Shortages

[Kapitan]

Fully agree with your sentiments, to me its about show and keeping up with the Jones.

I have nice things because I'm lucky an accident of birth if you will, i had a very good job in the UK paying a lot of money so i could afford the nice cars others my age could not.
But that was hard work doing at least 80-90 hours a week, i find a lot of people these days want to be doing 35 hours a week and earning a million a month.

A close friend of mine said that I had it easy and that her job was stressful, she worked 32 hours a week, so when I chirped up and said what do you do the rest of the week she was like well I don't.

We had a little experiment back in March 2018 i said to her you can come work with me for two weeks and she did for 3 days before saying its too much, after that she filly understood why I earnt so much, at the end of day 3 I was already on 42-45 hours worth and this was just my middle of the week.

Point is there's a living wage and a wage, living wage should be paid to the people as a matter of course.
Having done a very high paced job I can understand why bankers and the likes get large bonuses and perks its very simple they are pulling 20 hour days a lot of the time so they sacrifice a lot to make a wage and rightfully should be paid accordingly for the skill set.

(I don't condone their greed though when it comes to stuff like market crashes)

[Catfish]

Seems there is a general shortage of workers, lots of news in the german tv channels yesterday.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-...shire-58410363

This was also in the news yesterday, water purification in England cut to make up for lack of disinfectants, supply chain failure
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...mical-shortage

https://www.thenational.scot/news/19...ical-shortage/

And empty shelves..

https://metro.co.uk/2021/09/03/food-...sues-15202901/

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-...ec-2021-09-09/

Not good news. I take it, while it is not the only reason, brexit does have an impact.

EU workers are still denied to work in the UK. Some will not even want to come back after brexit and this special experience, especially when loans are so low, and while they have to apply for a visum now. And to be honest England is not exactly making it easy getting working visa even now, certainly due to brexit and national politics behind it.

So train UK citizens to make up for losses of whatever cause of course, but 1. takes a lot of time and 2. some will not want to do the work foreigners did before.
Same here of course. I take it the EU can compensate and balance for a while, but in the end brexit and driver shortage will also have an impact here.

And if this all was not enough yet, gas prices are soaring in whole Europe with gas reserves being already tapped early in september. The winter is said to become brutal
https://electroverse.net/uk-fires-up...rtage-worsens/

the UK is thinking about firing up coal plants; gas prices never were that high in Germany. Maybe North Stream II was not the badest of ideas.

Now what could be done against all this in a short time.. preventing bad decisions in the future, or at least thinking beforehand, will not help now.


B.t.w. where are Farage and Cummings?

Nigel does a tv show with the usual right wing hate paroles
"GB News is positioning itself quite openly as a nationalist television channel that propagates the war of cultures and tries to score points with topics such as illegal immigration and transgender lobbyism. So that's why Nigel Farage. He should fix it."
https://translate.google.com/transla...sten-1.5365184

Cummings is miffed about he had to leave before he could make Johnson lave
"Speaking of Brexit, Cummings said no one could know if it was a good idea to leave the EU . "I think anyone who claims to be certain about it has a screw loose," said the ex-advisor.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/...-17446978.html

[Kapitan]

Originally Posted by Catfish

Seems there is a general shortage of workers, lots of news in the german tv channels yesterday.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-...shire-58410363

This was also in the news yesterday, water purification in England cut to make up for lack of disinfectants, supply chain failure
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...mical-shortage

https://www.thenational.scot/news/19...ical-shortage/

And empty shelves..

https://metro.co.uk/2021/09/03/food-...sues-15202901/

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-...ec-2021-09-09/

Not good news. I take it, while it is not the only reason, brexit does have an impact.

EU workers are still denied to work in the UK. Some will not even want to come back after brexit and this special experience, especially when loans are so low, and while they have to apply for a visum now. And to be honest England is not exactly making it easy getting working visa even now, certainly due to brexit and national politics behind it.

So train UK citizens to make up for losses of whatever cause of course, but 1. takes a lot of time and 2. some will not want to do the work foreigners did before.
Same here of course. I take it the EU can compensate and balance for a while, but in the end brexit and driver shortage will also have an impact here.

