kr79:
Hi Lucy I sent an email in to commercial motor a few weeks back in response to your article on this that was coming at it from the operators perspective.
In my opinion the operators that struggle are the ones that pay poor wages won’t pay parking and expect max hours etc.
I saw a job advertised on a Facebook page today class 1 tram per self employed 550 a week all in. No doubt the operator will tell everyone you can’t get drivers not that you can’t get people that will bend over and be shafted
The other things are micro management from company’s especially the blue chips. Umpteen calls a day toolbox talks and memos about the correct way to climb up the steps in to the cab debriefs after every shift. Your driving a lorry to deliver baked beans to Tesco not defusing a bomb ffs.
After all that it’s more often than not these firms that you see buried under a bridge or in an alleyway that the sat nav told them to go down.
Add in lack of facilities and unsociable hours the feeling your about as welcome as a ■■■■ in an astronauts suit atvmany firms and delivery points.
The feeling your are been demonised by the likes of the mayor of London and the media I’m not one of the it’s up there with rocket science and we should be on 1500 quid a week merchants but all in all it’s on the whole a pretty crap job to get in to now.
+1.
I was waiting for Lucy to post the Operators thread, but since you said what I think, I’ll chip in now.
I believe if you are in the truck, you get paid for breaks and POA, it isn’t as if you can really do much else. Our wages are above average, not the absolute best, but paying right through helps balance it and there’s never any question about paying expenses.
I hate the zero hours rubbish and self-employed route, agree with HMRC ( that’s a first!), if you don’t have a truck, you aren’t self-employed. If I want someone to work for me and do their best, then I give them a contract and with it security. I don’t have the work, then it’s my problem and I need to find it; the driver gets paid either way.
I also employ people to do their job, I don’t want to do it for them, I don’t need to ring them every 5 minutes to find out what they are doing and tell them how to do it better. I don’t think the micromanaging is unique to drivers though, it’s more common across all walks of life now. I don’t know if it’s middle management justifying their existance, control freakery or a belief that drivers can only put a key in an ignition and after that they need to have their hands held. Frankly once I’ve given my lot the job, I don’t want to speak to them, it means there’s a problem if I do; though if it’s a run that takes a week or more I speak to them so they know they haven’t been forgotten 
. Our debrief consists of ‘how’d it go?’ 
. If you give people responsibility, they rarely let you down, unless they are incompetent in the first place, in which case they won’t be staying. Our main customers are decent too, so where we deliver and collect from, the drivers are made to feel that they are part of the team, particularly when there’s a field trial on.
We are lucky that most people once they come to us, usually via word or mouth, they stay and stay. However, if I were to put an ad on the tinternet saying, ‘Need drivers for Euro, quite a lot of double-manning’, not a lot of people would apply. It’s the long hours, away from home bit that puts people off. It used to be quite an adventure and the romance of the foreign open road, now there is so much moved by road and younger people see travelling in Europe much like I saw going to Birmingham at their age, all the glamour ( such as it was ), has gone.