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Journalists are a bit like big white sharks – they have to continue to move to survive. But that means that some stories, after a short moment of intense public control, remain backward. No one hears how they ended – or, indeed, if they ended up at all.
Thus, it was a big shortage of truck drivers from the UK in 2021, which led to empty supermarket shelves, a sudden bonus for employment and retention for drivers and interviews on the army. They both saw as chaos as evidence that Brexit was a mistake. Brexites saw that the driver’s salary had directed as if migrants had reduced their salary. But what happened next?
It is a short answer that the pandemic -related disorders have mitigated, drivers have received more money and the acute deficiency disappears. Between 2020 and 2023, an hourly medium salary for “large goods drivers” with full working hours increased 27 percent to £ 14.99, according to Official statisticsCompared to a 16 % increase in the middle salary for all full-time employees at £ 17.60. The share of HGV companies reporting the HGV job vacancies lowered From 43 percent at the end of 2021 to 18 percent at the end of 2023.
But vacancies are crawling again, which leads us to a longer answer: many fundamental problems behind the deficiency have not been solved.
The first is a salary. Regardless of whether truck drivers think they climb the salary rankings depends on whether they have looked up, on a reduced gap with medium profits or down, on a all -gap between their profession and the minimum wage. Both conservative and Labor governments have suddenly shoved the plates of salaries over the past decade, reducing the difference with skilled roles. In 2011, medium watches for HGV drivers with full hours were 62 percent higher than a minimum wage. That premium fell to only 35 percent by 2020. She returned to almost 50 percent over the next two years, but decreased to 38 percent by 2024.
Drivers mention it a lot, says Adrian Jones from Unite Unite. “There is a difference, a reward for skills, knowledge and experience and that is what is eroded,” he said. “We have drivers who have £ 13, £ 14 per hour, watching a minimum wage [which will rise to £12.21 for over-21s in April] And saying, “Why do I try to give up with that?”
Out of the salary, there was no improvement in long and unpredictable hours. Take the current HGV driver ad The father, who says, “You will need to make a flexible shift pattern consisting of nights, late and early shifts, including weekends.” The minimum contracted hours are 32 or 40, but “the routes have been awarded up to 12.5 hours a day, as you will be regularly expected to spend additional hours.”
Kieran Smith, executive director of the driver, employment agencies, says that these working patterns, which are difficult to balance with family life, or even with friends and hobbies, are leaving many drivers in the 20s and 30s. Only coaching more drivers is pointless when the real problem is “one of Churn,” he told me.
There are also new challenges. Employers, probably with the best intentions, install cameras supervise the driver’s eyelids and head positions for signs of drowsiness or distraction. But Jones says many drivers hate the feeling of watching them all the time.
What does all this tell us about Brexit? A reduction in the EU driver, which coincided with other pandemic disorders, probably delivered a salary for truck drivers. But Brexit did not solve all their problems. Indeed, most of them are not unique to the UK: Iru an industrial body reports The aging of the labor force and the shortage of drivers in many regions of the world.
For the Unite, the reply are new standards that are arguing in the salaries and conditions industry, to prevent companies from competing by squeezing the cost of work. “We need to get away from this broken outsourcing system and a contract where you can have a high street salesman using 10 different companies, and they pay all the rates, underestimating each other to get a job,” Jones said.
The Government of Labor is advocating for sector collective negotiationBut he promised the nervous business community that he would go slowly, starting with social welfare. And there would certainly be compromises: better jobs and more resistant supply chain would come at the price of higher transport costs. The lack of truck drivers briefly illuminated this choice of 2021, but Britain decided to walk to the next crisis, when the invisible will become visible again.
