“[EU licence holders cannot] check how many points you have in Britain using DVLA online services, even though they DO put penalty points and other information on your record. That puts them in the worse position when competing for jobs with UK licence holders, as many companies, third party licence check services or insurance companies simply won’t bother with checking the record of the UE licence holder, as it is simply too complicated. Of course, you can solve this problem by exchanging your EU licence for a British one (which, to drive trucks, you have to do after a maximum of five years, or when you hit 45 years, whichever is later), but with Brexit, many drivers – younger, or those who just wanted to come here for a short period of time – are not willing to do it now, as while EU licence is still valid in Britain, British licences are not valid in the UE any more, which means that they would need to obtain International Driving Licence to go for holidays to their own country, and if they decide to look for a job back in the EU, they cannot even start until they exchange their British licence back.”
The amount of applications by EU nationals to remain in the UK exceeded the UK government's recorded total number of EU citizens residing in the country by two million (5.7 million vs 3.7 million, respectively), which raises other questions about what went wrong with the former statistic
>If they recruit people from outside of Europe, how do they plan to make them leave the UK? EU is rich, even Easter Europe is a fine place and nobody will choose to work illegally in the UK(if they wanted that, they could have stayed legally).
Unless things have changed significantly between now and ten years ago (when I knew a handful of people who drove HGVs) many of the jobs even then were organised by recruitment agencies on temporary contacts. I don't see why now it'll be any different given that the wage pressure is there to pay them well.
The thing about that kind of jobs is, if you are not working your family is starving. No one is waiting for the wages to increase, they simply work somewhere else(apparently, not UK).
My father (retired) used to work for a logistics company, he was one of those who organized the deliveries (get new clients, write down proposals, compute costs, get in touch with border admins to clarify requirements/documents/approvals, etc..., all that admin&logistical stuff to have ultimately literally anything delivered from A to B).
Already at that time (~15 years ago) it was an extremely competitive business with very low earning margins and high risks (e.g. all kind of delivery delays as mentioned in the article, damages to the goods while driving or un/loading them or due to temperature/water, thieves, accidents, receiving company not being able to pay for the goods, strikes/events/whatever impacting the ETA of the delivery, etc...). I don't want to think what it has become now.
My father "lived that life" and he kind of liked it (a lot of personal responsability, had wide improvisation margins, etc), but once, on a particularily bad day, he told me directly "don't become a truck driver - it's already now a bad job and it will become worse".
He said that because the whole "poetic" side of being a truck driver (travel through many nations in Europe therefore being able to see a lot of stuff, deal with different kinds of people, be independent, etc...) got replaced by very strict delivery/pickup deadlines & monitoring & regulations - I DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT TO SAY that that's bad is general (e.g. I do love regulations about sleep time & truck maintenance, and as a company owner I would definitely like to know where my trucks are located, and deliveries/pickups are supposed to be done on time) but what I want to say is that their combination and the level of "how strict they are" can become toxic. The limits are "grey".
Nowadays truck drivers can get as stressed as a stock exchange broker but get a fraction of such a salary and in general their lives are very hard (thinking about family & living conditions while being on the road, which is most of the time). I guess that you must be born for that kind of profession + you need a lot of luck to land an "ok"-job in that area.
Concerning the Brexit & related extra truck driver visas I personally don't see that having a big impact on the current situation: admin effort does not change, risk (the articles reports about Calais - that's really a horrible situation) is still very real, in general it's just more reliable and less risky to deal with stuff in the EU (and Schengen) even if the profits are potentially not great.
Personally I think that there are other factors in play currently in this whole story (e.g. the Covid pandemic, the Suez-canal blockade, the container shortages, ...):
during the previous months we had in Switzerland because of all that several delays about buying all kind of stuff (never seen anything like that during the last 35 years - e.g. no plastic forks available, hehe), now things are slowly getting back to normal but retail delivery services have increased their prices, e.g. I'm changing flat right now and I have to pay ~150$ extra (each) to have my new bed & couch delivered to my flat (assembling is extra), which is as well for a swiss person not cheap and I think that in the past the same was priced max 50-100$ (or even included in the selling price especially for the couch) => I assume that the same happened as well in general to bigger truck shipments (e.g. from the manufacturers to the retail vendors), therefore I assume that e.g. Switzerland (for sure as well partially DE, FR, NL, ...) is basically "stealing" truck shipment capacity because it's just more remunerative (UK people are in my opinion more "picky" then others) and less risky => this makes the extra visas issued by the UK become just some background noise and that won't change unless the remunerations are increased.