Now what could be done against this in a short time..

I do agree we need to do something in the short term, back in the 1980's the government used to fund class 1 licenses and that overcame a lot of issues in the transport industry back then, something similar could be applied again.
That funding proved its weight in gold because many who gained their class 1 on that scheme still drive today and haven't been out of work since thus a net contribution based from government subsidy.

Right now we have a 5.6% unemployment rate, if there's so many jobs why is the unemployment rate so high? well yes many people don't want to do the jobs migrants have done, but you know what why should I or You the tax payer subsidize them because they don't want to work?
If there are jobs out there even as a stop gap they should be applying oddly its a condition on their unemployment benefit so I'm told, yes its harsh and yes its unpopular but I do think its high time to get the ones who are freeloading off the system into the work place.

As Humphry Appleby said oddly I find him quite correct on how to deal with unemployment

Brexit has had an impact I don't deny that, but again a lot of our food comes in via container (even from the EU), either deep sea or short sea.
With a massive global log jam of containers and ships being out of position it has created havoc in the just in time method not just in the UK as noted earlier its here in Canada and the USA as well, I also have colleges in Denmark, Germany, Turkey, Poland, Estonia all reporting shortages of food and drivers so yes its affecting the EU as well as the UK.

A lot of our issues and just like the EU have done, we downsized our warehousing in the 1990's thus were unable to stockpile because we became so heavily reliant on the just in time method, most goods spend just hours in a warehouse not days or weeks like they did back in the 1990's.
Warehousing is a severe problem note the lack of not just in the UK but many other countries using the JIT method.

The UK is also not big on rail freight and for good reason, we don't have the capacity on the rail network to ship in the volumes other EU countries do, our network is set up for passenger transport not goods, in fact rail accounts for only 8% of goods moved in the UK, on comparison Germany and France do much better in this field than us.

The chemical (Liquid Naphthalene UN1993) they use in water purification comes in to Fawley Southampton at Nalco via ocean going tanker (post panamax and VLCC) This product doesn't come from the EU it comes from Canada, it is railed around the country and taken by road or onwards by sea in coasters, so not a brexit issue here more of a tanker problem caused by covid, don't forget a lot of crews were trapped onboard their ships during 2020 some still are!

In the short to medium term we should open up a points bases immigration system like Canada USA Australia uses and allow people based on what we need to come to work in the UK, and we should offer a permanent resident system so after 2 years you can claim permanent resident status giving them leave to remain indefinitely (those who already have more than 2 years and can prove it should get it automatically without doing another 2 years).

To get a visa to go to Canada while we were in the EU was challenging for normal people, same with the USA and Australia, a lot of younger people have now seen that because were out of the EU it has become easier.
The biggest concern for the USA was anyone and everyone could go to the UK change passports and get into the USA which is why they had so many restrictions even though the UK was on the visa wavier program.

Even I had nightmares getting the green card having to prove I was born in the UK while many who held a UK passport born outside the UK were denied, so in one respect it has freed up travel to these countries (not that it was too difficult in the first place mind).

Overall we do need to sort out the unemployed in the UK at 5.6% according to the figures well there shouldn't be a shortage in a lot of industries.
I had to do jobs i hated why should the people who don't want to work be any different.
Unfortunately the welfare culture in the UK has got to the point of if i go to work I get less money I'm better off on state handouts.

Naturally there are genuine people out there who cannot work for various reasons and its those I feel sorry for, because its those who actually need the help and unfortunately its those who want to simply sit and sponge of the state that really screw it up for the genuine ones.

[Catfish]

"The hard reality of Brexit is hitting Britain. It's costing everyone but Boris Johnson"

" [...] While food shortages have been common in many countries over the course of the pandemic, Brown believes that one issue unique to the UK is making life extra painful: Brexit.

