Real culprits in UK lorry driver shortages

 Logistics has long been the poor relation of Britain's economy and despite all the breast beating by interested parties not much has changed but who are the real culprits who have given the industry a reputation for low pay, which is a key driver for workplace shortages?

Right now there is a clutch of problems plaguing global logistics but many of these, like the chaos surrounding container shortages and long shipping delays, are short-term. Years before Brexit and Covid 19 the seismic change in the way we all shop exposed the perennial problem of driver shortages, currently estimated at 60,000 in Britain. The ingredients of this shortage were low pay, long unsocial hours, dreadful roadside facilities for drivers to wash, eat and feel secure in their parking compounds, all experiences unknown on the Continent where drivers are treated with more respect.

The factors that led to this parlous state ultimately lie at the door of manufacturers and retailers whose obsession with maintaining good profit margins was at the expense of the 3PLs' margins which were often wafer thin, causing bankruptcies. This is important because much of Britain's goods movement is done by 3PLs often locked into 5-year contracts where they have little room for manoeuvre when their costs rise. In short the 3PLs were screwed long term by their clients and were helped in this by their exploitation of cheaper, foreign drivers.

It has been aired that the labour shortages are being blamed for distress in other areas outside logistics, like in food production, and here the post Brexit return of EU nationals, including drivers to their native countries, is blamed. Such distress, however, is short-term and can be addressed by a mixture of automation and better pay and conditions. In the broccoli picking fields of England, for example, a robo veg picker has been successfully trialled and while costing £400,000 it can replace seven human pickers who can earn up to £30 an hour and such robots are likely to fall in cost when economies of scale improve. 

So if we see driver and warehouse operators' incomes rise would the downside by significant inflation? This is a difficult one to call but we should remember that logistics (distribution and storage) forms less than 10% of a product's retail price and when the current, transitory logistics upheavals have normalised it should not be too worrisome. Meanwhile some mea culpa would be in order by the ultimate culprits, namely manufacturers and retailers, who are hoist by their own petard.

More respect for drivers would see less of this

Britain's first electric general cargo port crane proves 'green' economics

 As a UK general cargo port Ipswich may not be big league but it surely ranks with the best when proving the case for 'green' port economics. Ports going fully electric when handling container movements, particularly on mainland Europe, have been around for over a decade but when handling a wide range of general cargoes they are much scarcer but the owners of Ipswich, Associated British Ports, saw not only the business case for going all electric with their cranes but also listened to their customer's desires.

Hitherto, Ipswich, which handles over two millions tonnes of general cargo a year, worth over £600 million, making it the biggest export port for agricultural products, relied on a Mantsinen 95R diesel crane. Its two new, free-ranging cranes on order, the 95RE, part of a £4 million investment, are due to begin service next year and are believed by Cooper Specialised Handling, Mantsinen's UK partner in the supply contract, to be the first fully mains electric powered hydraulic cranes in a general UK port application. What's more they have been configured around the idiosyncrasies on the quays of the Orwell river. 

The new models, for example, will benefit from a 4mt centre undercarriage, some 2.5mt narrower than the standard crane yet does not compromise operational speed. They will be capable of handling over 500 tonnes an hour and its Insight telematics system will work out the cost per tonne moved. 

So what of the economic case? ABP has already reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 35% at Ipswich since 2014 and its latest investment will mean all its cargo handling operations will be fully electrified within five years, much reducing its CO2 emissions and noise. This is helped by the existing 4,000 solar panels which will generate enough energy for the two new cranes. Its investment in an electricity sub station infrastructure will future-proof it to accommodate up to four electric cranes working concurrently on the same quay. ABP, which plans to decarbonise all its ports, estimates the electric cranes will save over 40% in energy costs and to quote a company spokesman: "Going green does not cost the Earth."

A Mantsinen 95ER electric crane at work in Rauma

  

Very narrow aisle working gets safer

 Long-known for their space-saving advantages, articulated forklifts, however, require higher safety-conscious drivers when working in aisles 1.6mt-1.8mt wide than needed for drivers of conventional, counterbalanced and reach trucks in much wider aisles. This is one reason the more conventional forklift drivers need to retrain on articulated trucks. 

Collisions between forklifts and racking are a major cause of the worst kind of accidents after fire, namely domino-style rack collapses. Many of these collisions may be minor but how often are they reported to management? Accumulated, unreported damage of that nature if left ignored can lead to a disastrous collapse eventually. 

Now, however, that risk can be significantly cut if the trucks are fitted with Smart Stop, 'touch-sensitive' sensor, a recent, innovative device from Narrow Aisle fitted to their Flexi trucks which disables a truck after a collision with racking or pallets when in aisles. The drivers cannot override the system and so are forced to report the accidents to management for appropriate action. 

Smart Stop is quickly fitted to a truck's left and right-sided flanks and should go a long way to negating the problems of drivers who fail to pass on details of racking collisions. In Britain alone there are about 100 domino-style racking collapses, some involving fatalities.

To cut the risk of this with articulated forklifts consider adding touch-sensitive Smart Stop sensors to Flexi trucks.  

