My last UK driving job was on nights driving double deckers,
was that from out of Brudas old yard in Cemetry Rd?
Just to add my 2p, take a look at this :
thisismoney.co.uk/money/news … aries.html
192 in the list was HGV drivers averaging £25192
404 was Elementary sales occupations averaging under 10k.
I know most would argue with those figures as they don’t take into account hours put in but they are a rough guide. I think comparing the worst paid class 1 jobs on jobcentre plus with some kind of supervisory position at Aldi paying £10+ an hour is unfair.
Just a quick comment about train driving - yes it’s very very boring. You’d have far more ‘fun’ driving a truck on long distance work. However most train operating companies have 35 hour week. That’s from sign on to sign off so if the rota is arranged properly you can get 7 days off every 4th week in addition to any annual leave entitlement.
I think comparing the worst paid class 1 jobs on jobcentre plus with some kind of supervisory position at Aldi paying £10+ an hour is unfair.
the rates and jobs metioned at Aldi were for “store assistants”, hardly supervisory.
The driving jobs are the ones on offer at that time.
That was the comparison, not the average wages across the industry.
In fact you can take most driving jobs and make the same comparison, not just the worst paid ones.
There is most likely a huge percentage of driving jobs paying only around the Aldi rate, it’s only by working lots more hours that the gross figure is bumped up.
del949:
My last UK driving job was on nights driving double deckers,
was that from out of Brudas old yard in Cemetry Rd?
No Del it was via an agency, running for Charlie Butts in Hudds on the Poundstretcher contract. £9 an hr nights, handball off both decks at a couple of drops, and sometimes re-load returns.
Ah, was just rying to remember who in Bratfud was running DD’s.
There are approximately 200 LGV related driving jobs in my area, of which 1/4 are van, 7.5t or porter/warehouse with some driving. Of the remainder, another 1/4 is Class 2 and the remaining 100 are LGV 1.
I have spoken to about 20 different agencies in the last month, and of those most if not all have said that the job advertised requires an ‘experienced driver’ with at least 1 or 2 years experience and they can’t put that on the advert (but some do).
There were about 10 direct jobs with those companies and I have applied to them all, some have replied but most have not.
I am currently registered with 4 agencies locally. 2 may actually get me work tomorrow but those are only class 2 as they require ‘6 months experience’ but don’t give it.
So tomorrow I’ll be going looking for work, mostly class 2. Last time I tried that the replies I had were ‘no, but we need a class 1 driver’ of which I shall probably point out I have one of them but haven’t that much experience yet… I would like class 1 work but suspect I’ll be on class 2 for at least 6 months. I may be lucky at Christmas time when suddenly they don’t care as much about not having experience 
Saratoga:
There are approximately 200 LGV related driving jobs in my area, of which 1/4 are van, 7.5t or porter/warehouse with some driving. Of the remainder, another 1/4 is Class 2 and the remaining 100 are LGV 1.I have spoken to about 20 different agencies in the last month, and of those most if not all have said that the job advertised requires an ‘experienced driver’ with at least 1 or 2 years experience and they can’t put that on the advert (but some do).
There were about 10 direct jobs with those companies and I have applied to them all, some have replied but most have not.
I am currently registered with 4 agencies locally. 2 may actually get me work tomorrow but those are only class 2 as they require ‘6 months experience’ but don’t give it.
So tomorrow I’ll be going looking for work, mostly class 2. Last time I tried that the replies I had were ‘no, but we need a class 1 driver’ of which I shall probably point out I have one of them but haven’t that much experience yet… I would like class 1 work but suspect I’ll be on class 2 for at least 6 months. I may be lucky at Christmas time when suddenly they don’t care as much about not having experience
I know exactly how you feel there. In the same boat, got my class 1 recently after being class 2 for 6 years. Not a single place will touch me without “experience”. That being said, even class 2 work is scarce at the moment and the pay is utter ■■■■■■■■ (£6.50) for the graft. The whole thing is ridiculous, by the time I have held my licence long enough to be considered “ok” by the insurance muppets for a class 1 job, I’ll probably have forgotten altogether what to even do with a unit and trailer! 
Much as I love driving, I’m seriously considering just ditching it altogether and moving to greener pastures. Unless your luck’s good (mine has never been in general, but I’m used to that now) and you happen to be in the right place at the right time, it’s an extremely depressing cycle to get caught in for newbies. Shame really 
I have worked for Tesco myself, as a backdoor man and shelf stacker. Id go back to it if i was desperate but i couldnt wait to get out…
Positives:
– Job security, you can coast along and never be at risk of redundancy… job for life.
– Money is decent for the job. Yearly pay increases, probably about £7.20ish now.
– Premiums for sundays and bank holidays
– Free shares in the company you can cash in
– Staff discount card.
Negatives:
– It gets boring, same 4 walls everyday. Same mudane tasks.
– Loads of graduates in manager jobs lording it over you.
– If you work days customers will drive you nuts, even if your job is to work the backdoor they will have you out on the shopfloor between deliveries.
When the delivery comes and you are left with a ton of stock to sift through, you will wish you were the driver buggering off back to his cab for a quiet drive down the motorway with the radio on.
All in all, shelf stacking offers a good package but id rather be out on the road any day. Its not all about money imo, if im doing something for 40+ hours a week i want to enjoy it. Having the monday morning blues every week and dreading work and winging about it is no way to live.
Agree with you Rob. Shelf stacking = mind numbingly boring repetetive work - about on a par with regular route night trunk driving.