[...]
First, a lack of truck drivers, who take fresh items like cauliflowers to and from freezing facilities, meant that the ESG cooperative at one stage had to throw away a week's worth of production, at an estimated cost of £1 million ($1.4 million).
Second, Brown says that many of the seasonal workers, who would come from countries like Romania and Bulgaria for a few months to harvest vegetables, are now in short supply.

It seems that the consequences of Brexit are finally being felt up and down the UK. And far from the sunlit uplands promised by members of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government, a shortage of European workers in these vital areas means financial losses for businesses and empty shelves as the UK hurtles towards Christmas.

[...]
The current driver shortage is estimated to be between 90,000 to 120,000, according to a spokesperson for Logistics UK. While Brexit is not entirely to blame, the fact that the UK no longer has easy access to European drivers has created a headache for the industry.

The government, critics say, failed to adequately prepare for the inevitable consequences of Brexit and mitigate its initial impact.

Despite this, Brexit's fallout is not being used by Johnson's political opponents, who are instead whacking him over domestic issues. But why?

"The problem with these sorts of stories is they happen incrementally," says Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester.

"One of the very tragic things about these stories is that in order for the public to really pay attention to them, something really dramatic has to happen. Unfortunately, that might be an overworked lorry driver crashing into a family car or children falling ill through malnourishment."

Until that point, Johnson can largely deflect the blame for these problems onto the pandemic. Ford notes this goes down well with his base of "Leave" voters, many of whom are sick of being told that Brexit was a disaster, and often willing to believe other explanations.

But Brexit really is starting to bite. It was never going to be the case that the UK would immediately fall apart. But little by little, many of the assurances made in 2016 and during years of negotiations are cracking."

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/12/b...cmd/index.html



"Britain no longer in top 10 for trade with Germany as Brexit bites"

"A December 2020 survey of Germany's BGA trade association showed one in five companies were reorganizing supply chains to swap out British suppliers for others in the EU.
That trend was becoming more marked, though British businesses were even worse off, said Michael Schmidt, President of the British Chamber of Commerce in Germany, making any turnaround before the end of this year unlikely.

"More and more small and medium-sized companies are ceasing to trade (in Britain) because of these (Brexit-related) hurdles," Schmidt told Reuters.
The sharp first-half decline was also driven by pull-forward effects before the new hurdles, such as customs controls, kicked in in January."


"For many small British firms, Brexit meant losing access to their most important export market... It's like shooting yourself in the foot. And this explains why German imports from Britain are in free-fall now."
He voiced hope that some of the decline might be temporary. "Companies are normally always in a good position to adapt quickly – but this needs time."


https://www.reuters.com/world/europe...es-2021-09-08/

[Catfish]

So no shortages frome there at least ..

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-58556453

You can't make this up
As usual the comments are the best

[Skybird]

By chance I currently watch my way through my collection of DVDs of Yes (Prime) Minister.

Timeless.

Priceless.

Simply good.




The hissing, chopping sounds recently probably were the guillotine Johnson set up at Downing Street.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I placed a new test order for Ubiquinol from the UK. Lets see whether it runs better early this year. Back then the order stalled completely and the involved company said they retire from continental business completely. I hope it works, saves me an awful lot of money even with now increased custoimes and shipping. Shipping time is not so much a concern, as long as it finally arrives they can even take several weeks, if they want. German prices: 60x 200mg Ubiquinol 70-90 Euros. UK price if you check carefull and look out for good offers: 365x 200mg 75 Euros including VATS, plus customs. It does not compare.

Has arrived today, shipping time in total around 10 days, so everything back to pre-Brexit normal. Saved me close to 300 coins.



I just wonder how they get away with labelling it on the customs sticker as a "gift", the package obviously is form a retailer. Can i demand my money back now? A gift is a gift, I mean.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Catfish

So no shortages frome there at least ..

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-58556453

You can't make this up
As usual the comments are the best

Hopefully the electorate will hold those responsible to account.

[Kapitan]

I have never said brexit hasn't played a role it has, but not as big as some people make out.

