Any foreign drivers working here employed by a foreign firm or a British firm should be protected from being paid low wages.
I know a lot of you may think you are hard done to, But just imagine working in the UK for 2 months on minimum wage, I don’t mean our minimum wage, I mean something that equates to £2.00 per hour.
It’s not the drivers fault, It’s unscrupulous employers and agencies.
If we are going to have a free for all, Then we must have a level playing field.
limeyphil:
Socketset:
Fergie47:
Do these trucks staying over here months at a time, get regular (4 weekly ?) checks and maintainance…?And that is exactly the question I was going to ask - who looks after these vehicles - surely they must be subjected to six weekly inspections and if not - well, it’s a little unsettling…
Many will be on full repair and maintenace contracts. They wouldn’t be in business for very long if they run the lorries into the ground.
So where is the R&M being done then ?
newmercman:
limeyphil:
Socketset:
Fergie47:
Do these trucks staying over here months at a time, get regular (4 weekly ?) checks and maintainance…?And that is exactly the question I was going to ask - who looks after these vehicles - surely they must be subjected to six weekly inspections and if not - well, it’s a little unsettling…
Many will be on full repair and maintenace contracts. They wouldn’t be in business for very long if they run the lorries into the ground.
So where is the R&M being done then ?
Any main dealer.
robinhood_1984:
Mike-C:
I think everyone is getting confused here, trailers coming out of ports are not “internal UK” work.Yes they are, their journey with the trailer begins and ends in the UK, so its an internal movement and a violation of cabotage if more than 3 such movements are carried out within a 7 day period and the truck/driver in question has not exited the country to reset the counter.
There is absolutely no difference between a Lithuanian truck being in the UK bobtail, collecting a Dutch owned trailer from Immingham docks with a load of machinery from Germany going to Manchester than a British truck collecting a load of food products from a warehouse in Ipswich and delivering them to Manchester, they’re both internal domestic movements and subject to exactly the same laws. The Lithuanian truck doesn’t have some special right to this work as the trailer has originated from outside the country, if he did not bring it himself then its no different to a British truck collecting a Chinese container from Felixstowe.
Perhaps you think it should be a free for all and British trucks/drivers should be in direct competition with trucks from any country in the EU who import their cheaper wage drivers to under cut ours, but I certainly do not and this is one of the reasons we have cabotage. The examples of ferry freight trailers are a violation of cabotage and vosa have indeed impounded violating vehicles. I’m not making anything up as I go along, I’ve witnessed this whole thing with my own eyes in the UK and if you think its a thing of the past that’s been stamped out since my departure, I think you are living in cloud cuckoo land.
No, its a bit more complicated than that. There multimodal transport, CMR stuff (of which i aint to clued up about). Not all of them movements count as a cabotage operation.
The point i’m making is that funny enough its you fellas who’ve left the country that is telling us that all our transport is going to be run by or taken over by Bulgarians/Romanians. That just aint going to happen, its scaremongering.
Someone said the other day on here the Romanians are paid 500 euro a month to work a truck in the UK, then someone else (ex pat in Romania) tells us they earn £35 a day plus expenses for working “inernational”?
There’s so much misinformation out there its unreal.
Oh and BTW, if i could flick a switch we’d be out the EU quicker than you could say it. Apply for a Visa or permit i say like everywhere else.
robinhood_1984:
kr79:
There was one thread on here a while back where an eastern euro firm wanted to employ estonian drivers as they would work even cheaper than there own drivers but couldnt get work permits as estonia wasnt in the eu…Must have been another country? Estonia has been in the EU since 2004, the same length of time as the other eastern European countries apart from Romania and Bulgaria. Plus Estonians are on higher wages (I think?) than most of the other 2004 entrants and its not uncommon for Estonian firms to be using non-Estonians because they’re a cheaper option. Estonians certainly work in western Europe and Scandinavia but I’d be very surprised if any were to be found driving Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak or whatever else trucks due to cost reasons.
