MPs reject driver shortage, crap pay and conditions to blame

UK PROFESSIONAL DRIVERS FORUMS THE UK PROFESSIONAL DRIVERS FORUM (INTERACTIVE)
61

Let’s talk truthfully. If you are a decent driver, and are fitted with a reasonably decent brain, it’s not hard to find a reasonable HGV job. Luckily there are plenty rude, unhygienic, miserable knobs to make Mr or Mrs average look good. Add to this list the cocky drivers, the unreliable ones, and various other undesirable drivers, the chances tip in your favour.

Based upon the current obsession with undercutting the competition, lot’s of companies cannot improve the pay rate. What they can do however, is perhaps help you out if you need to finish early on a certain day for example. They might all of a sudden be able to manage to have 5 drivers off that week in August instead of the usual limit of 4.

You may end up with a better truck if that is important to you, or you may be first in line for overtime if you want it. Some complaints about you from a member of the public may progress no further than the initial phone call. A problem with your car could be rectified by the garage for you whilst you are out driving, and be ready to go when you finish your shift. That 18 tonner might be available next Saturday for you to help the wifes parents move.

It’s not all about the hourly wage. A decent well mannered person who doesn’t take the ■■■■ can benefit from all sorts of favours from the gaffer.

62

albion:
… Sometime I do wonder why I do more than I need because apparently all employers just want to have you over a barrel.

Rjan can waffle on about employers being united for all .he likes, but that’s theory versus reality. I gave up chasing work years ago and now it either comes to me or it doesn’t, but other companies would literally stab their own grandmothers in the back for more work. If I got .together with the other four hauliers in my sector and proposed an increase in rates, which would translate into higher pay, that would be a cartel and before long some new crowd would weigh up that the barriers to entry were no longer so great, against the potential profit, if only they paid their drivers less and charged a bit less…

Well I’m glad you recognise there are those out there who will stab their own grandmothers for profit, and that you’re in competition with these.

As for the cartel to raise pay (was there ever such a thing!), this is not stitched up by local employers, it is either imposed by closed shops and industrial action (which imposes barriers to entry for undercutters, and protects the incumbent employers from it), or by legislation which simply criminalises the undercutting of the incumbent employers’ pay rates (like wage councils or NMW).

Also, I don’t mean to suggest that all employers are swines as people. But those who are swines, if allowed to operate, impose discipline on the rest (who either obey discipline or suffer a crisis of profits). In fiction, it’s shown how Scrooge eventually puts the benevolent Fezziwig out of business.

63

Rjan:
I accept your account. What it doesn’t explain is why you were being paid £4.75 to begin with. If the employers can just knock £1.25 off the rate and not see any difference (no strikes, no shortages), then what stopped them dropping the rate beforehand?

In particular, what stopped them dropping their rates in unison?

As I say, the best explanation I can come up with is simply that the bosses finally realised they were overpaying above the rate necessary for the market, and the NMW acted as a starting gun for them to drop rates in unison.

The reason they would have got into a position of overpaying isn’t clear. Perhaps a hangover from days when there was a local shortage or better union solidarity, and managers with no incentive to upset the applecart hadn’t revisited the rates since (and perhaps, without the starting gun of the NMW, any who had tried to drop rates unilaterally had created unacceptable churn and an exodus to those still paying better).

Perhaps this is the explanation, that NMW created payroll pressure (so managers had an incentive and an excuse to take risks), and it operated across the market at once (so managers were talking with each other about the problem, and knew what others would be doing at the same time). In this way, they were able to get the rate down to its market level, without risking excessive churn and poaching.

Obviously, this is not the same as saying that NMW caused the drop. It realised a potential that was already there. The potential for employers in a sector to act in unison is frequently there - what backstops it is the threat of shortages (of new recruits or existing workers who leave for other sectors or occupations) or industrial action by existing workers.

Since that threat of industrial action obviously wasn’t there to backstop wages at £4.75, the underlying market rate silently fell away for some reason, but the rate you were being paid remained higher until there was a trigger for managers to drop the going rate back to the lower market rate.

