[Closed] What's so bad about a labour shortage anyway?

So, great idea let’s give everyone a pay rise but it’ll be offset by the increase of prices for everything, so back to where you started. The problem with the UK is chronic under-productivity, so unless those pay rises are matched with increased output it’s going nowhere. The more likely scenario is that it some areas they’ll simply invest in automation so those jobs will disappear - who needs truck drivers that need a rest every few hours when you can simply have a driverless vehicle. Of course the fact that this Government and quite a chunk of the population voted for Brexit which makes it even harder to sell to your neighbours as well as increasing the costs of everything we import, which is almost everything. COVID is creating a convenient smokescreen for the politicians right now, don’t expect it’ll last.

I predict that our labour shortages will soon be filled by our commonwealth cousins who will be more than happy to leave their homes that flood every year and work for a pound an hour and sleep in a tent.
Food picked, lives saved ,Tory tycoon profits up and Barry Brexit can go back to watching Strictly.

let’s give everyone a pay rise but it’ll be offset by the increase of prices for everything

It won't, though. We are talking about an increase in wages for a defined sector of the labour market, and labour isn't the totality of the total input cost for the goods we are talking about. Weird that the economy has been able to weather 30 years of pay rises for the top of the labour market with minimal inflation but if a shelf stacker gets a quid an hour more - we are DOOMED!

There probably will be more automation and low productivity jobs will evaporate. Maybe that's not a bad thing in an economy like ours that's apparently so fragile it falls over when there's an interruption in the foreign cheap labour supply.

The more likely scenario is that it some areas they’ll simply invest in automation so those jobs will disappear – who needs truck drivers that need a rest every few hours when you can simply have a driverless vehicle

Yep, long term expensive low skill jobs will just get automated / exported away eg labour intensive crops which can't be picked by machine will just be imported from countries with cheap labour and vanish from the UK.

I look forward to increased pay , for so long , workers have been screwed by successive govts , indeed most tesco workers get subsidised by the state , this is replicated across all sectors of so called service sector .
We don’t really do much heavy industry anymore , no ships are built commercially , steel is about to shut down , hell in a handcart .
Personally as a joiner our rates have been creeping up again but still below rates 20 years ago ......

A degree of labour shortage is good for workers, or at least the specific workers that have the shortage. A really big one, not so much. Like, truck drivers right now are in the headlines at last,for good reason- that's a shortage that's been growing for a decade and been completely ignored. But while individual drivers have a lot of flexibility and it should improve conditions, the same shortage is impacting massive numbers of businesses. Can't get your raw materials, can't get your product to market. It's even a headache for the supermarket stackers now having to spread out the same amount of product more thinly, constantly rearranging shelves to try and cover up shortages. Not healthy.

We need to train more people for unskilled jobs...no wait..

most tesco workers get subsidised by the state

Quite a lot public sector workers also have to rely on benefits, which is absolutely ****ing crazy, if a government pay it's own workers an adequate wage.

I'm lucky that I can afford to pay more for goods so that workers could have proper pay, but a lot of people couldn't.

The OP also misses the fact that it takes 9 months to get a full HGV license - pay alone won't see us through till next summer.

I spent almost my entire career within the engineering and manufacturing sector, including 16 years in one of the UK’s largest engineering companies. Almost every year we were in some sort of re-organisation or redundancy programme. In the later years I was doing cross-industry work with government on skills - having seen close-up those civil servants responsible for advising ministers it’s no surprise the country is a basket case - everything was about the ‘optics’ and parliamentary cycles, not about sustainable investment and improvement. The way that in-work benefits are used to subsidise workers wages for retailers like Tesco is no accident, it’s been deliberate government policy.

The OP also misses the fact that it takes 9 months to get a full HGV license – pay alone won’t see us through till next summer.

absolutely this

Referring to all these jobs as ‘unskilled’ is nonsense. It’s just a way to dehumanise people to excuse treating them like shit. What ‘unskilled’ seems to be shorthand for us ‘didn’t go to university’.

