Carryfast:
Rjan:
…
Make your mind up.Firstly you’re saying that LHV’s,in addition to removal of road fuel duty,would create less jobs for truck drivers.Then you’re saying that the move would obviously actually create more balance regarding the long haul road freight sector v rail thereby actually creating a net increase in truck driving jobs and in the quality of those jobs.
I said LHVs will reduce the ratio of drivers required against volume of freight carried. That is the whole point of LHVs, and surely it is an uncontentious point?
I didn’t say cutting fuel duty will reduce the number of drivers required.
I accept obviously that if you reconfigure the parameters which determine the relative competitiveness of road and rail, in road’s favour, then more freight is likely to be moved by road.
What I don’t accept is that more freight will mean higher pay or better conditions (except, as I’ve said, perhaps briefly during the initial disruption caused by the change, if such a spike was not forestalled by measures designed to prevent it).
If higher volumes of work for a sector necessarily meant increased pay, then doctors would be on poor pay and factory workers and call centre clerks would be on good pay.
On that note it seems strange as to why you’re conveniently all for taking truck drivers’ jobs and replacing them with far fewer train driving jobs.While at the same time trying to hypocritically make the case that LHV’s mean less truck drivers’ jobs but which you know is bs anyway.
I’m sure we’ve had this argument before. I’m not “for” rail freight in some partisan fashion, I simply accept that it is technologically suited to the task of long-distance, high-volume freight.
My response is fierce because of the idiocy of your general reasoning together with the beady-eyed enthusiasm with which you propose to intentionally smash another man’s industry simply to cannibalise their work. We are already swirling in the cesspool that such thinking creates.
I would be just as fierce if you said let’s introduce LHVs, abolish fuel duty, and carry petrol in drums, and in this way we can improve pay and conditions in the sort of work to which you confine yourself, by taking work away from those better-organised petrol tanker drivers.
Or indeed, let’s abolish the national petroleum and gas pipelines, and replace them with movements via road haulage.
The obvious economic absurdity of such arguments, and the resulting infrequency with which one hears them, leaves one stuttering to analyse and articulate their flaws.
Don’t see anything within your reasoning which isn’t just all about lumbering truck drivers with mainly dumbed down,boring,job options,often involving ridiculous levels of ‘other duties’,just to protect your chosen few in the form the rail unions.The result being drivers voting with their feet.Hence a shortage of and an oversupply of drivers for,‘the right work’ and a surplus of and shortage of drivers,for ‘the wrong work’.Which will only get worse while we continue with the cross Party anti road transport consensus committed to returning the industry to its place in the 1930’s and before.
Your own ideal job - the RDC trunk - is the most dumbed-down and boring of this industry.
There is no shortage in any division of this industry. There isn’t an imbalance either. The driving-with-labour roles just involve more fly-by-night firms who burn through drivers faster, often going through every available candidate in an area like a dose of salts, until they either have to sub the work out at higher rates to those who can retain drivers, or return the contract to source and allow it to be taken over directly by those who charge more and who organise the work so they can retain drivers.
To anyone who ever says they cannot recruit a driver, ask them, have they tried standing in the carpark of one of their competitors in the evening, and offering to beat both the wages and conditions, paid for by clients desperate to get their goods moving? If they cannot afford to do that, and there are no desperate clients willing to bankroll the scheme, then there is no shortage.
Lots of bosses only imagine they have a shortage. “If I could get 10 more drivers, I could steal this contract from Bloggs Ltd down the road”. But Bloggs Ltd already has the 10 drivers doing that work. No actual shortage of drivers exists, rather there is a surplus of bosses and firms all scrabbling to capture the same work, which is already being performed by an adequate number of drivers.
We really need the ‘other’ driver’s side of this story. 
