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There are 10s of thousands of people with HGV licenses who don't work as drivers. Also only 6% of HGV drivers are female. Maybe doing something on pay and conditions to attract these people to the industry would help.
I think the HGV driver issue is a wake up call to any employer who's business model depends on cheap foreign labour to relise its time to invest either in people or equipment or die
I don’t think it’s so much the training costs stopping people choosing certain jobs. It’s the fact that when you’ve been in it 5 years your wages will still be low, you’ll still be treated like shit and you still won’t be able to afford a house. You may as well choose a shit option that lets you piss around on the internet all day long rather than go home smelling of food production or not go home at all and sleep in a truck stop.
Plenty of people are quite happy to invest mortgage sized amounts of money to hopefully become a lowish paid pilot but eventually they’ll be doing nicely.
We don’t have enough pilots either… people will be reminded of that next year, it’s a hidden problem this year for obvious reasons.
We don’t have enough pilots either… people will be reminded of that next year, it’s a hidden problem this year for obvious reasons.
Only a problem if your pilot needs to be based in the UK - for many airlines reconfiguring where there "hubs" are to fit with staff availability is far easier than the HGV problem...
Very true. Now, think of the companies making location decisions right now. A failing UK haulage sector is another strike against siting here when balancing everything up. Add that to new restrictions on where you can recruit from to fill vital specialist roles in your own company, and the extra cost and hassle of shipping to and supporting your customers in the EEA and Northern Ireland... etc, etc.
Now, if the government linked these jobs to corporation housing, a fair wage structure, training paid for, and a few other sweet things, maybe they'd get people jumping on them.
I've just taken a 20% pay drop to get a 9-5 job where I'll have a work/life balance. I was forced to work 6/7 days a week and on a shift system that once a week didn't allow for enough sleep. 3 years of my life almost wasted except an experience letter. I studied external "burn-the-candle-at-both-ends" CPD, off my own back, that almost caused my brain to meltdown. My employer didn't provide on the job training or ongoing CPD.
I've worked in similar work to these drivers in the past. Lonely continental shifts. There are plenty of people who'll try to enter into it if the license/training and subsequent housing are sorted. They want to know they'll get more than £29/week more than their friends that are unemployed though (and the loss from that of money for milk, uniforms, etc) They want to know their families can be lifted out of poverty and still be able to watch their kids grow up.
how do we ‘train’ people to pick fruit and pack meat?
you'd be surprised at how many people can't actually stack shelfs properly or don't give a shit because they are treated like shit.
The labour market is very complicated.
Companies are not a level amount of "busy" all the time. Workload peaks and troughs. You win work, you recruit (or try to). You dont win work you cannot afford to train. You cannot see 10 years in advance to put enough people through apprenticeship and tlearn how to actually do the job productively on the hope that the future work you win (which goes to the lowest bidder remember) will pay for them. So, who pays for training?
Companies struggling for labour put up wages to attract staff from other companies as takes too long/too expensive to train. All wages go up as companies dont want to lose staff. All costs go up and the low bar raises. This is why someone earing average salary now would be considered rich even 20 years ago. So costs and therefore prices go up and the cycle starts all over again.
Paying more isnt the answer. Companies need a stable workload to properly plan and high productivity.
On top of above (which has been a problem for years) there have been 3 new big factors affecting the uk labour market to get to this position, IR35 changes, brexit and covid. All 3 happened at almost the same time.
I think the next 2 years will be a constant struggle to get all this fixed, its not easy and you have so many viewpoints.
I manage resourcing for a major engineering company and we have major shortages of people in several areas. We pay well, have good working conditions and unionised workforce. Doesnt matter, the skills we need dont exist in the uk.
Whatever the wages, training required etc,. it is still simple maths. If you have 10 million jobs you need 10 million people.
If 3 million of those were migrant workers who are no longer in the pool and won't be again because "we" don't want migrants in the country then it doesn't matter what the wages are.
Based on that you then need to throw away certain areas of the market where there is no appeal to ensure the jobs you have left are the more desirable jobs that can be closer to 100% filled.
The government could easily pay for the training. It's reliance on the market to take up slack is laughable.
Markets are rigged, and generally work against low earners - and on top of that the idea that people expect deliveries to be free or next to nothing - it's a shit storm without some form of Government intervention.
The neoliberal benefits to cheap labour from being within the EU have always been apparent to me. We are staring this one in the face.