It’s not just a case of training people either. The average age of a lorry driver is 56. You can’t just magic 100,000 fully trained ones up from nowhere

Brexit (which was/is total idiocy) has brought to a head decades of policy where no employer was remotely interested in spending money on training their workforce and the state didn’t give a shit about it either

They still don’t

Increasing the pay of high wage jobs pushes up house prices as peoplemcan afford to compete with each other. This pushes up prices across the board and makes it harder for people on low wages to buy.

Pushing up low wage jobs is likely IMO to result in rent increases, because there is still a housing shortage, therefore the extra money will end up back with the rich people.

Investment in automation would be good, but what might happen in a global economy is that businesses will just move and the UK economy will just shrink to match the size of the smaller workforce.

Labour shortages don't magically produce a workforce capable of doing the jobs do they? So in the meantime things will just grind to a halt. And eventually we will have enough HGV drivers and fruit pickers to get back to where we started, hopefully.

You can't just import 100,000 truck drivers in overnight either. Big business isn't thinking about now until Xmas - they're thinking about the next 20 years, and they'd quite like a stream of pliant, cheap, insecure labour from overseas. If they come pretrained at the expense of someone else (thank you very much, Nigerian health sector!) so much the better.

What ‘unskilled’ seems to be shorthand for us ‘didn’t go to university’.

No, but you knew that already. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp

No, but you knew that already

Er, your reference pretty much agrees with Binners!

Unskilled labor is generally characterized by a lower educational attainment, such as a high school diploma, GED or lack thereof, and typically results in smaller wages. Work that requires no specific education level or specialized experience is often available to the unskilled labor force.

It’s not just a case of training people either. The average age of a lorry driver is 56.

I am confident that it doesn't take 56 years to train a lorry driver so I don't see the point of that comment.

It does sound that it is very much a case of more training people.

Unless you are suggesting that it takes 56 years for someone to decide to become a lorry driver?

Big business isn’t thinking about now until Xmas – they’re thinking about the next 20 years

20 months if you’re lucky

they’d quite like a stream of pliant, cheap, insecure labour from overseas

One of the reasons for Brexit. We had people “from abroad” who could work here and still have all the rights the rest of us have. What some clearly want are for migrant workers to be tied to work visas, and be in fear of being sent home if they don’t except being teated as a second class citizen. No right for them to bring their families here. No right to switch to a better paid job with a different employer. Tied labour. It’s all some people think foreigners are worth. That’s why you now have Brexit loons like Tim Wetherspoons calling for visas for EU workers to staff his theme pubs. He doesn’t want to get rid of EU workers, he doesn’t want to replace them with higher paid UK workers, he wants to be able to employ people and treat them as poorly as he can get away with, where ever they were born. Brexit will not result in these employers treating their staff any better, or making they jobs pay a real living wage, they will screw anyone if they can get away it.

An interview with the Morrisons logistics chief was illuminating. What is apparent is that the daily hgv deliveries were essentially half full, they are switching up to deliver every two days and full.

This shows the costs of transportation were essentially too low, they were superceded by the costs if not doing a daily delivery. This clogs our roads and pollutes our air.

If the present issues make them relook at their systems and reduce journeys then we all benefit. Expect to see ads trumpeting these "green" improvements.

If driver pay and conditions improve then great. We might see an industry racing to the bottom improve.

What some clearly want are for migrant workers to be tied to work visas, and be in fear of being sent home if they don’t except being teated as a second class citizen.

This doesn't seem to be the policy of the Business Secretary. He's told them to hire and train UK resident workers.

Oh… had a chat to my haulage contacts (both by dad and uncle where drivers)… those being hired currently are being pinched from delivery companies (DPD etc) and agriculture etc. We’ll just be shifting people between struggling sectors over the next twelve months, and creating shortages elsewhere. My brother has had offers (he has an HGV licence) that sound like quite good money, but he likes what he does now… pay isn’t the only reason HGV license holders are resistant to step into the gaps left by people we’ve told to **** off.