Il have to look may have been an estonian firm employing russians. Was a while ago now.
Mike-C:
No, its a bit more complicated than that. There multimodal transport, CMR stuff (of which i aint to clued up about). Not all of them movements count as a cabotage operation.
The cabotage law states that they must bring a loaded trailer into the country and discharge the cargo in that country to “qualify” for 3 cabotage operations within 7 days before having to leave the country. If they enter the country bobtail, or with an empty trailer they are only allowed 1 cabotage movement to be carried out within 3 days of entering the country before having to ship out.
Each trailer they pull out of the docks subsequent to their arrival in the UK and tipping their first trailer is therefore a cabotage operation.
kr79:
robinhood_1984:
Il have to look may have been an estonian firm employing russians. Was a while ago now.
Thats very likely. Also there was that thread about the Swedish company that “flagged out” the fleet to Latvian plates and Latvian drivers and after a few years of that decided to get rid of the Latvians and replace them all with Filipinos who live in the trucks for several months at a time, in the same way the merchant navies of every western country are manned.
I’m very pro-European, I’m all for trade with any European country and sensible limited amounts of immigration where needed, but the current status quo is totally unpalatable for me and as the EU shows no signs of ever developing an approach that will stop or even slow down the economic and social destruction of western European sectors, such as in our case road transport then I’d fully support leaving the EU as the lesser of two evils, for what good it would now do, as the proverbial horse has long since bolted.
newmercman:
So where is the R&M being done then ?
When I was an OD, I usually got my Scania serviced in Scania Lübeck. Sometimes Scania Örebro, Helsingborg,Göteborg,Stockholm,Lyon and Beasain (Pais Vasco). When I sold it I got offered a job in company I was subbing for, driving a Swedish reg lorry for a Swedish wage. Now the boss was formerly the owner of a Volvo dealership and you only had to mention a problem on the lorry once and it would be put right asap. But since the regular drivers didn’t care, the worst case was when I turned up for work in Sweden, had a quick walkaround the lorry and the fridge, put on my overalls to change 4 tyres on the trailer and after taking the old ones off to see what’s going on under them drove to the Volvo dealership some 500m away to change all the brake discs/pads on the trailer as they were all cracked and blue. Nevermind all the other airbags/wires/lights etc I changed or had replaced (one lowride volvo needed a new clutch,nightheater and front airbags but the regular driver just went home and didn’t tell anyone and it sat for a week like that, 500m from the dealership). So I’d say my Scania that went back to Estonia once a year for the MOT was in a perfect mechanical condition compared to a Volvo that went home after every trip to Spain
kr79:
robinhood_1984:
kr79:
There was one thread on here a while back where an eastern euro firm wanted to employ estonian drivers as they would work even cheaper than there own drivers but couldnt get work permits as estonia wasnt in the eu…Must have been another country? Estonia has been in the EU since 2004, the same length of time as the other eastern European countries apart from Romania and Bulgaria. Plus Estonians are on higher wages (I think?) than most of the other 2004 entrants and its not uncommon for Estonian firms to be using non-Estonians because they’re a cheaper option. Estonians certainly work in western Europe and Scandinavia but I’d be very surprised if any were to be found driving Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak or whatever else trucks due to cost reasons.
Il have to look may have been an estonian firm employing russians. Was a while ago now.
I’d like to think that I wear no rose-colored glasses when it comes to my fellow countrymen (and I don’t claim they all know english like some people claim of their compatriates 
), but I haven’t seen or heard of any estonians being employed by any other eastern european haulage firm. We do have plenty of russians/ukrainians etc working in estonian trucks, just last week I painted an Actros that pulls containers out of the Port of Muuga to Russia (collision damage, no airbrushing and a million lights like on lorries pulling out of fxt though 
). I am pretty sure the driver is either a Russian citizen or holds a “grey” passport, meaning he has no citizenship but is allowed to live in Estonia.