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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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