If the government moved towards a job guarantee - I.e they effectively offered jobs/training for where the demand is in society and coupled this with a policy of full employment then we could fix this. But they won't - the Tories fatally flawed logic of the market fixing everything is coming undone.
Also, it's shameful that during the pandemic we digital workers weren't really missed, and did our work from home. Yet the necessary jobs like feeding the nation are not deemed important enough to be paid well, or supported now.
Well we deserve what we get dont we?
It's reasonable to acuse me of cynicism for this, but I reckon a more likely outcome is the 'dubai model'. If Acme BigCo doesn't have enough workers, they'll be brought in on a flexible basis, by agencies / consultancies (Serco, Crapita etc), with all the workers needs (eg visa, accomodation, food, training etc) taken care of by the agencies. The workers will have almost no rights at all. I don't think it'll be as bad as the effective slavery you have in the middle east, but it won't be an improvement on the status of an EU National. I don't think this labour shortage will be solved by creating a workers paradise, I expect legal 'innovation' will. Hopefully I will be proved wrong!
Whatever the wages, training required etc,. it is still simple maths. If you have 10 million jobs you need 10 million people
Then the workforce should simply be redirected from overpaid bullshit jobs of little societal value to well paid jobs of value.
Your domestic workforce would then move. That's what market forces say.
Then the workforce should simply be redirected from overpaid bullshit jobs of little societal value to well paid jobs of value.
Hooray for the command and control economy!
There is enough workers. It's just that much of the workforce are employed in jobs where the old model of society prescribed many bullshit jobs.
This is likely to change over the next ten years or so.
As neolibralism dies on its arse there will be a massive adjustmemt of what's deemed of value to society.
It's going to be a tussle between share-holder 'value'/ house price inflation and keeping food on the table.
Hooray for the command and control economy!
Astute observation.
We live in a rigged economy already that works to benefit the wealthy. It's already command and control, just not for the majority.
You want food supply shortages, expensive utilities etc then keep swallowing the market logic.
I'm not convinced Belinda from accounts is going to put away that bullshit spreadsheet tracker that nobody reads anyway to take up gutting chickens / picking fruit / other worthwhile but current underpaid job.
I’m not convinced Belinda from accounts is going to put away that bullshit spreadsheet tracker that nobody reads anyway to take up gutting chickens / picking fruit / other worthwhile but current underpaid job.
You mean like when a pandemic dictated what we could and couldn't do over the last couple of years?
You think society is always going to be organised around office life if food gets scarce?
Dream on.
People lost their shit with toilet roll shortages remember.
The UK economy is based around bullshit jobs of low value though... well that's a bit harsh but there are an awful lot of low paid jobs in the UK (food, 'hospitality') where there is constant downwards pressure on prices as margins are low and the customers moan like hell about any changes (who remember the recent 'how much for a pint!' thread. A big lump of the population are very used to current and prices and adding a few % here and there will cause a lot of unhappiness.
Or, simply, put up the minimum wage, then put up income tax and fiddle around with other parts of the system to move tax bias heavily to anyone earning more than a mode average wage. Ultimately training is nice, but not everyone in the UK can be 'high skill', there are a lot of jobs of enormous value that need to be a lot better supported, and the support is called higher wages
Above. Tax doesn't pay for central government spending.
So if you move tax in one direction or another it needs to be for another reason (inflation control, policy decisions etc.)
Government spending is a policy choice not constrained by lack of budget or tax receipts.
The idea that the status-quo will always be preserved is nonsense.
We've had a pandemic (still there of course), Brexit and 40 years of unfettered markets. Just about every indicator points to a change of how the economy and society organises istelf.
For a start I can't see Airlines returning to where they were (which was pretty terrible before the pandemic in terms of profit.) Working from home is bound to continue and have a knock-on affect on how we are employed. Then there's all the supply chain stuff.
Also the UK was almost in recession before the pandemic hit!
It might take a few years to see how it all pans out and what comes next but I suspect there is going to be lots of drastic change as we move to a different economic model.
Not to mention climate-change!
You think society is always going to be organised around office life if food gets scarce?
This seems like fantasy to me.
There's not really any such thing as a labour shortage - it's just the market sending signals.
Er, your reference pretty much agrees with Binners!
