Article in The Spectator

UK PROFESSIONAL DRIVERS FORUMS THE UK PROFESSIONAL DRIVERS FORUM (INTERACTIVE)
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Just found this

Link to article spectator.co.uk/article/why … d-trucking

I became a trucker by default. It was the 1980s and I was working three jobs just to pay the mortgage and keep my family going. I was a milkman, a taxi driver and a barman and I was tired and bored. We were living in a town with a ferry link to France and so at the evenings in the pub I got to know the truckers who drove back and forward from the Continent. I’d listen to their stories and think what fun it sounded. I saved up, passed my test, bought an old DAF tractor unit, hired a trailer and began my life on the road.

Back then, it was just as weird and fun as I imagined it would be. On my very first trip, I met a one-legged prostitute who worked the service area at Auxerre and a Scottish driver who introduced me to the Congolese cocktail lumumba (brandy and chocolate milk). I reloaded with oranges from Valencia and was promised a healthy bonus for delivery within 36 hours, which I easily accomplished. I got paid and started again. I loved every minute.

Progressively, though, the sense of adventure left the job. The days of Smokey and the Bandit, CB pseudonyms, wallets on chains, camaraderie, red diesel and mirror sunglasses gave way to a joyless efficiency. What had been a band of happy, freedom-loving truckers became a giant web of just-in-time delivery vehicles circulating throughout Europe, keeping the factories, assembly plants and food stores stocked.

If you’re looking to explain the shortage of HGV drivers in this country, and across many others in Europe, one significant reason is simply that the job is both less lucrative and less fun. As well as the pay being terrible, there’s no longer any sense of comradeship; of getting one over on the authorities. Everything is computerised. A driver’s hours are rigorously checked and it’s common for us to be fined and dismissed for any contravention of the rules.

What is there now to entice a young person into the trucking industry? It was once a way of being free and seeing the world. But for all the talk of serious salaries and golden hellos from the desperate supermarket chains, the reality is a salary of £12-15 an hour and a life spent sitting in endless traffic jams, eating junk food and only seeing and interacting with people who dislike you. You spend your leisure time in motorway service areas, knowing that you’re in a job with no promotional prospects. You work on bank holidays and at weekends, all the while spied on via satnav and in-cab cameras, by some mean-minded adolescent back in the office who couldn’t park an HGV if their life depended on it.

Brits like me began to abandon trucking a long time ago. But when we belonged to the EU, the shortfall in drivers was concealed by the readily available east European workforce. Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovaks and Czechs all appeared just as they were needed, willing to take on zero-hours contracts and happy with the minimum wage, which to them was a huge hike relative to what they were able to make back home.

Then the European migrants left because of Covid and Brexit. Armed with their experience and qualifications gained in the UK, they’ve been able to find better jobs at home, and so no doubt they’ll stay there.

I’m not sure what I’d suggest to entice more young British people to become truckers, but I will say that the latest plans are insane.

It has recently been announced that anyone with a car licence can train and test directly for a Class 1 ticket without going up through the ranks: small lorry, big lorry, 44-ton articulated truck. This can only end in carnage. If you’re driving a big-wheeler you have to think ahead all the time. The concentration needed is huge and the potential hazards are numerous. Even when parked up, you must be on your guard for fear your trailer is slashed open, the load stolen and the diesel siphoned out. I’ve known HGV drivers who were gassed like badgers in the night, and thrown into a ditch by criminals who steal trucks to order. Enticing the inexperienced into the trucking industry is a very bad idea.

WRITTEN BY
Rodney Pittam

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An eloquent post script to a better time, with a lot of truth.

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Milkman,Taxi Driver,Barman starts off by somehow finding enough capital to satisfy the O licence requirements, gets a unit and hires a trailer and sets off across Europe ( obviously with no experience ).In the days when you could actually take your class 1 on a provisional car licence.
Ends by effectively saying that class 2 council driver in the day has to stay there because not ‘enough experience’ to take a drawbar outfit across Europe.
So how does that provide the freedom of the open road incentive for new inexperienced drivers that he’s rightly moaning about.
The only way they’ll get that ‘experience’ is to make that first run with no experience.
Obviously getting a class 1 from day 1 helps just as it did in his case and probably all those Polish drivers now taking advantage of Poland’s new found King of Europe’s road transport industry status.
Ironically it’s the experience issue, combined with the British political crusade to ■■■■■■■ the long haul road transport sector, which is the perfect storm in disincentivising the job for anyone wishing to enter it for the freedom of the open road.
Also bearing in mind that the pressures of big brother type tacho enforcement was a European thing which was brought here.

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An interesting article, and makes perfect sense. Why would a 21 year old go into the haulage industry, hard physical graft ( at times anyway). They can make money sitting on their arses at home. Even a career out of it.
When it comes to truck driving, big brother watches every move. Telematics system,cctv, Joe public armed with camera phones! Generally hated by everyone.
Bit like us bus drivers!

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RogerOut:
An interesting article, and makes perfect sense. Why would a 21 year old go into the haulage industry, hard physical graft ( at times anyway). They can make money sitting on their arses at home. Even a career out of it.
When it comes to truck driving, big brother watches every move. Telematics system,cctv, Joe public armed with camera phones! Generally hated by everyone.
Bit like us bus drivers!

Agree, interesting article, but a bit nostalgic and rose tinted glasses. All a bit - ‘When I were a lad’

Nevertheless, I would not recommend this industry to anyone, a 21 year old or otherwise.

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Everything changes, you don’t have to like it.
What you do is find your own niche in the industry where you can take out of the job what you enjoy as best you can, and where the downsides are minimal.

It isn’t all doom and gloom, but neither is everything wonderful either, you find the job in the sector that you enjoy with a company that values you and rewards you accordingly and you do your best to make the job a success.

If someone has the right temperament and ability to make a good long term career (for want of a better word) out of lorrying, then i would encourage any decent minded youngsters to seriously consider joining up.
The job has never been right for glass half empty people, it’s a way of life you either suit or you don’t.

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Juddian:
Everything changes, you don’t have to like it.
What you do is find your own niche

I’d guess that at least 80% of those wishing to enter the industry want to do it for the same reasons that he did the adventure and freedom of travelling to far flung destinations.
So it’s obviously not a ‘niche’ that all those are looking for or at least it shouldn’t be.It’s what we should expect the industry to be able to provide just as it’s now doing for East Euro based drivers.
But then he goes back to the hypocrisy that it was ok for ‘him’ to start out on that type of work obviously with no ‘experience’, but the same privilege that he was given should be denied to others.
They supposedly have to take all the zb to ‘get their experience’ which for most still won’t cut it they’ll just be type cast with it.Thereby reserving the best jobs for those like him.
As such what he wrote is part of the problem not the solution.Prospective new entrants have seen through the hypocritical agenda that he is clearly advocating.