Blimey Rjan get real.Do you really think that any Victorian Capitalist Tory government would ever keep anything which they thought wasn’t going to put a lid on if not downward pressure on wages.Or that Blair was all about increasing wages as opposed to being just another anti/post Fordist economics Tory pretending to be a Labour politician.Although having said that Socialism is obviously more about dealing with the symptoms of a low wage economy and thereby maintaining its dependent under class. :unamused:

64

Rjan:
As for the cartel to raise pay (was there ever such a thing!), this is not stitched up by local employers, it is either imposed by closed shops and industrial action (which imposes barriers to entry for undercutters, and protects the incumbent employers from it), or by legislation which simply criminalises the undercutting of the incumbent employers’ pay rates (like wage councils or NMW).

I don’t think that any union member would be naive enough to fall for the bs that taking wages out of the competitive tendering process means a cartel. :bulb:

The idea of stopping wage competition being the main object of having unions.No surprise that the government wanted to remove secondary action from the frame in that regard.

65

OVLOV JAY:
We had no NMW when it was £4.75 an hour. It was the going rate for unskilled work at the time. It was take it or leave it rates. When the NMW kicked in, the agencies in the area all decided that was now the going rate. They have never changed since. Only increasing with legislation. And with most employed unskilled staff on decent rates, it’s no surprise firms have opted for prodominantly temporary staff.

I understand. But you still don’t actually explain why they’d pay £4.75 one day in the market, if the next day they can just drop it to £3.50 and get the same work done.

Bosses don’t need the NMW as an excuse to try and drop pay! It’s all very well saying it creates a psychological target for them or it changed the benchmark. But what produced the old benchmark, if it was higher than they needed to pay to get work done?

And if you’re willing to work for £3.50, what was to stop even a single boss having a psychological target before, of zero, and trying to force down your wages? What could you do before to the boss who threatened to drop your pay, which you couldn’t do after?

The only answer I can come up with to answer my own question, is that beforehand, if a single boss tried to drop rates without coordination with the others, you could have thrown down the gauntlet and gone to his competitor who was still offering £4.75. Because they all dropped wages at once (because the NMW forced them to all take action at once), you did leave, didn’t get any better than £3.50, then settled in to the new rate.

As for how wages ever got up to £4.75 when we now know they could have had the workforce for £3.50 (separate from the question of how the workforce maintained £4.75 once they were there), I’ve touched on some of the possibilities.

Clearly, the market tide had hit a high water mark previously, and then fallen away, but employers had not been able to drop wages immediately - they might not even have realised the tide had fallen. They might not, for example, have perceived the workforce was ripe to accept a drop without significant retaliation.

Ultimately I’m keen to make the point that a minimum wage cannot, itself, cause market rates to drop. And of course, for those below the new minimum wage, it causes an increase. It might seem an academic point, but its important that people don’t think minimums, by some hocus pocus, set the market norm.

As I say, this is why doctors or electricians did not end up on NMW overnight through this “benchmarking”, because the underlying market rate is supported by both skill shortage and industrial action. They can’t just drop doctors rates without consequences, whereas in your case it turned out they could if they acted simultaneously.

66

Rjan:

OVLOV JAY:
We had no NMW when it was £4.75 an hour. It was the going rate for unskilled work at the time. It was take it or leave it rates. When the NMW kicked in, the agencies in the area all decided that was now the going rate. They have never changed since. Only increasing with legislation. And with most employed unskilled staff on decent rates, it’s no surprise firms have opted for prodominantly temporary staff.

I understand. But you still don’t actually explain why they’d pay £4.75 one day in the market, if the next day they can just drop it to £3.50 and get the same work done.

Bosses don’t need the NMW as an excuse to try and drop pay! It’s all very well saying it creates a psychological target for them or it changed the benchmark. But what produced the old benchmark, if it was higher than they needed to pay to get work done?

And if you’re willing to work for £3.50, what was to stop even a single boss having a psychological target before, of zero, and trying to force down your wages? What could you do before to the boss who threatened to drop your pay, which you couldn’t do after?

The only answer I can come up with to answer my own question, is that beforehand, if a single boss tried to drop rates without coordination with the others, you could have thrown down the gauntlet and gone to his competitor who was still offering £4.75. Because they all dropped wages at once (because the NMW forced them to all take action at once), you did leave, didn’t get any better than £3.50, then settled in to the new rate.

