Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

DyslexicAtheist

several freight-forwarding/logistics companies in my country are pulling their trucks from going to the UK (Schenker is just one of many). It's too much hassle for them. My friend works for a mid-size logistic company where their trucks still go to UK but he reckons it's a big risk even in the short-term because drivers will not put up with it and leave the company. (note: well paid long distance truckers do not exist anymore)

For those who believe the market will fix it: Well paid drivers no longer exist. The last time he has seen a local work as truck driver was in mid-2000 and meanwhile salaries have dropped to ~€700 and less therefore only some Eastern Europeans can justify that working as a driver still makes sense for them. There is not much wiggle room left in terms of just paying better salaries - even smaller freight-forwarders are asking themselves whether it continues to go there (at least for now).

He is also not happy about having historically taken care of UK freight business and that he should just roll with it. He says all the customs/declaration headache with the UK is now not different than being in charge of shipping to Uzbekistan or Russia, and he can't see profits for them in the UK market only risks which especially are a bitter pill for smaller freight-forwarders.

What makes it worse is that UK customers have a high level of expectations of services. Their service industry has always been put on a pedestal especially when comparing themselves to France/Germany/etc, ... people expect cheap, fast and highly tailored to the customer. That was already hard before, and it's going to become impossible now to satisfy the expectations. As an example pre-Brexit, he had a truck go there on Monday and it was supposed to return by the next morning with a full load (booked for the way back). Now the same trucks return empty and also are stuck frequently, sometimes a whole week because even locals don't understand the paperwork. And truckers had enough of pissing into bottles too. It's a huge risk for UK businesses when the costs of the supply chain become hard to predict.

But why don't they just warehouse more stock? They have like everyone today a JIT supply-chain and there isn't any storage to stock up. These warehouses would literally have to be built.

> For those who believe the market will fix it: Well paid drivers no longer exist. The last time he has seen a local work as truck driver was in mid-2000 and meanwhile salaries have dropped to ~€700 and less therefore only some Eastern Europeans can justify that working as a driver still makes sense for them. There is not much wiggle room left in terms of just paying better salaries - even smaller freight-forwarders are asking themselves whether it continues to go there (at least for now).

Which is probably, in part, why Brexit happened. Think about it - this is a career that used to provide fairly well-paid jobs to British people, but EU rules around access to our trucking market meant that wages were driven down so much that the only people who can do that work are Eastern Europeans based in countries with much lower cost of living. And the response of the British elite, including our press, was to insist that this didn't happen, that working class people were just brainwashed into blaming the EU because they were too stupid to realise it was their own damn fault they didn't have jobs. There's comments along those lines in almost every HN discussion of Brexit, including the other one that's on the front page right now.

So, why aren't these high paying trucking jobs reappearing now that Brexit happened? And if this were somehow a EU problem, why aren't the trucking firms making bank off of all that cheap Eastern European labor?

Lots of firms and the banks that own and fund them have been making a killing out of exploiting us Eastern Europeans, actually. All of this while enforcing privatisations, austerity and deregulation in our countries to force us to accept such low wages, both abroad and at home.

The high paying jobs won’t come back without class struggle. Just because the periphery of the EU was pillaged to such an extreme doesn’t mean the working class in the centre wasn’t exploited too.

Rebuilding an industry takes time, those resources that was previously allocated to this industry is now allocated elsewhere and need to reallocate again. Also the expertise that is required to run a business like this is either gone or doing something else.

Yeah, there's some fairly difficult (and somewhat expensive) training and testing involved in being a HGV driver. As I understand it, one of the ways the EU helped Eastern European truckers outcompete local ones is that they could use their own countries' HGV licenses to do deliveries that were entirely within the UK and didn't have to go to the hassle and expense of getting a UK one. (Wouldn't be surprised if there was something of a race to the bottom in licensing too.)

While HGV driving is certainly a skill, the difficulty level has come down quite a bit in the last 50 years. My dad used to drive an ERF LV with no power steering and a 9 speed unsynchronized gear box. Now most trucks drive like a very large car, automatic gearbox or, at the very least, a ZF fully synchronised gearbox.

You seem frame it like some kind of EU conspiracy to destroy UK, but what would be the alternative? Have every truck driver have the license for every country they go through or deliver to?

Can you imagine how much of a pain it would be for a truck driver to keep up 10+ licenses and for the logistics people to plan things when only some drivers can go to only some countries?

Also, if the required knowledge is the same, why is getting UK license so much more of a hassle than in other countries?

I don't think he was ascribing any kind of malice to the EU. You can do something sensible that still has negative repercussions.

