Truck drivers are recognised – finally

For years, CHARLEEN CLARKE has battled to get an answer to this question: why does no one appreciate truck drivers? It’s taken a dire shortage of fuel and other goods in the United Kingdom for people to finally realise their value.

“Supply chain woes may mean Christmas is cancelled,” proclaimed UK newspaper The Times recently. “If no solution is found to a shortage of drivers and manpower, this year’s festive season will be remembered for empty shelves,” it warned.

This is no sensational scaremongering. The UK supply chain is well and truly broken.

Thanks to a shortage of farmworkers and truck drivers, vegetable farmers have had to toss their crops (3,5 million heads of broccoli and 1,9 million heads of cauliflower have been thrown away by just one producer). Farmers have warned that up to 120 000 pigs face being culled because of a lack of abattoir workers (the widespread slaughter of the perfectly healthy porkers has already started).

Then there is the fuel issue. Please note: I am deliberately referring to the “fuel issue” and not a “fuel shortage”, because there is no shortage of the stuff that fuels our cars and trucks. Instead, there’s a dire truck driver shortage; the UK desperately needs to employ a whopping 100 000 drivers.

The driver shortage has meant that some fuel stations have run out of fuel. This has resulted in extremely long queues at others, unruly Brits brawling on forecourts (very non-British, I must say) and even funerals being cancelled due to hearses running out of fuel! Just to make the Brits really grumpy (they love their footie), at least 23 football matches have been cancelled – because the players couldn’t get to the actual matches.

Many Europeans and some Americans are barely containing their mirth at the situation, which they lay firmly at Brexit’s feet. The New Yorker ran a cartoon which showed Boris noting that “the shortages are all British made and British owned, and that’s something we can be incredibly proud of”.

They should be cautious about laughing too hard. Back in 2019, the US was already short of 60 000 drivers – and the American Trucking Associations reckons that the number will swell to 100 000 by 2023. Sky News has reported that some 400 000 more truck drivers are needed to plug a shortfall across Europe. Poland alone needs at least 120 000 drivers, while Germany and France also have a shortage of more than 40 000 each. Our American and European friends could soon be laughing on the other side of their faces…

I don’t think that the situation in the UK is funny. Actually, if I could take a couple of months off work, I would happily go drive trucks in the UK. It’s a fab country and the pay is amazing too. I would have a blast.

However, I do think it is good that the situation has finally brought home one truth: without trucks and truck drivers, we simply cannot survive! This is something I say over and over again – especially when friends complain about the trucks on the road (on which they blame congestion). How else do they think that the drivers will deliver their precious loads? Trucks aren’t flying. Yet.

Most of my South African mates think that I’m daft when I sing the praises of truck drivers. I suspect that, had I to make the same statements in a pub in the UK, the reaction would be different. That’s because the Brits have finally realised the importance of truck drivers. It’s just a pity that it’s taken something so drastic as a decimated supply chain in order for them to do so.