Morning guys. I got talking to a class 2 drive who was on direct for them out of Avonmouth. He told me that the training is second to none, over 800 reward schemes available for groceries, unsociable hours pay rewarded, health and dental insurance schemes, free onsite canteen, excellent fleet of well maintained volvos and 31k for a 50 hour week. Now im always sceptical of layby cheap talk but could this be the happiest driver in the UK or was he suffering from delusion?
Anybody got any experiences or info about working for these lot, class 1 or 2 ? or know which agency they use for a bit of “try before you buy”.
The Class 2 work takes a good few months to get into, some can’t and jack whilst others take to it and stay for donkeys years. Once you know the job & get a regular round your on easy street but it can be tough at first and many don’t survive.
The Class 1 work is where it’s at. Less drops & mostly easy superstores with bays.
trying to get a loaded milk dolly/tet to go where you want it is next to impossible . Once the dammed things are broken down and nested together you haven’t a cat in hells chance of them going anywhere close to where you want them to go . £100 k a year wouldn’d entice me to think about that sort of a job .
Thanks for the replies guys, seems like the general consensus is that if you enjoy riding busted tail lifts and loosing your rag with buggered over loaded trolleys with your life whizzing past your eyes, then this is the job for you.
Ill use my loaf and apply for Hovis and warburtons around the corner
BIG_SHOW:
Thanks for the replies guys, seems like the general consensus is that if you enjoy riding busted tail lifts and loosing your rag with buggered over loaded trolleys with your life whizzing past your eyes, then this is the job for you.
Ill use my loaf and apply for Hovis and warburtons around the corner
The job can be good it’s just what you make of it
I’d take it over tramping anyday.
Also alot of people here are allegeric to physical activity so any sort of work that has manual labour often gets looked down on.
I did a few weeks running trailer swaps between droitwitch and somewhere else, can’t remember the name but my old boss got a subbing contract with a few trucks doing that and it was easy work, people there were friendly enough and some of the drivers say they have a high retention and some said it’s like a “dead mans shoes” job etc, so I guess it can’t be that bad. I was always looking to try and get in with them with nothing ever coming up when I looked.
Their tractors run on diesel and LPG I believe and some of the trailers are old but they have some decent equipment too from what I remember.
Did a few trailer offloads of empty cages which was very physical but I enjoy some exercise in a job if I can get it so it wasn’t a problem for me, but of a ■■■■■ backing into their bays though as you have to drop the tail lift but if you dropped it too low then you would bottom out while backing into the bay etc but I enjoyed it overall and the company guys seemed to enjoy it too and I heard at the time that their drivers were pretty well paid for the job too but I could be wrong
BIG_SHOW:
Thanks for the replies guys, seems like the general consensus is that if you enjoy riding busted tail lifts and loosing your rag with buggered over loaded trolleys with your life whizzing past your eyes, then this is the job for you.
Ill use my loaf and apply for Hovis and warburtons around the corner
Good thinking - you’ll get more bread doing the Hovis run…
BIG_SHOW:
Thanks for the replies guys, seems like the general consensus is that if you enjoy riding busted tail lifts and loosing your rag with buggered over loaded trolleys with your life whizzing past your eyes, then this is the job for you.
Ill use my loaf and apply for Hovis and warburtons around the corner
The job can be good it’s just what you make of it
I’d take it over tramping anyday.
Also alot of people here are allegeric to physical activity so any sort of work that has manual labour often gets looked down on.
I suffer from that - the doctor diagnosed “Idleitis” and theres no cure.
I did 4 years when i first did my licences,its a marmite you either like it or dont. The pay structure wasnt to bad when i was there (left jan 2019). £9.95 basic for class 1 and 50p less for class 2, but if your a class 1 driver you got that rate regardless of what you drove.
JeffA:
Hells teeth, 14 something an hour? That’s more than I get now.
Something seems to be amiss with that YTD average rate as it’s certainly not reflected anywhere in that particular week’s pay. To get that as an average means he’s doing a lot of Sunday working and a lot of hours. Ignore the Saturday and Sunday and work it out over a standard 40 hr week and it’s £11.94/hr which was slightly above what everyone else was paying in 2019, probably due to the graft involved.
The induction was arduous. We were left sitting around for too long, turning the whole thing a bit sour. I felt it could’ve been condensed. They were churning out too many stupid SSOW sheets, so I just skimmed the whole things. To me it felt we were being farmed the usual corporate way. But the drivers were happy though, seemed like a cream job. I got the sense they knew where their bread was buttered. Well… the drivers that were left. A lot seemed to have evaporated.