The problem is, Can UK pay the EU companies enough so that they can stop servicing their current EU customers and send their trucks and drivers to the UK for 3 months? What if they can't get their customers back when the 3 months time is over? What if they lose their customers to the competition that did not took the British offer?
There is a law specifically against that. Basically, if you drive mainly in Belgium, for example, you get paid local wage regardless of where your employer is based.
Sorry, downvoted you even if I'm aware of such companies being extremely cheap (open question about ethics of who hires them), but no report in TV nor newspapers that I ever watched/read ever mentioned such strong words like "slave" nor "starve".
As you didn't post any link to potential evidence for your statements (your post style being "matter-of-fact") your post is therefore subjective, which is supposed to be NOK here on HN.
I posted no evidence because I thought it's common knowledge.
A slave per definition (wikipedia) is somebody who has no choice, other than to accept the work he/she is told to do, wherever, under whatever conditions and in this case under constant fear of loosing this exploitative employment; in other cases this could involve physical abuse.
Yes, under that definition a lot of occupations could be listed. E.g. foreign meat factory workers, hired to work in Germany under hellish conditions, coming from the eastern European nations.
Slave-like for me is just a political correct way of saying slavery. It's a big shame for the EU. Under the cover of free trade, the western EU nations exploit the eastern citizens, to keep prices for goods low.
Back to the topic.
Poland in specific is known for hiring north Korean slave workers https://www.businessinsider.com/lives-of-north-korea-slaves-... and these business men are not much nicer to their own people.
About eastern European truck drivers in general you can find a lot on the net https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppv3a9/international-lorry-d...
> These drivers from countries like Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Belarus, or Ukraine are often on the road for weeks or even months, and they sit, eat, and sleep on less than three square meters during that time. For many of them, it's the unemployment at home that forces them to drive for any wage—which some carriers will gladly use to their advantage.
I found something on German Tagesschau, which is the official German public news source https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/lkw-fahrer-arb...
But true I found nothing about polish companies sending out swarms to GB now. Maybe they will, maybe not.
The question was if anybody would sign up for this GB offer. I think no, except someone with no choice. Let's see, maybe it will be a big success story for a few thousand individuals earning a golden nose. I hope so.
This is a few months visa, which means come to UK, supply us with goods, make some money and fuck off.
That kind of opportunities are very nice for the youth where you go to some foreign country in the summer work a bit party a lot and tell the experience to everyone for years.
For a grown up to come to UK for a few moths of a skilled job doesn't add up that easily. Truck driving licenses are expensive and are for mature people since they are trusted with very expensive and powerful machinery. Who does exactly goes to a foreign country to do that job? It must be someone who is retired and does it every now and then to make some extra buck or someone who is unhireable on a regular job.
What the people are supposed to do when the 3 months of visa expire? Go back and hunt for a job that they just left? It doesn't make sense unless the money is extremely good and in the UK the money is not good, it's not like the US.
Earlier today I stumbled upon a blog post of a EU truck driver on the reasons why the EU people left UK: https://orynski.eu/20-reasons-why-there-is-shortage-of-drive...
After the Brexit referandum in 2016, EU nationals had the privilege to keep their right indefinitely, with almost no paperwork and cost up until the beginning of 2021 and many did not take the opportunity.
If they recruit people from outside of Europe, how do they plan to make them leave the UK? EU is rich, even Easter Europe is a fine place and nobody will choose to work illegally in the UK(if they wanted that, they could have stayed legally).
People from poorer places will want to stay, that's why you have the Calais issue. People from richer places cannot be paid good enough to come to the UK.