mike68:
the management don’t seem to care brand new units and trailers wrecked within weeks from new.
Well how amazing is that meanwhile in other news, people in suits ■■■■ other peoples money up the wall like its going out of fashion now who’s the bigger fool the one who cares not a jot or the one funding such negligence.
My favourite is when some plonker damages someone’s allocated vehicle and wanders off into the sunset without a word being said to them, no repercussions whatsoever, you couldn’t make it up.
kcrussell25:
With no offense intended I don’t think some on here realise how poor employment opportunities are these days. Where older drivers say wages are poor compared to the past for many younger people its more than they can dream of.
Except on the very best contracts with at least some remnants of unionisation, where the incumbents have managed to defend pay and conditions, which new drivers won’t get anywhere near, I wouldn’t say this is true about wages. Most firms’ hourly rates are pedestrian, comparable to almost any other poorly paid occupation, and the industry is much more casualised than the norm.
Unless a young person is being frank with themselves, and saying “yes, I want to work long hours in a solitary job, I want to work 80 hour weeks, I want to get up at radically different times every day, and I want to say goodbye to any social or family life or any opportunity to spend and enjoy the extra money I’m earning, and I want to be treated like ■■■■ most of the time”, then the conditions of work will be unacceptable for many at virtually any rate of pay, never mind the actual rates of pay.
Winseer:
How many companies with fleets run some kind of a “Footworkers to Drivers” programme?
“Warehouse to Wheels” they call it where I work.:
They do that where I work. Not from some altruistic reasoning but rather as some “way forward” that a suit at head office has decided is his pet project.
The latest candidate is four weeks in from passing his test and is quite frankly appalling. He’s still not deemed safe enough to be unleashed on the public alone so consequently our traffic office is wringing its hands in despair at having to pay two wages for one vehicle to do a days work. Of course sooner or later they’re gonna have to bite the bullet and hope that he doesn’t kill a headline causing amount of members of the public.
The problem is that the personality profile of many good footworkers, the kind who would likely benefit from the favour of management and put on a driving course, is not necessarily suited to the responsibility of driving. The sort who work physically hard and coordinate themselves well within a team, are not necessarily the sort who like to sit still doing predominantly mental work, and who make good independent decisions.
The sort who are capable of both tend to become supervisors in a footwork context, and by time you’re on track to be a supervisor (or actually are one), salaries and especially conditions of work tend to be better and have better future potential, so the idea of changing track and becoming a driver (mostly a career dead-end where market-wide conditions are appalling) would be absurd - and a company that already has good supervisors in the warehouse probably doesn’t want to put them on the road and have to backfill their roles.
Another aspect of the problem is also that companies willing to pay for driver training are usually the most desperate - because if they weren’t, they’d just hire an experienced (or at least, newly qualified) driver outright. They then find that they face the same general problem of poor performance - except that, by hiring a footworker with no prior experience, the difficulties that cause many experienced drivers to walk off the job or avoid the employer entirely, instead cause the footworker to muddle through into calamity.
Or, if they actually turn out to have a good driver (obviously not the case here), he’ll leave in a short time for the better employers which don’t have to train their own drivers - so the worst employers will haemorrhage cash subsidising the training of the drivers who eventually end up working for the better employers. I’ve certainly seen this happen in other contexts, where employers think they’ve devised a fiendish scheme to avoid offering the market rate pay and conditions to experienced workers, and all they do is become a training centre for the better employers, as well as being a reservoir of the worst trainees who are so bad that they cannot leave for anything better.
mike68:
I will say one thing about the mishaps I witness, they are a never ending source of entertainment, we do £500,000 a year on damage at my depot so entertainment is never far away, the management don’t seem to care brand new units and trailers wrecked within weeks from new.
Perhaps they are actually the realists, and therefore accept £0.5m a year in damage as the cost of doing business in the way they choose to do it.
The ones who obsess about damage probably just end up spending more money trying to avoid it - they end up paying for trainers and extensive inductions and driving tests, and the associated paperwork and management effort coordinating it all, and they end up hectoring good drivers who are of normal risk and who are taking normal care, but have just been unlucky on a particular day.
meanwhile in other news, people in suits ■■■■ other peoples money up the wall like its going out of fashion 
now who’s the bigger fool the one who cares not a jot or the one funding such negligence.