Driving a truck pays pretty well for a job that requires no more than a high school education and not much training, all things considered. You can do quite well in it.
It isn’t, however, a popular job. Blue collar jobs aren’t in general.
Yup, I’ve been through that. Plus, the managers that stay have a lot more reports. Managing 16 people is no picnic, I was only able to do it because 7 of them were in a project with a great, experienced, team lead who we official managers let run it. I’m just glad he didn’t leave before I did.
That’s another story, but the same message can be (re)learnt from both: as the old saying has it-“Fail to prepare=Prepare to fail”.
[quote=Driving a truck pays pretty well for a job that requires no more than a high school education and not much training, all things considered. You can do quite well in it.[/quote]
Not in the UK apparently:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/27/getting-into-europe-a-relief-hgv-driver-on-uk-crisis
Another cause are new rules for “cabotage” for EU trucks in Britain. Increasing the number of trips to transport the same cargo.
Can you explain that a bit more?
Not any more.
Wages have not kept up with inflation. Hours are long. Being aware from home is a hardship. There are hazards on the road desk jobs don’t have. Oh, and did I mention wages have not kept up with inflation?
Yes, a few drivers do well. Many do not.
Possibly because they get little to no respect and working conditions are often bad for no other reason than squeezing as much profit from the driver for as little compensation as possible.
Our society should treat essential jobs and the people who do them with some respect and importance, ensure humane working conditions, and make sure people get an actual living wage rather than as they are typically treated: no respect and the workers disposable cogs rather than people.
Dismissing a job and/or justifying low wages by saying “doesn’t require more than a high school education” is part of the problem. A person’s worth to society should not be determined by solely by how much education they have. If a job is essential to society - and trucking is - it should make more than minimum wage once all the actual hours are reckoned and provide a decent living especially if some hardships are involved.
Cabotage is used between the US and Canada too. It is an old word from marine navigation, if I remember correctly: staying close to the coast during daytime and anchoring at night in a protected harbour or bay, if you could find it. In each harbour/nightstay the ships tried to buy and sell stuff, making the trip more profitable. Same for trucks: if you can load some stuff where you have unloaded your cargo, you earn more money. That is what cabotage rules between the UK and the rest of the EU allowed. Now the rules do not allow taking on a new load on the way back or only under some circumstances and make round trips with multiple loads and unloads practically impossible, so the trip is not worth the effort anymore. Here you find what the European Parliament thinks about the new cabotage rules.
And here some legalese on cabotage.
Yep, an encroaching shortage (which is real) doesn’t seem likely to create a complete collapse of availability.
What happened was:
- A government announcement that ‘there might be shortages soon’
- The media coverage consisting of literally “you probably shouldn’t panic, but OMG! look at all the people panicking! There soon won’t be any fuel left! You probably shouldn’t panic, but IT LOOKS LIKE PEOPLE ARE PANICKING NOW!!! There won’t be any fuel left, very soon! OMG THIS IS BAD!!!”
People ran to get fuel - including of course people who really need it, but also including people who could have waited a bit, or could have curtailed a bit of leisure use of their vehicles. The surge in demand caused onhand supplies to run out - this exhaustion of onhand supplies drove a more acute perception that things were really bad, making some people act even more desperately. Classic panic buying situation.
The only thing really in our favour is that, unlike the panic-buying of food, toilet paper and paracetemol last year, it’s not so easy to stockpile petrol in your spare room. Sure, jerry cans exist (all sold out now of course) and sure, a few idiots will try to fill inappropriate containers, but this hopefully should settle down more swiftly than it did when it was toilet paper/pasta, where every time the shelves got restocked, people just swooped in and bought even more to add to their pile at home.
There’s a shortage of drivers (more acute for general HGV than for HazMat, I understand), which will continue to be a problem, but the immediate catastrophe in this case is caused by human weakness and self interest in a free market environment suffering some shortage of supply, as usual. I don’t think there’s any way to try to fix that short of rationing (which would be hard to robustly implement) or communism (which I am not prescribing)
The objection to cabotage is that in some cases a foreign haulier will have lower operating costs than the locals. This may be because wages are lower in that country or taxes and regulations are less costly. This makes for unfair competition.
On the other hand, it is for the benefit of all to keep the number of empty trucks down to the minimum.
We’ve had a warning from the estate managers where I live, not even to think of storing petrol anywhere on our estate (not that many if any of my neighbours are that stupid, but apparently it has been happening elsewhere).
That isn’t how I read your links. I’m reading it as performing an in-country move after making an international move, so you bring Polish goods to Germany, then make a trip (or two) completely within Germany before taking a load back to Poland. One risk of free-for-all cabotage is that you have, let’s say, Polish drivers doing extended work in Germany; German drivers get excluded from their market, and Poland may wind up short of drivers because they’re all working in Germany.
One thing that occurred to me this morning, unrelated to cabotage. My company hires truck drivers every day, we have no apparent shortage of drivers for our business. Why?
Our drivers get paid a good wage, have good benefits, get time and a half (or double time) for overtime hours, and have working conditions that aren’t abusive. If they weren’t protected, my company would absolutely squeeze them for savings, not because we’re evil bastards, but because we’re competing with other companies for business, if our prices are high because we treat our workforce ‘right’, we don’t get the business. The union is literally keeping our business going.
