kwlf wrote:
On the other hand, allegedly a local petrol station had a glut of drivers driving 100 miles from the Midlands to fill up, then drive 100 miles back home!
I have seen people locally here who drive 20 or 30 miles to reach a cheaper gas station with between 5 and 15 cents per liter difference…. I have my doubts about the viability of that too.
So then it would be a matter of distribution
Sure, but as with almost everything in “modern life”, this business is organised to be “lean”, or “just in time”, which works when, ahem, it works 
It’s the same with car manufacturers not being able to make cars because they can’t get chips; it’s because somebody upstream was screwing their suppliers into keeping the stock at no cost to them 
JIT works until the chickens come home to roost i.e. until the slightest change in the situation, and it works largely because the customer is relatively big enough to be able to sue the supplier for damages if the delivery is not made on time.
I have seen people locally here who drive 20 or 30 miles to reach a cheaper gas station with between 5 and 15 cents per liter difference…. I have my doubts about the viability of that too.
GA pilots do the same, and much worse And so many boycott any airport charging a landing fee over £10 / €10 / etc.
Some people will understand this one:
I haven’t ridden 100 miles to a cheap gas station as a destination in over two weeks If you’re based in the far north of Italy and want to go for a ride, it can be well worth it to punctuate it with a fuel stop in Austria.
My wife typically puts the equivalent of under £25 in her car, not because we’re worried about cash flow at that level (!) but because in the US that’s all her little car will take from empty.
Fuel in Wales always used to be more expensive, as it has to travel further along windier roads. Not sure if that’s still the case. The issue here was that there was apparently no fuel station that was both open and closer.
If people really did use a significant amount of fuel in looking for fuel and if there’s insufficient spare capacity in the system, perhaps you could have a bistable state, where 1) everything ticked over nicely until there was a run on petrol and 2) nobody could end the shortages without temporary measures to enforce reduced fuel use.
~
I don’t entirely understand why it would be in one companies interests to drive down tanker driver salaries so aggressively, with a view to forcing the government to grant emergency visas for HGV drivers?
Company A obviously wants to pay less than company B, but if both company A and company B are both forced to pay 2x their pre-Brexit rates then surely they can pass on the costs to the consumer? Neither is at a competitive disadvantage relative to the other.
It seems more likely to me that fuel drivers are undercompensated relative to drivers in other roles, or that there’s a genuine critical shortage of drivers overall.
kwlf wrote:
I don’t entirely understand why it would be in one companies interests to drive down tanker driver salaries so aggressively, with a view to forcing the government to grant emergency visas for HGV drivers?Company A obviously wants to pay less than company B, but if both company A and company B are both forced to pay 2x their pre-Brexit rates then surely they can pass on the costs to the consumer? Neither is at a competitive disadvantage relative to the other.
I think it probably involves a degree of collusion between the companies, with one perhaps agreeing to take the lead on pushing the government.
What’s certainly true is that just about every industry which used a significant degree of Eastern European labour to lower costs and increase margins is pushing for some sort of post-Brexit concession or special treatment to protect their margins. Anything but pay the going rate in the country they’re doing business in.
Graham wrote:
I think it probably involves a degree of collusion between the companies, with one perhaps agreeing to take the lead on pushing the government.
Why would one company agree to take the reputational damage on behalf of the others?
Graham wrote:
What’s certainly true is that just about every industry which used a significant degree of Eastern European labour to lower costs and increase margins is pushing for some sort of post-Brexit concession or special treatment to protect their margins. Anything but pay the going rate in the country they’re doing business in.
Let’s say you’re a British strawberry farmer, who used to employ Romanian workers to harvest your strawberries. Since Brexit you have to employ local labour at 2x the cost. Your French colleague can still employ Romanian labour and his strawberries are therefore much cheaper than yours. If the trade tariffs / Dover chaos are not sufficient to prevent your French colleague exporting his strawberries to the UK, you are in deep trouble. Much as I dislike the exploitation of Eastern-European labour, I can appreciate the dilemma the British strawberry farmer finds himself in. His back is against the wall, unless he can perhaps employ strawberry pickers from somewhere in the 3rd world, pay them even less than the Romanians and undercut his French colleague.
But contrast this with the fuel companies. Nobody is going to drive tankers full of fuel from France to the UK. Very few people are going to take the Chunnel to fill up their cars in France where fuel might be cheaper. The fuel companies have a captive market in the UK to share between them. Nobody has an unfair advantage over the other. If wages do go up, every company is in the same boat; they just need to pay them and put fuel prices up to maintain a margin of profit.
If they can’t do this then maybe there is a genuine shortage of drivers.
Just received this from a friend, and it made me laugh, however maybe affected by a point of view from continental Europe
kwlf wrote:
If they can’t do this then maybe there is a genuine shortage of drivers.
There’s certainly a shortage of drivers.
It’s a relatively high turnover job – lots of new ones qualify every year (the cost is only ~£3k, contrast with ATPL) and lots of old ones retire or change jobs.
The pandemic meant there was basically no training or tests, so no new drivers, for about a year. Then Brexit means we’ve lost most of the Eastern European ones, but I am told Eastern Europeans were not a significant proportion of petrol tanker drivers.
I guess one has to accept the reality of Brexit. In the new reality, a British strawberry farmer indeed cannot compete with a French one who is able to use Romanian labour to lower his costs. So we have to (a) accept there is no export market for British strawberrries, and (b) impose import tariffs on French strawberries on the basis that their use of Romanian labour results in a non-level playing field.
Like the 1970s when we had to accept the cold reality that most of what we made was (a) crap, and (b) expensive!
however maybe affected by a point of view from continental Europe
Very much so – the word is schadenfreude
Like the 1970s when we had to accept the cold reality that most of what we made was (a) crap, and (b) expensive!
However, the solution to that didn’t come from Brussels. It came from (initially) Japan and (later) China. The UK made crap cars but you could buy great cars from Japan, and still can. I now drive a VW but had two great Japanese cars for about 25 years.
impose import tariffs on French strawberries
The UK can’t do that because the brexit deal is zero tariffs both ways. But regardless of tariffs, any “common market” wipes out a lot of industries. The EU has wiped out lots of former industries around Europe. Of course, none as comprehensively as China has done.
Then Brexit means we’ve lost most of the Eastern European ones
Not sure that’s true. The majority of delivery drivers I meet with an obviously foreign accent (I talk to them because their story is usually interesting, once I told them I am Czech) do have UK passports. I reckon the really transient workers were mostly in the potato picking and such areas. Fuel tankers, much less.
