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Comment by oji0hub | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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