Pat Hasler:
Why do you all seem to register with agencies… ?
A lot of the local transport companies near me pay around £7.00 per hour compared to £9.00 per hour on the agency. You get time-and-a-half after 8 hours, time-and-a-half on Saturdays, double-time on Sundays and Bank Holidays, triple-time on Boxing Day and New Year, and quadruple-time on Christmas Day (collected 26 pallets of mushrooms from Holland last Christmas and Boxing Day and earned just over £800 for two days work - it were great, absolutely nothing on the roads !).
Sometimes, you get jobs that last 3-4 hours but you get paid for a minimum of 8 hours. Other times you turn up for a job and its been cancelled, you go home and still get 8 hours pay. You can also pick and choose where you want to work, or if you want a day-off you take one !
Most agencies provide holiday pay, free uniforms, free boots, better night-out rates, and so on.
I’ve worked for agencies for most of the 15 years I’ve been driving. You get treated like a leper by some full-time drivers, which is understandable when you consider that a fair proportion of agency drivers are worse than useless. One of the companies I work for are beginning to employ agency drivers only, they’re getting shut of their own full-time drivers because they’re more hassle.
For example, if a company has an increase in business they employ more drivers. If they begin to haemorrage business, they can shed agency drivers with no cost to themselves, whereas the company has both a legal and moral obligation to its full-time drivers.
Most full-time drivers will tell you that agency drivers are always damaging vehicles and loads. And full-time drivers don’t…? I’ve known so-called professional full-time drivers damage vehicles and blame it on agency drivers.
Anyway, I get great satisfaction from it because I’m not stuck in the same job day after day, week after week. I earn a better wage than most full-time drivers for less work. I’ve also gained a great deal of experience - enabling me to turn my hand to almost anything !
I’m going to get slated for these comments but I couldn’t really give a monkey’s ! I used to do a lot of work for Salvesens in Evesham and Droitwich. A lot of the full-time drivers at these depots used to say they’d never work for an agency. When the depots closed, a lot of these drivers went to work for the agencies - the word “hypocrites” springs to mind !!!
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