Yorkshire Tramper:
Rjan:
The problem is that it’s usually chaotic firms, with difficult and high-risk work and conditions, and bad practices, and who can’t get old hands, who first turn to new passes thinking them more gullible and pliable.
Absolute rubbish, if there is a shortage of experienced drivers and there is, then your only option is to train your own in the way of new passes or from scratch. It does not mean chaotic firms thinking these are more gullible at all.
You know in my full post which you’ve abridged, I acknowledged that even sensible operators get tarred with the same brush by insurers, because the insurers can’t actually tell what the cause of the problem is, all their actuaries can see is that firms which hire new passes see risks soar.
Look at that tipper driven by an 18 year old a few years ago that went barreling down the steep hill, killed children at the school gates, and landed on its roof. The fundamental cause was not his own reckless judgement.
It was the haulage operator sitting besides him in the passenger seat that had instructed him to break the law and take a dangerous route. Experienced drivers, who tend to be much older, would simply have told the operator “no”, or had a bust up about something else being out of order, before it even got to that stage.
Experienced drivers probably already had reacted like that, which is why he got the idea “I know, I’ll hire a young lad for a pittance who’ll do as I tell him”. Insurers know that operators like these, and with ideas like these, abound, and that’s why they associate “new pass cover” with shyster operators who are being boycotted by experienced candidates, and who are a swingeing risk to insure.
Your comment of if your company cannot compete for experienced drivers is also nonsense. You cannot simply compete for experienced drivers by keeping upping your rates out of proportion and rendering your company running at a loss.
You either pass the increased cost of wages on to your own clients/employers, or you leave the market to be served by those that will.
You can advertise at £20 per hour then the company next door advertises at £21 per hour, at what point do you stop?
You stop when one of you says “I can’t pay”, and the other guy gets the worker and does the work. And because the other guy gets work done, he takes your clients too.
You make no sense with your comments and is not very informative of the current situation. If you were a driver then you would know how things are at the moment, it is a drivers market at the moment but there is still a cap as to the wages or rather the hourly rates.
I think what you find hard to understand, but the vast majority of drivers will not find hard to understand, is that the market isn’t there to keep you personally in business or making money.
It rewards those who obey market signals and out-compete their competitors (whose businesses then wind up and they leave the market). Winning that competition may even occur by being willing to tolerate losses longer than your competitors, who go bankrupt whilst you rebound and pay down the debt you ran up competing. This is how the free market works. If you refuse to compete (or simply can’t), then soon you will join the ranks of failed businesses, and your creditors will come into your building and take everything off you, and give it to someone whose business remains standing.
Industry figures warned several years ago that the oversupply of drivers would eventually disappear, and only the strong would survive amongst hauliers. That day of judgement has now come.