No brainer here obviously driving. I worked for a shop for 5 years doing night shiftr, yer you get £10 an hr excluding benifits and the potential for anyone to become a tea manager. But look at the job market thereis much greater demand for drivers. class 1 is potentialy a liscence to print out money(exclude the pun) in the long term. Whilst being a shelf stacker for 2,5 years will not get you newhere in retail they just give the job to schoolboy, truck driving you will be rewarded for your experiance.
bob96:
class 1 is potentialy a licence to print out money.
Yeah…good luck with that 
truck driving you will be rewarded for your experiance
.
So, why then, as per the original pont of this thread are drivers being offered less per hour than Aldi store assistants?
^^^Because Aldi etc can afford to pay their staff more.
newmercman:
bob96:
class 1 is potentialy a licence to print out money.Yeah…good luck with that
Not literary, but you have to think there are far greater advantages in the potential to find work regularly and do something that is fairly enjoyable and important to society. Compared to mind numming shelfstacking were the opportunities are very few and far for such an undesirable job. Look at Indeed website for example you will see there is a much greater demand for truck drivers than shop assistants.
Driveroneuk:
Agree with you Rob. Shelf stacking = mind numbingly boring repetetive work - about on a par with regular route night trunk driving.
All routes become ‘regular routes’ on whatever type of long distance work it is when you’ve used them all enough times.Trunking is just a form of long distance work like many others.If someone finds trunking boring then they’d obviously find many other types of long distance work boring too.The issue in that case would just be wether someone finds driving for long distances boring or not.If they do then driving trucks over long distances is obviously the wrong job especially in the case of someone who finds it as boring as working inside.
I’d have had no problem with doing another 15 years of night trunking on top of the 15 years that I’d already done unlike having had to work one more year on top of the few that I’d had to do working in a factory. 
Carryfast:
Driveroneuk:
Agree with you Rob. Shelf stacking = mind numbingly boring repetetive work - about on a par with regular route night trunk driving.All routes become ‘regular routes’ on whatever type of long distance work it is when you’ve used them all enough times.Trunking is just a form of long distance work like many others.If someone finds trunking boring then they’d obviously find many other types of long distance work boring too.The issue in that case would just be wether someone finds driving for long distances boring or not.If they do then driving trucks over long distances is obviously the wrong job especially in the case of someone who finds it as boring as working inside.
The trunkers at our place have two destinations. One on monday, the other on tuesday…there and back. Thats all they do. Surely that is boring compared to long distance work where you get to go all over the country to different places?
I do long distance, a typical local trip for us is over 1000miles each way, the longer trips can be 5000mile round trips. The yard is pretty central, so I can go East, South or West (we don’t go straight North) I drive the same roads all the time, the only time I do something different is at the very end of the journey or going across country for a reload, no matter how varied the work is, The World is not a big enough place to have a different destination every week 
It seems some of you have missed the point. I was referring to those who drive the same exact route, in the dark, night after night after night, for years.
Part of the reason I have driven trucks is because I enjoy all the different things I see during the day.
Driveroneuk:
It seems some of you have missed the point. I was referring to those who drive the same exact route, in the dark, night after night after night, for years.Part of the reason I have driven trucks is because I enjoy all the different things I see during the day.
No I get what you’re saying, but I was making the point that after a few years, it doesn’t matter where you go or how far you go, you end up driving down the same roads. Take the middle east run, that was/is the same thing all the way to the point where you clear customs, from there you may go to a different delivery point, but that’s only a few miles of different roads that you’ll drive in a trip that takes three weeks (if you drive back, four weeks if you fly back via Thailand ) Even if you vary the route, there’s only so many different permutations and after a few trips you’ll have done them all
I agree with the night trunking though, after a few weeks of doing a Belvedere-Haydock trunk, I knew every bump on the M1/M6 and as I left at the same time every night, I would see the same lorries, in the same place every night as everyone else was on a similar schedule, I only did it for a month or so, thankfully as it was like being a robot, which may explain poor old Carryfast
Driveroneuk:
It seems some of you have missed the point. I was referring to those who drive the same exact route, in the dark, night after night after night, for years.Part of the reason I have driven trucks is because I enjoy all the different things I see during the day.
Even if if you’re on uk tramping work your main workplace is still going to mainly be the nation’s motorway and/or trunk road system.Maybe I was a bit luckier than some in spending a lot of my time on trunking on a rota of different runs and some of those involved more than one destination to different parts of the country even in a single shift.However I also spent a lot of my time doing single destinations like Heathrow-Leeds-Heathrow,or Bristol which could even be two return runs,or Scottish changeovers at Charnock Richard or Killington Lake,on a long term basis for years and found none of that a problem and certainly not boring.
In the winter it’s dark from the time you get up to the time you go to bed but mid summer at this time of the year made up for that.At this time of the year it’s only really dark for a few hours during the middle of a shift from around 23.00-02.30 and driving through the country in the evening before and after sunset and early morning before and after sunrise on a clear motorway is great.
There’s no way that any of that compares with working in a factory year after year from 08.00-17.00 or 18.00.In the winter it’s still dark when you get to work and it’s dark when you walk out the doors.In the Summer the day light hurts your eyes when you eventually get to go home if you’ve spent all day under artificial lights in a part of the factory that’s not under a glass roof and it was as hot as hell in those parts that were.But as I’ve said elsewhere in addition to that every hour seemed like at least 3 and was absolutely no place for a driver.