Britain needs lorry drivers – we’re told. The government simplified the training process (now even an inexperienced car driver can go straight to driving 44 tonne articulated vehicles) and organised boot camps, where training is available for free. However, is it potentially addressing the issue from the wrong end?
I see more and more stories of people who came into the industry, only to leave it shortly after in disappointment. As someone who, for 18 years, observed how the British haulage industry is going down a slippery slope, I don’t blame them.
Reality check
Imagine you got your HGV licence. Despite all that hype about the driver shortage, nobody wants to give you a job. The insurers make it very hard for companies to employ a newly qualified driver, knowing how many corners are being cut on training nowadays. But most of the job ads are fake anyway – they are posted by agencies to lure people to sign up with them for casual work. Meanwhile, the few remaining real vacancies offer ‘competitive wages’ of about £12 per hour. Finally, desperate to get some experience, you sign up with an agency.
Being agency driver means you’ll be sent on short notice to a random company, which will result in keys and paperwork thrown at you, telling you to fend for yourself. You have to be available virtually 24/7, but the job can be cancelled even minutes before it starts, with no compensation. If you’re lucky, you might get semi-regular work and, who knows, maybe even make enough money to survive. If you’re not, you will get random shifts starting at any time of the day or night, which means that having no advance warning you might regularly have to go to work without a proper sleep – and especially then, your sleeping pattern will be completely off the rails very soon.
Trucker’s life is tough
When on the road, you’ll find that it’s not exactly driving towards the setting sun as you expected. Britain’s overcrowded road network is stressful to drive and offers very little infrastructure for truckers. You’ll struggle to find a safe place to park, a clean shower or a place to eat decent food – and wherever you go, you’ll be expected to pay a fortune for it. Most of your work will be done on dull and underpowered fleet vehicles with basic specification. As companies rely more and more on random agency drivers, nobody will take care of the vehicles, so expect many of them to be dirty, borderline road-legal and with the cabs full of rubbish left by previous drivers who didn’t care about the truck they were also given to drive for just one day. And, often, even the company’s own facilities for truckers are in appalling condition – I can assure you that pictures shared in this thread on reddit are nothing out of the ordinary.
At the bottom of the pecking order
Such a state of the work canteen would be never acceptable for an office worker, for example. And yet companies have no issues with treating truckers to such delights. This is because the trucker is looked down on by anyone – from management, through warehouse workers and forklift drivers who consider a truck arriving for collection or with a delivery as a nuisance, the office staff who often think even things like answering to a polite hello from a trucker are below their dignity, to the gatehouse security officers who often seem to enjoy their power trips by treating drivers really badly over those 20 seconds or so that they have to interact with them.
The general public also despise trucks, ignoring the fact that those vehicles are the lifeline of the economy. And then there are police and DVSA officers, who are very keen to fine drivers extortionate amounts of money for the smallest infringements. And if you travel abroad, you’ll also be expected to do the job of the Border Force, as you can be fined £12,000 for every migrant that sneaks on board your vehicle in Calais without your knowledge.
No wonder they are leaving
I was lucky to work usually at the outskirts of the trucking industry, either in specialised haulage or driving to the Scottish Highlands and islands. I only rejoined mainstream trucking during my last year in Scotland in the hope of getting some more diverse experience before moving abroad, and after 10 months of this I was really happy to leave it behind.
But, like the slowly cooked frogs, many older drivers grew to accept it. I saw seasoned truckers calling newcomers who give up the industry “lazy”, and say things like, “You need to endure s**t jobs before landing a decent one”, or “It’s not true there is no money in trucking; you just need to put the hours in. I worked nearly 70 hours this week, but it was worth it for my £930 take home pay.”
But the thing is: it does not have to be like that. I now live in Finland and I began in what would be considered in the UK a starter’s job – I worked with other migrants and young boys straight from their army service. And yet, it was the best company I ever worked for: I had a great introductory training, the office staff were polite and supportive, the PPE equipment was of the best quality I have ever seen, and faults with the trucks were rectified promptly. Despite being paid legal minimum for the industry, I was surprised to see my average hourly wage to be slightly higher than I was paid in Scotland for driving dangerous goods tankers at night. And with the industry norm being 80 hours of work across two weeks, I had plenty of time for my own life.
What needs to be done
If the government wants to retain the drivers it spent so much money on training, it should work towards the industry being more welcoming. We desperately need a decent infrastructure for truckers, and an employment law reform that would get rid of the middlemen agencies turning a once-stable market into a zero-hour contracts, gig-work hellscape. But drivers have to stand up for themselves too. They need that eye-opening moment.
When I arrived in Finland and looked for a job, I remember looking at industrial estates and thinking, ‘There are no burger vans here; where do the drivers eat?’ It took me a while to realise there are no burger vans, because drivers – just like everyone else – eat decent, home cooked meals in restaurants. Only then did I realise, so skewed I was by my years of working in Britain that I assumed people eating greasy burgers on the kerbside is something normal. It’s time to end that mindset of, ‘yeah, it’s terrible, but in Britain this is normal.’ It might be now, but it does not have to be! And then it will all get better. Because there is no shortage of HGV licence holders. There is a shortage of people willing to endure it all for so little money.
More in society.