As for how wages ever got up to £4.75 when we now know they could have had the workforce for £3.50 (separate from the question of how the workforce maintained £4.75 once they were there), I’ve touched on some of the possibilities.

Clearly, the market tide had hit a high water mark previously, and then fallen away, but employers had not been able to drop wages immediately - they might not even have realised the tide had fallen. They might not, for example, have perceived the workforce was ripe to accept a drop without significant retaliation.

Ultimately I’m keen to make the point that a minimum wage cannot, itself, cause market rates to drop. And of course, for those below the new minimum wage, it causes an increase. It might seem an academic point, but its important that people don’t think minimums, by some hocus pocus, set the market norm.

As I say, this is why doctors or electricians did not end up on NMW overnight through this “benchmarking”, because the underlying market rate is supported by both skill shortage and industrial action. They can’t just drop doctors rates without consequences, whereas in your case it turned out they could if they acted simultaneously.

It’s not rocket science.Already weakened unions and a below market rate ‘minimum wage’ introduced by a so called ‘Labour’ ( Blairite Tory ) government which hits the lowest paid sectors it’s aimed at in the form of wage reduction re alignment.IE which union was going to take on Blair’s administration regarding a minimum wage which was always about a ‘recommended’ wage in the lower paid sectors in which there were always going to be more losers than winners.Bearing in mind the fragmented non unionised nature of the sector in question and a union movement in no position to dictate terms even if it wasn’t.

67

Another interesting topic in thread town nuked flat by the CF/Rjan boredom bomb :unamused:

68

Very pleasing to see Parliament shoot down the RHA & the likes constant whining about driver shortages.

Trainee train driver positions as well as being extremely rare, attract literally thousands of applicants for every position. Applications from people willing to go through an extensive interview & assessment process to land the job. Train driving is as much a dead end job as lorry driving, but the reason the train companies are spoilt for choice & hauliers struggle is because the train companies are paying £30-40K+ for a 36 hour week, whilst hauliers are offering £8-£9ph for 15 hour days and dossing in cabs.

It doesn’t take a genius.

69

Carryfast:
Blimey Rjan get real.Do you really think that any Victorian Capitalist Tory government would ever keep anything which they thought wasn’t going to put a lid on if not downward pressure on wages.

What they’re doing is fairly profit neutral, because the wage increases are offset by cuts to social security and public services.

Also, they are coming around to the idea that there’s a crisis of effective demand, so it makes no structural sense to cut workers’ incomes. They have tested austerity to destruction already!

And finally, the Tories are democratically elected. There has to be a fig leaf of popular measures, a narrative superficially plausible to the voters.

The Tories are collectively the technocrats of the profit-making class. They will do as much as possible to preserve profit, but they won’t (within the limits of their understanding and expectation, and their perceived available avenues) cause any wilful destruction which will potentially disrupt profit or destroy capital. That’s why they flushed Thatcher, and why they’ve now flushed Osborne (since austerity has helped profits but has harmed growth and wages moreso, an act of obvious class war).

It’s also why the IMF has started to support redistribution and debt relief, because their own analysis shows that we’re suffering a crisis of effective demand and excess liquid capital accumulation.

But there’s no need for the rich to act quickly on this advice (and the poor move slowly to organise effectively - it’s seems glacial at times amongst drivers), so they aren’t doing so.

Or that Blair was all about increasing wages as opposed to being just another anti/post Fordist economics Tory pretending to be a Labour politician.Although having said that Socialism is obviously more about dealing with the symptoms of a low wage economy and thereby maintaining its dependent under class. :unamused:

Blair and New Labour were basically just an alternative Tory party, who subscribe to much the same basic economics as the Thatcherites (the very economics which embarrassed the LSE with the Queen, and which the IMF is now moving away from).

70

Carryfast:

Rjan:
As for the cartel to raise pay (was there ever such a thing!), this is not stitched up by local employers, it is either imposed by closed shops and industrial action (which imposes barriers to entry for undercutters, and protects the incumbent employers from it), or by legislation which simply criminalises the undercutting of the incumbent employers’ pay rates (like wage councils or NMW).

