UK needs 100,000 truckers and tempts foreigners: what’s the average wage?

Long queues that sometimes take up to two hours to load fuel. Gas stations forced to close due to shortages. Serious problems in the agrifood distribution chain. This is the image that the government of Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, a picture in which the tail wobbles of the pandemic and the consequences of Brexit are mixed, infuriating UK consumers.

This is all due to the shortage of truck drivers in the UK, a bottleneck of such magnitude that businessmen in the sector estimate that it would take 100,000 truckers to meet current demand, and this situation led the Johnson government to announce in the last hours that will grant up to 5,000 temporary visas, to attract foreign drivers.

To get an idea of ​​the salary levels involved, It should be noted that the average salary of a truck driver who works 40 to 50 hours per week ranges from 25,000 to 32 pounds per year.. This number is equal to the current variation. approximately 4 million Argentinian pesos, or about 330,000 pesos per month, to which must be added the “bonuses” that companies offer for additional tasks or for working on Saturdays or Sundays.

The causes of this shortage of truck drivers are multiple, but the main factors are seen as the blows of the pandemic and the closure of borders with Europe imposed by Brexit, severely affecting the supply of food and fuel.

A truck driver who works 40-50 hours per month in the UK has an average salary of £ 25,000-32,000 per year. Today, that equates to around 4 million pesos.

This announcement of temporary visas for the arrival of foreign truckers supposes a radical change in Johnson’s policy, who was the promoter of tougher immigration rules after the country left the European Union (EU) and reiterated the need to end dependence on foreign labor.

However, the growing shortages caused by the lack of drivers, which hit the agri-food sector, but also the energy sector, causing the closure of several service stations, prompted the Government to take action, in the face of complaints from British citizens increasingly angry, unaccustomed to these supply problems.

In recent days, huge queues have formed outside petrol stations, where Britons who ignore calls for calm are trying to refuel.

Faced with this situation, the British government said yesterday that “it was considering temporary measures to avoid immediate problems”. Any measures that will be taken “will be strictly limited in time,” said a spokesman for Johnson, while assuring that the country has “abundant deposits of fuel” and that “there is no shortage”.

In this sense, it has been noted that the Johnson administration’s plan is to issue around 5,000 temporary visas, Although transport business groups estimate that at least 100,000 heavy truck drivers are needed to restore the situation, UK channel BBC reported.

Different sectors have even called on the government to deploy soldiers to help distribute gasoline or deal with the backlog of heavy vehicle license applications, which has increased during the pandemic.

AFP / HB