Unskilled refers to the role. We have plenty of uni grads doing unskilled jobs. We have plenty of people in skilled and semi-skilled jobs that didn't go to uni. Binners wants to make out calling jobs "unskilled" is some kind of toffee-nosed slight but he knows of course that it's a word with a recognised meaning.
The nature of unskilled jobs is that there are no barriers to entry: anybody can show up and start a job as a shelfstacker. Truck driving is a classic semi-skilled job: you can't just show up tomorrow and do it, but it doesn't take that long to train/get a ticket for it. That doesn't mean that those jobs are easy, or don't have a knack to doing them well, or shouldn't be well-paid.
it is still simple maths. If you have 10 million jobs you need 10 million people.
It's not maths, it's medium and long term macroeconomics, baby! The solution is not going to be to just find 10 million more workers, either by importing them from the "Commonwealth" or pushing more UK residents in to the labour market. That's short term thinking.
The economy is going to have to be more efficient (eg Morrisons making one full truck trip instead of two half empty ones, make deliveries at night when there is less traffic), adopt more capital-intensive production (eg more mechanised weed picking and harvesting, app ordering in restaurants, unstaffed or less staffed shops), or price labour-intensive jobs accordingly (eg not have ten different subcontracted gig economy couriers delivering to every street every goddamn day).
Business Secretary and all round Brexiteer dimwit Kwasi Kwartang has already made it quite clear that the government has no intention of providing any funds for training
More joined up thinking from the vote leave morons
If he did you'd accuse him of subsidising big business
It's an industry that has been going downhill in working conditions due to the ease at which new labour can be brought in working in incrementally worse conditions
It's also an industry that has inefficiency due to low costs
It's also an industry that might not be around as much in 30 years time as technology moves on
The reality for anyone who is a current HGV driver or a returning one is that they will see a Brexit bonus as their pay goes up and t&C's improve. Getting substantially more women into the sector would also be a good thing and if This enables that then it's a bonus
Empty supermarket shelves are due to the way they operate now, 30 years ago stock would have been brought out the back and placed on them, now there is no stock because it's on a wagon on the M6 and the computer doesn't let them back fill. The industry relies on cheap haulage to operate the way it does.
overpaid bullshit jobs
So the problem now is workers are paid too much?
(eg Morrisons making one full truck trip instead of two half empty ones, make deliveries at night when there is less traffic)
I would politely suggest you have no idea how efficient Morrisons already are. Organising to reduce empty loads and low volume loads has been their focus for a while. Their PR is full of the “green” advantages if this, but of course it’s really about the constant driving down of costs that is the MO of most supermarket businesses.
I would politely suggest you have no idea how efficient Morrisons already are.
I would politely point you toward the interview the CEO of Morrisons gave on R4 Today programme and that was referred to above! CEO said that was exactly what they were doing to save labour 🤣
Exactly what they are already doing.
Or should we get the average age down before considering training more drivers?
Great Scot! Never mind the lorry drivers, tell us more about this time machine you’ve invented, Doc! 😉
When they were interviewing lorry drivers on the radio 4 yesterday they were saying the problem isn’t just money, it’s the fact that you’re treated like shit.
Unlike mainland Europe there are no facilities at all for drivers so you end up in a lay-by having to take a dump into a carrier bag inside your own cab
Something else, along with the training, they have no intention of investing in and will supposedly appear by magic, I suppose?
Where do I sign up? Sounds great!
Then the workforce should simply be redirected from overpaid bullshit jobs of little societal value to well paid jobs of value.
The big problem there is who gets to decide what jobs are bullshit? A dangerous attitude.
It is all wage and conditions.
If there were the following for hgv drivers:
HGV hubs every xxx miles featuring free:
* Sleeping pods
* Food (proper cooked breakfast lunch and dinner)
* Toilets and showers
* Gym
*2 weeks local / 2 weeks far staffing schedule so they could spend time with family
* Mentally stable and supportive manager.
In addition to £100k salary + profit share / stock options + realistic targets.
Don’t tell me there wouldn’t be a queue…
The above is basically what the average big tech worker receives. That is in part why you have a big queue of people trying to work in that sector / for those co’s.
If raising wages will not work then how com other countries with higher wages for manual work are doing better than us economically?
The above is basically what the average big tech worker receives.
Really?
Exactly what they are already doing
In response to the increased costs of hiring hgv drivers, they are essentially moving their warehousing off the roads and back into bricks and mortar
I manage resourcing for a major engineering company and we have major shortages of people in several areas. We pay well, have good working conditions and unionised workforce. Doesnt matter, the skills we need dont exist in the uk.