I have long been amazed at how industry will invest millions billions in hardware but refuse to invest in humans these days. Are humans part of your business? Yes? Then shouldn’t you invest as much in them as you do in hardware, computers, and software? That includes maintenance. For machinery that’s things like lubrication and repairs. For humans that’s rest breaks, a meal, and being able to use the bathroom during a shift.
Hardware goes in the “assets” column of your books. Humans go in the “liabilities” column.
NAFTA is not similar to the EU in terms of employment, there is no free flow of people with NAFTA that allows workers in the three countries to freely work anywhere in the trade union. NAFTA would never had been ratified as a good portion of the U.S. would have burned to the ground if that had been an element of the treaty. Mexican truck drivers do not have U.S. green cards, without which it is illegal for them to work in the United States as full-time / permanent employees–unless they have a special work visa (there are some for temporary agricultural workers, some for technology workers etc, but they are all different varieties of temporary in scope.) Transporting goods from Mexican destinations to U.S. facilities in the border region is okay, but there are limits to how far into the U.S. they are allowed to go and it isn’t very far.
Well, then, businesses should be happy they no longer have so many “liabilities”!
Again, that’s part of the problem - seeing humans as a liability instead of a necessary part of the business.
I’ve worked in places where they had the same low-maintenance sort of attitude to both people and machinery - eventually the machines break, but if you have people to blame it on, and them you get to grumble about how you have to pay money to fix something you already paid for once when you bought it, and then tell the people that there was unexpected expense about fixing things, so we can’t afford to give pay rises quite in keeping with inflation this year, that all seems to be fine.
That was my understanding of cabotage both before and after reading the link. I’m not sure if it is a big cause of the lack of fuel delivery in the UK - after all, how often do fuel trucks come over from the EU and then decide to do local deliveries before they go back, and it’s not like other sorts of truckers can just decide to do fuel delivery while they’re there - but I can see this same calculus making local deliveries more difficult for items in general.
Most sources agree the median salary for a truck driver in the USA is $60,000, which is solid money. In the UK it’s about $50,000. (I am guessing the disparity is due to there being fewer long haul routes; those pay better.)
No one is dismissing a job. All jobs are important, and I’ve forgotten more about the carrier industry than most people on this message board will ever know. But just saying “let’s pay everyone more” isn’t a solution to anything. These are economic problems that have to be dealt with by applying economic solutions.
A person’s worth to society has nothing to do with their job, because “a person’s worth to society” is a vague and largely meaningless phrase. A person’s worth to society in the only way that matters is 1. That is, they’re one person, just as valuable as any other person. It doesn’t matter what they earn at work. Children have no labour value but they’re just as valuable a human being as anyone else. Retired people are worth just as much as doctors. People who are too sick to work are worth exactly as much as engineers.
If you want to know what truck drivers are in short supply then an honest examination of their labour value needs to be made, and that figure has nothing to do with their value as human beings. Truck drivers are worth X dollars per hour, a figure that may be $21 an hour or $27 or $39 or $16. Whatever it is their “Value to society” as humans is the same as everyone else, no more and no less, but we are talking about their labour value. Being honest about what the market-clearing price for truck drivers, and then examining what should be done if there is a mismatch between how many jobs there are and how many people want to do them, is not “dismissing” anyone and being morally indignant about it isn’t a solution.
I mean, you can’t seriously think that it hasn’t occurred to carriers to pay more, can you? Many HAVE tried paying more.
Well, my sentence went on with
and make round trips with multiple loads and unloads practically impossible
and round trips include “a trip (or two) completely within Germany before taking a load back to Poland” and even going further to Rotterdam and from there to Hull before going back to Poland. I probably did not express myself clearly, but I think we mean the same: if the loading/unloading options of the hauler are bureaucratically restricted it might not be worth the trip, and somewhere there will be a truck missing.
Yes, that is a risk, but IMHO the bigger risk is that the German (or British) long haul companies will get out of business, the Polish ones will take over, and when the Polish companies are no longer allowed to operate in your country on equal footing with the local ones, you have no fall back position. The drivers are fine, they are doing shorter trips for Amazon, DHL, FedEx, DPD etc. Actually, I believe that is a significant part of the problem in Britain right now.
Plus the border controls in Calais and Rotterdam on one side and in Dover and Hull on the other. Bloody waste of time and stupid paperwork.
Pay is lower in the UK virtually in every position compared to America–the reason is America is a much wealthier country and wages are higher. This is true for the EU as a whole and virtually every individual country in the EU aside from a few outliers (several of which are microstates filled with wealthy tax dodgers that skew the numbers, and Norway which is a small country by population but has vast oil reserves per capita and a huge oil-created sovereign wealth fund.) This isn’t trying to…start any kind of argument, as I’ve seen them appear frequently when I point things like this out, but it’s simple economic data reality that the US is a much higher wage country than most of Europe and Britain. In fact if the UK was in the United States it would be our 2nd poorest state only slightly ahead of Mississippi, in several measures.