I don’t think that any union member would be naive enough to fall for the bs that taking wages out of the competitive tendering process means a cartel. :bulb:

The idea of stopping wage competition being the main object of having unions.No surprise that the government wanted to remove secondary action from the frame in that regard.

Yes unions are a type of cartel, but no employer cartel ever formed spontaneously to raise workers’ wages (unless implicitly threatened by industrial action or assisted by a union).

71

Rjan:
Yes unions are a type of cartel, but no employer cartel ever formed spontaneously to raise workers’ wages (unless implicitly threatened by industrial action or assisted by a union).

The point was employers using the lie that taking wages out of the competitive process among operators ( IE industry specific minimum wage ) means a cartel.

72

Looking at it in a simple way. Take a haulier who moves goods on behalf of someone else. Say a supermarket chain. The haulier can only get a certain rate from the customer. There’s lots of people with lorries.

Only when Mr Tesco starts finding it very very difficult to obtain road haulage to get their parsnips will they pay more to get stuff moved and pass the cost onto their shoppers. It’ll take ages before that happens.

Hauliers don’t work together, there’s loads of them all worming away undercutting each other. And hauliers are always monkeying around trying dodgy things to keep their costs down such as using self employed agency staff to level out the seasonal nature of the manning costs.

No one wants to be the first company that draws a line in the sand and says enoughs enough. There’ll always be someone starting up willing to give it a pop. Someone flying flying over Indians to drive for rupees. Someone offering trainee courses to ex convicts or something. You name it, they’ll try it first. Mr Tesco won’t have to open his lazy eye.

73

Harry Monk:
Thirty years ago, if you drove a truck you could afford to buy a five-bedroomed detached house. Nowadays if you drive a truck you’d struggle to be able to afford to rent a bedsit. Nuff said.

I think you could say the same about the pay for many average jobs, when it comes to house prices, especially in the South East.

A cynical person might think that successive governments might want to engineer high house prices and therefore large mortgages, to make sure the work force had to work and couldn’t afford to take industrial action to improve their pay and conditions. :open_mouth:

But I’m just a simple truck driver and not concerned with such thoughts. :laughing:

74

Might be around 6 (i reckon more like 10) million reasons why house prices are no longer on a par with wages as they were, still, though with variations, in the 80’s.
Similarly, supply and demand in the labour market, many millions of reasons why wages have stagnated.

The irony being we, as a nation, willingly voted for this, it would be amusing if it wasn’t a tragedy to see an island surrounded by a bloody good salt water moat destroy itself.

75

Rjan:

OVLOV JAY:
We had no NMW when it was £4.75 an hour. It was the going rate for unskilled work at the time. It was take it or leave it rates. When the NMW kicked in, the agencies in the area all decided that was now the going rate. They have never changed since. Only increasing with legislation. And with most employed unskilled staff on decent rates, it’s no surprise firms have opted for prodominantly temporary staff.

I understand. But you still don’t actually explain why they’d pay £4.75 one day in the market, if the next day they can just drop it to £3.50 and get the same work done.

Bosses don’t need the NMW as an excuse to try and drop pay! It’s all very well saying it creates a psychological target for them or it changed the benchmark. But what produced the old benchmark, if it was higher than they needed to pay to get work done?

And if you’re willing to work for £3.50, what was to stop even a single boss having a psychological target before, of zero, and trying to force down your wages? What could you do before to the boss who threatened to drop your pay, which you couldn’t do after?

The only answer I can come up with to answer my own question, is that beforehand, if a single boss tried to drop rates without coordination with the others, you could have thrown down the gauntlet and gone to his competitor who was still offering £4.75. Because they all dropped wages at once (because the NMW forced them to all take action at once), you did leave, didn’t get any better than £3.50, then settled in to the new rate.

As for how wages ever got up to £4.75 when we now know they could have had the workforce for £3.50 (separate from the question of how the workforce maintained £4.75 once they were there), I’ve touched on some of the possibilities.

Clearly, the market tide had hit a high water mark previously, and then fallen away, but employers had not been able to drop wages immediately - they might not even have realised the tide had fallen. They might not, for example, have perceived the workforce was ripe to accept a drop without significant retaliation.