This doesn’t seem to be the policy of the Business Secretary.

I didn’t say it is.

And it wouldn’t work anyway, not this year anyway. People won’t come. With our new attitude to EU workers, why would people come? Just go to another EU country and have full rights, rather than face discrimination and a hostile environment.

A shift to trying to fill gaps with migrant workers might come later, if we have a very bumpy winter, but I suspect the likes of the Wetherspoon man will be very disappointed if he thinks he’ll get his way anytime soon. He’ll have to stick to treating his UK staff abysmally instead.

I am confident that it doesn’t take 56 years to train a lorry driver so I don’t see the point of that comment.

What it suggests (applying a little foresight) is that a cliff edge approaches as the workforce retires (or dies in service). If the average age is 56 it implies there's a lot of folk older than this driving LGV's.

I am confident that it doesn’t take 56 years to train a lorry driver so I don’t see the point of that comment.

Are you being especially dense and/or Ccontrary at the moment?

It shows that there has been a failure to train enough UK lorry drivers for years, and it's coming home to roost now we can't plug the gap with foreign drivers. Plus a potential issue in the next few years with retirement and ill health.

MoreCashThanDash
Full Member

The OP also misses the fact that it takes 9 months to get a full HGV license – pay alone won’t see us through till next summer.

Also that we just don't have the capacity in place to rapidly increase the number of drivers. About 70000 drivers qualify a year, which is sometimes more than the replacement rate, sometimes less.

It took the best part of a decade to grow this problem, it's not going to be any faster to fix it.

I am confident that it doesn’t take 56 years to train a lorry driver so I don’t see the point of that comment.

it means that we’ve not been training enough lorry drivers for about 30 years

Not really rocket science, is it?

It shows that there has been a failure to train enough UK lorry drivers for years, and it’s coming home to roost now we can’t plug the gap with foreign drivers. Plus a potential issue in the next few years with retirement and ill health.

Just like the health service etc.
Why bother to invest in training your own population and pay them well when you can just "import" them fully trained from the originating (and let's face it often poorer) country's expense no matter the the detriment to them and their home country and keep pay rates down.
Bringing in cheaper overseas labour is a short term fix at best but should not be a long term strategy.

2 sides to this though, yes we've relied on cheap skilled Labour imports, it was easier than training and employing UK residents. We have under utilised Labour in the UK, but are those individuals ready to actively participate in productive work. The great Brexit experiment in action, probably not something envisaged but the Brexiteers.

it means that we’ve not been training enough lorry drivers for about 30 years

Not really rocket science, is it?

Look at what you said :

It’s not just a case of training people either. The average age of a lorry driver is 56.

It is a case of training more people. It doesn't matter if we have not been training lorry drivers for 130 years, the solution is still to train lorry drivers.

It's not rocket science.

FOM wasn't about cheap labour, was about flexible labour

Its why UK government never bothered to use powers they did have to return EU workers without jobs.

As ever its about long term investment, even 'unskilled' labour means training, huge investment in FE, apprenticeships, etc, instead we've seen the opposite of that.

On top of an ageing population I can't see us breaking our dependency on immigration anytime soon, nor will there be wage rises that wont outpace inflation for most and UK wages lag many other countries not just for unskilled workers but for skilled ones too.
NHS had 10% staffing shortage b4 brexit and nursing bursaries still aren't coming back.

We have under utilised Labour in the UK, but are those individuals ready to actively participate in productive work.

Indeed, as we have pretty much full employment, which Peter are we going to rob from to train to drive a HGV for Paul?

And by full employment, I mean those who choose to be in the labour market already are - of course, some may choose to enter the labour market if wages were higher.

TLDR Where are these unemployed folk that we are going to train as hgv drivers?

some may choose to enter the labour market if wages were higher.