Why climate change solutions may fail

 Throughout history Man has faced many threats but none has reached the global level posed by climate change today. The many causes have been highlighted and solutions proffered but are we shying away from one cause because it is considered almost taboo to discuss it? 

It will surely never be enough to rely on cleaner energy technologies alone to stem Nature's indifference to Man's proposes. The source of the problem, Man, will not only need changing of long-treasured habits like meat-based diets but a much greater effort to control population numbers responsibly. 

We all know that in developed countries the social fabric and high incomes have seen reproductive rates  fall to at or below replacement levels but that is far from so in developing countries where social and religious mores play a role. There is no reason to believe that if these countries reach a higher level of prosperity that they too will not feel the need to maintain higher reproductive levels but it will need non-economic changes. The migration flows, for example, are not only fuelled by economic pressures but political and religious clashes. The former will not be relieved until misgoverance and corruption have been excised and the latter will hold back economic progress. 

Comprehensive policies to fight climate change should, therefore, include demographic, political, social and religious changes if the cleaner energy technologies proposed are to have any chance of success. If not, Nature may do it for us in frightful ways.     

    Nature reflects the four horsemen of the apocalypse?

Reform e-commerce habits or face road gridlock?

 If humanity is to pay more than lip service to the need for a sustainable environment it seemingly has no choice but to reform its attitudes towards e-commerce or face the perfect storm that could lead to the UK's road network , in particular, grinding to a halt by the end of this decade. That, at least, is the view of Colliers' UK head of research and economics, Walter Boettcher, and is one hard to gainsay. 

When some 40 years ago I wrote in Materials Handling News on e-commerce potential I said that the coming of e-commerce could deliver an environmental boon by reducing weekly car journeys to supermarkets and accidents. What I had not envisaged was the way that boon would be undermined by the fatuous way online shopping has been allowed to develop, namely consumers ordering just single, small low-value items and multiple items with every intention of returning all but one, a practice today that most online retail suppliers admit can be loss-making through reverse logistics costs. 

The current e-commerce distribution model has a substantial environmental footprint that may equal, if not exceed, that to traditional bricks and mortar retailing, averred Mr Boettcher, adding that the anticipated large scale repositioning of these assets into other uses could unwittingly exacerbate the problem and undermine the path to net-zero.

Colliers predicts that more than 38,000 additional HGVs will be required in Britain to satisfy existing demand, impacting all pledges to reach net-zero. This predicted increase in HGV movements risks counteracting any decarbonisation of transport seen in the shift to electrifying vehicles and highlights the challenge of balancing economic growth, our changing way of life post Covid and the increasing, pressing needs to counteract the climate emergency. 

Unless consumers become more aware of how their e-commerce deliveries affect their carbon footprint so their decisions go beyond the most convenient or cost effective, then Nature's recent warnings will surely be just a mild foretaste of far worse to come. 

                Recent devastating flood destruction in Germany a foretaste of things to come?

Climate change poses new logistics problems

 Much has been said about climate change remedial action but little progress has been made. Climate change deniers still point to much bigger changes long before the advent of Man and while that is true there are still, nevertheless, uniquely new conditions today, in particular a huge number of people totally dependent on global logistics for survival through trade. 

The threat to humanity from climate change is, perhaps, greater than most people imagine. There are basically two kinds of threats: the destruction of the means of production and the damage to infrastructure that facilitates the distribution of that production. Droughts, floods, heat, typhoons and hurricanes can all damage food production as well as destabilise society through mass migrations and conflicts over resources, like water. 

The second threat, namely damage to the infrastructure like roads and railways, is no less worrying. Extreme heat can buckle train rails, melt roads and close airports, making them unusable while extreme floods can wash away roads, bridges and railways. Rising temperatures will also raise the risks of forest fires while melting permafrost would release methane gas far more harmful than CO2 emissions. 

There is one other uncomfortable problem which is almost taboo to discuss. We cannot deny that growing population numbers is part of the climate change problems and if we do not address that properly Nature's insouciant ways may do it for us savagely. 

                                           The effect of heat-buckled rails

Beware the banksters

As global wealth grows so does the level of rapacious greed and nowhere is this more evident than among the global banks which took on a new dimension following their role in the American sub-prime housing mortgages scandal that burst in 2008.

Pressed to rebuild their weakened balance sheets, they egregiously embarked on criminal devices helped by complicit lawyers, accountants, land valuers and insolvency practitioners to steal an estimated £100 billion from their own customers with viable, profitable businesses.  

Labelled the biggest bank robbery in history, the ruses used were vehicles euphemistically described as global restructuring group, specialist manning devices and restructuring business experts brought in by the banks who, once in control of companies after suddenly calling in their loans would sell them off at a fraction of their worth to American vulture funds. Just one senior UK bank manager was found guilty of defrauding the bank's customers of £1 billion.

In this monstrous culture of "sometimes you let customers hang themselves because missed opportunities mean missed bonuses" it is hardly surprising that the banks left a swathe of SME owners suffering from marriage breakdowns, homelessness and suicides. 

The lesson is choose the smaller banks if feasible and always check the small print, even if it needs bringing in independent contract assessors.

London's towers to mammon the new reptilian dinosaurs?