers they had. Most of the jobs in this industry, all the hiring and firing, just reflects the turnover of staff whilst the employers drive down pay and conditions, and high-paying firms are undermined or replaced by lower-paying firms. Every time you hear about a firm “winning a contract”, what that means is that a firm which paid better money to workers, has just been undermined and replaced by a firm that pays less.
robroy:
Not so much killing this industry more like gone a long way to totally [zb] ing it mate.If these parasite cream off middle men [zb] shysters did not exist we would all be on a decent wage, or at least a better rate.
It’s a rhetoric question but why are so many companies willing to pay max rates to an agency, but minimal rates direct to a direct driver.(…I know the answer btw.)
Surely it would be more prudent to get a group of good, able competent and loyal drivers by looking after them with good t.s and c.s and paying them a proper wage, (those methods btw actually create those type of drivers,… news to many firms) than to get any Tom ■■■■ or Harry off the street, a lot of whom are new or inexperienced or ■■■■ poor (or all 3) drivers anyway, supplied by these wonkers.
I fully realise there are a vast amount of good agency drivers…fact.
I also fully understand that unfortunately many of these are used and abused by these agencies on a weekly basis as a matter of course, and I would go as far as to say that those type are in the majority.
So the answer to your question imo mate is… YES !
havent you got it yet after all the years robroy
the bosses dont need to look after there drivers anymore as there is an endless supply of nerds from the eu that are flooding the industry and very happy with 9 quid an hour as its worth upto 5 times there pay they would get back home
so why would any firm need to up the pay or condtions for our own brit drivers ?
years ago when trucks were manual and you needed at least half a brain to be a driver a firm would value them as it was a bit of a skill, nowaday with the sat navs and auto boxes well any fool can drive them even women can manage the job these days
so why would a boss need to value any trucker ? there 2 a penny mate
commonrail:
10 is a bit poor…but i’d go for 12
Is that a " straight through," rate, £12 per hour?
Not time and a bit more after 40 hours?
Yeah…straight through
60 x 12
Plus a oner for nights out…would do for me.
Mon-fri days…of course.
haydn54:
I’m new to the HGV industry and my general observation is agencies appear to be paying extremely low wages for work undertaken, your views please
I’ve been in it for a few years now and there are just too many cowboy agencies in the business right now. Too many of them are placing what look like job ads on jobs portals and when you follow them up they are just agency leads, looking to get more drivers on the books. Some of them will promise you ongoing work but they don’t have it, or if they do, it’s reserved for their “favourite” drivers. Or they lie to you about the nature of a job to get you to do something you wouldn’t otherwise, or to turn down someone else’s work for theirs. There are one or two good operators in that business in each area and the rest are chancers and cowboys.