Ultimately I’m keen to make the point that a minimum wage cannot, itself, cause market rates to drop. And of course, for those below the new minimum wage, it causes an increase. It might seem an academic point, but its important that people don’t think minimums, by some hocus pocus, set the market norm.

As I say, this is why doctors or electricians did not end up on NMW overnight through this “benchmarking”, because the underlying market rate is supported by both skill shortage and industrial action. They can’t just drop doctors rates without consequences, whereas in your case it turned out they could if they acted simultaneously.

Let me try and make it simple, seeing as you can’t understand the point.

Back in the 90’s, most firms only had a handful of agency staff in the warehouse, except at peak times. In my area we had Tesco, Sainsburys, Safeway, Iceland, Comet, Dixons, Brakes, Nft, Cert, RHM and loads of smaller warehouses, run by a combination of Exel, Tibbetts, Wincanton and in house operations. All within a 10 mile radius, and all running minimum agency warehouse staff.

Let’s say ABC Warehousing want a couple of agency bods. They ring Straight arrow staffing. Straight arrow quote abc £7 an hour. They advertise their rates to their staff at rates of £4 an hour. No takers, that’s market forces. Eventually they get blokes in at £4.75 an hour.

A few weeks later and Banana recruiting go in and say they’ll cut ABC down to £5 an hour. They advertise at £3.50 an hour and can’t get a bod. Straight Arrow hold out as they know they will get the work back.

Fast forward to NMW times, and EVERY agency goes in at £4.50 an hour. Advertising at NMW, and setting up in droves. Forcing the likes of Straight arrow to either adapt or go extinct. And this is the reason most warehouses are now running at least 50/50 ratio of full time vs temp. When was the last time you saw an agency job that wasn’t advertised as “meets NMW”? I remember when you signed up with an agency, and different jobs paid different rates.

76

muckles:

Harry Monk:
Thirty years ago, if you drove a truck you could afford to buy a five-bedroomed detached house. Nowadays if you drive a truck you’d struggle to be able to afford to rent a bedsit. Nuff said.

I think you could say the same about the pay for many average jobs, when it comes to house prices, especially in the South East.

A cynical person might think that successive governments might want to engineer high house prices and therefore large mortgages, to make sure the work force had to work and couldn’t afford to take industrial action to improve their pay and conditions. :open_mouth:

But I’m just a simple truck driver and not concerned with such thoughts. [emoji38]

That same cynic might also think the “right to buy” scheme wasn’t entirely altruistic either [emoji33]

Sent from my X17 using Tapatalk

77

Munchkin:
That same cynic might also think the “right to buy” scheme wasn’t entirely altruistic either [emoji33]

Sent from my X17 using Tapatalk

You mean the Self pre-funded care home scheme?

78

Right to buy is a good thing, but there needs to be legislation that means an identical property is built to replace the one being sold

79

It can’t be a good thing that having got a yard full of decent drivers - to save money, the firm then decides like so many other firms to cut pay/squeeze out more hours/deny overtime/run ragged it’s drive work force - whilst not doing ANYTHING about wasting money on stupid items like leaving the heating on full blast in the summer, letting stock perish, smashing kit and stock up, or annoying customers so they cancel their accounts.

FFS you can’t make it up!

80

Winseer:
It can’t be a good thing that having got a yard full of decent drivers - to save money, the firm then decides like so many other firms to cut pay/squeeze out more hours/deny overtime/run ragged it’s drive work force - whilst not doing ANYTHING about wasting money on stupid items like leaving the heating on full blast in the summer, letting stock perish, smashing kit and stock up, or annoying customers so they cancel their accounts.

FFS you can’t make it up!

There needs to be some joined up thinking between employer and employee. Most firms think it’s still 1973 and you can keep the driver in the dark and feed him ■■■■. They don’t seem willing to tell the staff of their costs, but all too happy to cut the wages back as far as possible. I don’t know why they don’t show the driver the invoice paid to have a bulb changed for arguments sake. Then the driver can start showing some willing and change the bulb themselves, then hopefully the driver won’t find his wages under constant attack.