That was exactly my point, there are a lot of people choosing not to be in the Labour market, does anyone really believe the unemployment figures after years of manipulation and changing of definitions. We also have an element of revolving door employment when we're at 'full employment', employers are desperate so will take who ever they can, doesn't mean some of those individuals are capable of holding a job down for more than a couple of months.

It is a case of training more people. It doesn’t matter if we have not been training lorry drivers for 130 years, the solution is still to train lorry drivers.

Great. Where do we get these 100,000 people from who are going to pay for their own HGV training? If we all start breeding in earnest now, they’ll enter adulthood and be ready for training in about 20 years

I know you’re an enthusiastic Brexiteer but even you might see the idiocy of telling tens of thousands of EU HGV drivers to **** off home without the remotest clue who was going to fill their jobs, that still need doing

HURRAY FOR BREXIT!

It’s almost like the morons who planned and supported this hadn’t really thought it through, isn’t it?

the solution is still to train lorry drivers

But you also have to make the job attractive so people actually want to train to do it. And you have to make sure there are enough people to train to do the job as well as do all the other things that need doing.

Binners has a valid point, it's not lack of available labour, it's a about who is going to pay for the training. There actually aren't that many truly unskilled jobs any more, traditional unskilled labour like the docks, construction and warehousing all require more skills and qualifications than being able to move a heavy load from A to B.

who needs truck drivers that need a rest every few hours when you can simply have a driverless vehicle

Simply?

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

Binners has a valid point, it’s not lack of available labour, it’s a about who is going to pay for the training.

But you also have to make the job attractive so people actually want to train to do it.

The fact that there might well be problems associated with training HGV drivers doesn't mean that training drivers isn't a solution.

The average age of 56 for a HGV driver is irrelevant. It doesn't make training more drivers a less valid solution.

Or should we get the average age down before considering training more drivers?

I was trying to point out that providing trainers and examiners isn't *the* solution as suggested earlier - it's a required part of the solution.

This doesn’t seem to be the policy of the Business Secretary. He’s told them to hire and train UK resident workers.

That might work eventually for HGV drivers but how do we 'train' people to pick fruit and pack meat? The wages would have to get a lot higher to encourage enough UK workers to do it IMO.

The average age of 56 for a HGV driver is irrelevant. It doesn’t make training more drivers a less valid solution.

No, but it suggests we’re currently not doing enough of it. How do we train 10 times as many over the next two years than the past two? And where do these people come from? Who does the jobs they leave? Who pays for the training?

[ Not cancelling the HGV training programme for those leaving the forces on medical discharges would have been wise. ]

Why haven’t we been training these drivers we need over the last five years we have been “planning” to end FoM?

providing trainers and examiners isn’t *the* solution as suggested earlier

Was that suggested?

I responded to the dismissive attitude towards training more HGV drivers because apparently the current average age is 56. I can't see how that's relevant.

It’s relevant because it is an indicator that we have not been doing the thing you (and everyone else) say we should have been doing.

how do we ‘train’ people to pick fruit and pack meat?

You don't, you have to decide whether higher wages as an incentive or reduce benefits as a stick is the appropriate approach. As usual in reality it's a combination of both. Set the minimum wage at a liveable level (which is about controlling the costs of living as much as increasing basic income levels) and then control who is eligible for benefits. The difficult bit is deciding the last bit.

Lack of new HGV drivers is also as much about the lack of HGV tests for new drivers because of COVID,30,000 missed last year and also the change in tax status of drivers rather than the EU/Brexit issue. Shortage of drivers means they can now turn down the sh**y jobs with the terrible hours and cr*p pay.My cousin is an HGV driver and relocated to Spain years ago for better conditions. My brother in law worked for a HGV distribution company until a few months ago.Drivers were just turning cr*p jobs down or not turning up as they now know they can get better paid work elsewhere. One could say the market is resetting itself.Consumers may have to start paying more so the workers can get a decent salary,shock horror.

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?