Britain is short of 100,000 truckers, leading to fuel and food supply worries
Truck drivers stand on the road near parked trucks on the M20 motorway near Ashford, UK. Picture: BLOOMBERG/CHRIS RATCLIFFEThe UK’s 25-year-old model of importing cheap labour has been upended by Brexit and Covid-19, sowing the seeds for a 1970s-style winter of discontent complete with worker shortages, spiralling wage demands and price rises.
The longer-term impact on growth, Johnson’s political fortunes and the UK’s on-off relationship with the EU is unclear. Stagnant wages, he said, would have to rise — for some, the economic logic behind the Brexit vote. Johnson has bluntly told business leaders in closed meetings to pay workers more. As the EU expanded eastward after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Britain and other European economies welcomed millions of migrants from countries like Poland, which joined the bloc in 2004. No-one really knows how many people came: in mid-2021, the British government said it had received more than 6-million applications from EU nationals for settlement, more than double the number it believed were in the country in 2016.
Wages have already soared: a heavy goods vehicle class 1 driver job was being advertised for £75,000 a year, the highest the recruiter had heard of.The Bank of England said last month that CPI inflation was set to rise to 4% late this year, “owing largely to developments in energy and goods prices”, and that the case for raising interest rates from historic lows appeared to have strengthened.
“Our country has been running at a comparatively low rate of wage growth for a long time — basically stagnant wages and totally stagnant productivity — and that is because, chronically, we have failed to invest in people, we have failed to invest in equipment and you’ve seen wages flat,” Johnson said on Sunday.
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