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Alle Laing has a tough job and it’s not just because the human resources manager at Timaru-based Hilton Haulage has to help keep the firm’s 300 drivers in line.
She’s also trying to sell the job’s merits to students at school career days and the local polytech to help overcome a nationwide shortage of truckies, an increasingly ageing workforce and more freight to haul.
Consider the numbers. The amount of freight carried on our roads has increased 60% since 2000, but the number of people with Class 5 licences – big-rig drivers – has risen only 10%. That yawning gap is an economic risk for a country reliant on exports that needs to move its products around the regions and beyond.
It’s a hard sell for Laing and others to recruit new drivers when the average annual pay is $51,200, which has risen little in years, and licensing rules mean it can take two and a half years for younger people to get qualified.
Recruitment used to happen organically, with kids riding shotgun in trucks driven by family members, but health and safety regulations ended that.
The driver shortage is a longstanding industry gripe, yet no industry-wide plan has emerged to resolve it and there’s been no national move to recruit new drivers. That, say industry members, means the problem is just getting worse as older drivers retire.
A 2014 Road Transport Forum survey found 85% of 150 transport firms nationwide lacked drivers. Auckland is often cited as hardest hit, with estimates of a shortage of 500 drivers in the region alone.
Calven Bonney, of Auckland-based LW Bonney & Sons, owns the company started by his grandfather in 1922 and employs 150 drivers. He claims to have trucks parked up because of a driver shortage “every day, and it’s getting worse”. While still running the company, he was forced to get behind the wheel himself in the busy three months before Christmas.
Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment figures show truck drivers earn between $32,000 and $67,000 a year. Careers New Zealand says pay rates vary between $16 and $25 an hour.
“We’d love to pay more money, but with the corporate bullying that’s going on, there’s a serious downward pressure on rates in an industry that’s already in dire straits,” Bonney says. “It’s so competitive, nobody’s making any money and there are very close margins.”
David Aitken, chief executive of road transport association National Road Carriers, agrees customers are not willing to pay more, meaning companies can’t afford to lift wages.
Image is another issue. Dean Colville, who has run a freight logistics course at Bay of Plenty Polytechnic for some years, says outdated stereotypes don’t help recruit school leavers. Three-quarters of his students are aged 25 or over and have worked in another industry before deciding to retrain as truck drivers.
“What it used to be like – a guy in shorts with his butt crack showing – well, that’s not today’s drivers,” he says. “The trucks are more technical, the way of driving them is more technical with the systems on board, and they need to be smarter for the jobs they’re doing.”
Colville’s course, now being replicated at polytechs nationwide, trains about 66 commercial drivers annually for the Class 5 licence that lets them drive up to the heaviest trucks.
Since 2011, the focus has been on providing work-ready drivers, which means students complete 132 hours’ work experience taught by industry trainers. That makes them more employable, as companies want drivers experienced on the road, he says.
Because of squeezed margins, fewer companies invest in internal training, making it hard for some newly qualified drivers without on-road experience to get hired.
“When [the industry] gets desperate, all of a sudden they want to do something,” Colville says.
The course only works as long as it has the right industry support and firms need to step up and invest time into training to get the outcome it wants, he says.
Jonathan Ward, general manager at Wilson’s Bulk Transport in Ashburton, says school leavers are deterred from entering the industry because it takes too long to go through the stages required to drive a heavy truck.
Anyone aged under 25 has longer stand-down periods between licence stages, so they opt for other jobs where they start earning earlier.
They can earn “$55,000 to $60,000 working in a factory environment from day one”, says Hilton’s Laing.
What’s the answer? National Road Carriers has been working on a strategic plan in consultation with drivers and government agencies. Although it’s still a “work in progress”, Aitken says a simplified, quicker licensing system with fewer stages to attract more school leavers would be a good first step.
A lack of funds is hampering industry efforts to find a solution, but without one, Aitken predicts a time when goods will be forced to sit around, waiting for available drivers to deliver them. Trucks across the country are already regularly sitting parked up and idle.
The Government places the onus squarely back on the industry.
Truck driving was removed from Immigration New Zealand’s skills shortage list at relatively short notice in March 2014 (apart from in Canterbury), after a MBIE review concluded the industry “could do more to develop and train a supply of truck drivers in New Zealand, rather than rely on migrants”.
A joint-sector workforce engagement programme (SWEP), led by the MBIE and the Ministry of Social Development and in concert with industry and tertiary education providers, was launched last August. So far it has talked to transport companies about recruitment and jobseekers looking for work, says a MBIE spokesperson.
MBIE says it wants the industry to take the initiative on both “quantifying the challenges” facing it and “identifying possible solutions”.
With freight volumes rising and a lag in training roadworthy drivers, it seems the pedal needs to be pushed a little closer to the metal to get a unified industry effort.
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