It's amusing to see this, as in the UK people think shortage of truck drivers is purely a Brexit phenomenon.
That may be a factor, but there are others in place as well such as the tax regime changing for self-employed drivers (IR35) etc.
That may be a factor, but there are others in place as well such as the tax regime changing for self-employed drivers (IR35) etc.
However, many UK truck drivers were foreign nationals that all got sent home or didn't believe in their job security after Brexit. Nothing in economics is ever the result of just one thing, but Brexit has made an existing problem much worse.
The difference can be seen all around the UK. Every European country has some kind of shortage in the logistics industry, but only in the UK are the problems bad enough that the army needs to step in.
For people on the fence about going back home, lockdowns were a major driver. Additionally, Poland has rejected vaccine mandates, whilst the UK seems on the cusp of implementing them, and requires them for re-entry to the UK.
For people who have experience living under totalitarianism, being forced by the Government to take a medical treatment (often for no purpose since many working-class people already survived COVID) is unacceptable.
The other big factor is that a lot of people who have worked in the UK for the last 5-10 years have now saved up enough money to buy a nice house in Poland. By contrast UK real estate remains continuously unaffordable due to the restrictions on development and continued population expansion from immigration (legal and otherwise).
These trends of de-migration would have played out slowly over the next 5 years but COVID rapidly accelerated them.
More opinions here: https://emerging-europe.com/news/the-poles-disappointed-by-b...