This implies that you aren't training and increasing your people's skills. Training is as important if not more important than the latest robotic machine tool/plant. A clue the robots don't go shopping and without the shopping demand falls.
The big problem there is who gets to decide what jobs are bullshit? A dangerous attitude.
Exactly. There are not actually very many really worthy jobs (on the face of it) so concentrating on those and expecting people to actually want to do them is not going to add up.
No doubt a typical "overpaid bullshit" job would be an IT person. But take those IT people away and a lot of things start to fail, including the automation that is helping reduce the number of over shit repetitive, manual jobs.
In response to the increased costs of hiring hgv drivers, they are essentially moving their warehousing off the roads and back into bricks and mortar
It’s not just a shortage of HGV drivers.
There was a retail analyst on Radio 4 last week saying that due to the increased restrictions we’ve imposed on ourselves with Brexit, the ‘just in time’ supply chain is simply no longer a viable business model in the UK
We’re going to have to accept that the days of walking into any supermarket and just assuming they’ll have everything you want, sat their on the shelf waiting for you, are over
Taking Back Control eh?
The above is basically what the average big tech worker receives
LOL no.
Really?
Yes. Pretty standard in Fintech too.
The big problem there is who gets to decide what jobs are bullshit? A dangerous attitude.
And who decides what 'overpaid' means. Maybe there could be a committee of some sort
Yes. Pretty standard in Fintech too.
I'm currently pulling apart the accounts of a couple of fintech companies. Their staff are not getting anything like that. Exceptions are not the norm.
Can only speak for London, but that's the going rate for a top class senior software engineer, it's been getting harder to hire since pandemic too.
who needs truck drivers that need a rest every few hours when you can simply have a driverless vehicle.
Bwahahahahahahaha! Nope. What you’re showing is a complete lack of understanding about how technology and it’s development works. There are no such things as driverless vehicles, at least, not at the moment, and as far as large, articulated heavy goods vehicles are concerned, it’ll be at least another decade before such technology has matured to the point where such vehicles are safe to use on narrow British roads. If at all, personally I think it’ll be twenty years before such tech is completely safe enough for such trucks to be enabled for our roads, which are nothing like American roads and highways.
This implies that you aren’t training and increasing your people’s skills.
No, it implies they can’t get the people with the skills needed in their organisation because of a lack of suitable people in this country. It is very likely that also means a lack of people with the skills to teach those skills in this country.
Take a very simple example… a company is using a CRM product developed by a company based in Spain. They need experienced and trained developers to change how they are using it to suit new customer facing channels and to integrate with the other systems required for them. Good news, there have been training programmes on the go all the time for years. Oh, they’re in Spain. Oh, the places tend to be filled with Spanish, Portuguese and German developers already. That’s alright, we could encourage a few of them to come and… oh.
But they are bullshit high paid jobs, so it doesn’t matter that we can’t fill the posts, right? Now, time to expand… does the company do so here, or Amsterdam, or Frankfurt, or Barcelona, or anywhere else where they can function in a joined up modern world where people can by employed for their skill set, not their accent.
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/273615/web-engineer-signal-ai?so=i&pg=1&offset=16&l=London%2c+UK&u=Miles&d=20
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/518586/senior-react-native-engineer-kin-pluscarta?so=i&pg=2&offset=5&l=London%2c+UK&u=Miles&d=20
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/528802/frontend-developer-javascript-typescript-tradingview?so=i&pg=2&offset=1&l=London%2c+UK&u=Miles&d=20
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/507621/senior-full-stack-engineer-bulb-energy?so=i&pg=1&offset=19&l=London%2c+UK&u=Miles&d=20
bear in mind that candidates often negotiate up at offer stage too
Easy, people can just give up their overpaid bullshit job and go and pick that fruit. It doesn't pick itself you know.
Oh, the places tend to be filled with Spanish, Portuguese and German developers already. That’s alright, we could encourage a few of them to come and… oh.
These courses are put on via a secret schedule? Come on, every training organisation publishes its timetable ahead of time. Failure to secure a place comes down to the employer not prioritising training for the workforce and failing to book a spot or two on this course.
Edit Failing to train the people in a mission critical piece of software is managerial failure, especially if said skilled people are as rare as hen's teeth.