Which brings us to the kind of work that sits at the core of the crisis. The haulage industry is reckoned to be short of
around 100,000 drivers. Some of this is to do with Brexit, but it also reveals deeper, more structural
problems evident in many countries. For lorry drivers, median hourly pay stands at £11.80, work is often arduous and massively time-consuming, and the majority of the workforce is over 45.
Via such services as Amazon Prime, we have been encouraged to believe that the costs of post and packaging can be waved away, and transport can somehow be organised for free – an insidious idea that has accelerated the downward slide of pay and conditions.
Adrian Jones, the Unite union’s national officer for road transport, says “a lot of chickens have come home to roost”. He is now seeing pay increases for drivers that are three or four times the rate of inflation, and he wants more. A fragmented industry, he says, ought to be compelled to agree a
floor on pay and basic standards, as happens in the Netherlands. In the short to medium term, the haulage industry’s problems will be seen in confusion and economic disarray – but the sudden sense of urgency surrounding such proposals shows that fundamental things might already be changing for the better.