To be honest, this is not something that would happen overnight. I don't think it will happen, but it's too early to say

> So, why aren't these high paying trucking jobs reappearing now that Brexit happened?

In the last couple of weeks? While the entire world is closed due to Corona?

Regardless, high paying truck driving jobs are long gone. There is more chance of driverless trucks in the next 10 years than a return to well paying jobs.

Same as high paying manufacturing jobs in Detroit.

It had years of preparation time, you'd think some company would start finding a workforce for a post Brexit world.

> It had years of preparation time

Preparation for (unspecified) 'treaty' or 'no-treaty' or what?

If cheap Eastern European competition was the cause of the decrease in pay, the kind of treaty shouldn't matter much. The competition is gone, the companies will now be forced to pay a solid British wage.

If the problem is indeed that truckers are refusing certain economically important trips because they would be uneconomical to them (and I have no idea whether that is true), it seems to me that this is an entirely legitimate question:

* There is demand for the trip to happen.

* The truck exists

* The driver exists

* It is legal for the trip to happen

* So why isn't there a market clearing wage at which the trip happens?

There is no demand for the trip to happen at that price.

Hence this will produce high inflation on imported goods, especially on basic necessities.

Hence this will make the average British poor citizen.. poorer.

Wage rates are sticky. Many employers are used to paying very cheap labour costs.

You see this in agriculture too, where owners will sometimes let crops rot in the fields rather than risk setting a precedent for higher wages for pickers.

One would think that with the proliferation of gig economy arrangements, employers would get used to the concept of "surge pricing". Sadly not, it seems.

We could ask the same of the rest of the world economy after large parts of China were locked down at the beginning of the pandemic and people wondered where to buy masks and ventillators. Infrastructure and jobs are slower to appear than opportunity because capital is required upfront and the skills can't be downloaded, they must be trained or moved in.

Long term this kind of thing will lead to new jobs and decent wages that force technological innovation because businesses and the politicians they employ can't push costs down by importing cheap labour. Or, as the Guardian would probably predict, Britain will run out of food and people will starve.

Which do you think is more likely?

> Long term this kind of thing will lead to new jobs and decent wages that force technological innovation because businesses and the politicians they employ can't push costs down by importing cheap labour.

It would make me happy to be wrong but I envision even more inequality as a result of brexit. I just don't see it playing out in any way that would result in an objectively better quality of life for working people. Ironic how I, a highly paid immigrant, am concerned for their future.

> I envision even more inequality as a result of brexit

It's certainly possible but since inequality has risen since 1979[1], which correlates rather well with the UK's membership of the EU it might be hard to convince Brexit voters that they've made a mistake on that, especially at this early stage. I'm sure someone will be tempted to pipe up with "evil Tories!" or "Thatcher" but they'll have to contend with all the quotes from staunch Labour politicians against the EU (in whatever guise it was in at the time), let alone explaining how joining the project coincided with the slow down of the post war narrowing of inequality and did nothing to stop it increasing later.

> I just don't see it playing out in any way that would result in an objectively better quality of life for working people

Don't forget the sovereignty bit, one of the reasons the remain argument failed to resonate with so many was because it focused purely on economics (partly because of the weakness of that for remainers, partly because it reflects interests). Given what you say, that inequality continues to rise just as it was previously then to regain sovereignty will be a big win.

[1] https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed

I doubt people will starve, but I would expect imported goods (including food) will be more expensive, and local perishable foodstuffs that are unpopular and hard to export will get very cheap.

Maybe the English need to develop a taste for whelks.

Maybe they will? I think somebody will still ship stuff to the UK. Or are the predictions coming true and the British people will now starve to death because of the EU trade embargo?

At the time of the referendum, there was [as usual] a massive shortage of UK-based HGV/LGV drivers, 89% of whom were British with an average age of nearly 50, and pay had just gone up 5%. [1]http://www.repgraph.co.uk/files/reports/The%20driver%20short...

The only bit that might be dominated by Eastern Europeans is the super long haul trips from Europe that Brexit is significantly reducing...

I do agree that claims about how Britons couldn't get careers in lorry driving due to massive influxes of foreigners probably helped influence the result, but such claims would have been as fundamentally dishonest as the claims about leaving funding the NHS.

Bigger risks, bigger profits. We did great before the EU and will do great after the EU.

The UK did not do great before the EU. In the 1960s it was considered the "sick man of Europe". That was the reason they wanted to join the EEC in the first place (and were refused twice by De Gaulle).

Yes, the man had his flaws but he was dead right on what to expect of people. He was right about the US and the UK.

"We did great before the EU"

When? In the late 1800s?

We joined the EC in 1973 partly due to falling behind economically to Western European powers within

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