A lot of farmers are angry because they cannot get cheap foreign temporary labor, however why do they need cheap foreign labor when we have what 4.5% unemployed ?
Yes its true a lot of Brits don't want to do the jobs they do and I do believe it has a lot to do with a very generous welfare state.
If they curtailed some of that then maybe just maybe people will go ah i kind of need a job.

A lot of scientists were put out because a lot of them were EU funded, ok that's fine but when it comes to academia indoctrinating people with EU good UK Bad I'm sorry not happening in my world (started happening in my school in the early 2000s).

There does seem to be an air of superiority in the remain camp (not everyone I stress this) but I often find I am classed as " Stupid Uneducated and don't know what I voted for"
Well I do know what I voted for infact it was one question should the UK leave of remain in the EU.
I fully understood that leaving meant leaving the common market, the free movement and every other connotation and principles of the EU.
I fully understood that the UK would suffer in the short term but freed from the shackles of the EU there was a good chance we could regain that ground (which I would speculate will be around 2028/2030 time)

With regards to shortages, no one in my industry could have predicted COVID at all no one in the EU UK or anywhere could.
On top of that the consequences of COVID causing delays in the supply chain, the Ever Given running aground for over a week.

Our schedules are very tight even a 24 hour delay can be a big problem, so add a week into that mix plus covid shut downs well it kind of speaks for itself.
With that there's the knock on effect of container shortages and out of place containers in ports.
To give you an idea were now predicting the problem in this one area wont be over until Q2 2022 as per my discussions Monday, this is if nothing else goes wrong.

Driver shortages well this one has been on going since before the EU existed, exacerbated in the 90's it wasn't even solved by EU labor coming over our growth and the JIT network out grew the ability of job creation, a bit like the population out growing housing supply.

Again i state simply blaming shortages of labor and goods on Brexit is not wholly appropriate, while a contributing factor its not entirely the big picture.

[Skybird]

Just saying that you cannot just quickly pick a job on the fields and get along. Most people simply physically are not used to the physical stress of kneeling or bowing all the time, you need to get used to that and "hardened" in your muscles and backbone. I did it once during student times, and after just a very few days (althoigh I still trained at that time) my back was so stiff and I had so sever pains that I could not bow again, I had to quit, i was almost partially paralysed.

And during the early pandemic last year enthusiastic young people went to their farmers and offered their work to him, and very many had to quit early, too, until farmers stopped hiring native Germans, saying they had to see most of them go in the first week, exhausted and in pain, and needing to pay them full wage but getting only 40% of the work done that a trained worker from the East would have acchieved in that time. These jobs not only must be mechnaically learned, but you need to build the stamina and physical toughness to endure a day. Some can do it easily, for others it is very ard. Some can never really adapt.



Its not so much heavy lifting or such things, its this monotonous movement and especially the arched, stooped and crooked back. The pain can stab you in the backbone and hips like a dagger. If you are really bad off, you can almost not move for days.

[Catfish]

"Britain Signals Intent to Revert to the Imperial System"

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/w...es-return.html

or here

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/e...nds-and-ounces

"Since Britain formally split from the EU on Jan 1, after nearly 50 years of membership, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has touted his vision of a "Global Britain" that would flourish without being shackled by rules imposed by the 27-member bloc.

British officials have pointed to developments, such as changing the colour of British passports from the EU's burgundy to Britain's traditional blue, which was dropped in 1988, as bold and triumphant symbols of the country's new freedom."

Nevertheless, Mr Frost said on Thursday that the move towards the imperial system would be part of the broader changes Britain was making to "capitalise on new Brexit freedoms".

Bold, triumphant inching forward to freedom.
I sometimes thought there may be some really queer lifeforms on this planet. Now i know.

[August]

Originally Posted by 3catcircus

It gets back, however, to entrepreneurialship. In the US, the average base annual pay for a truck driver is around $45,000. For an owner-operator, the average is around 3x that.

Which might seem like a lot but the cost of a new tractor trailer cab is about $125-150 grand and that's not counting insurance and all the other related costs. It should probably more like x4 or x5.

[Kapitan]

Originally Posted by Catfish

"Britain Signals Intent to Revert to the Imperial System"

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/w...es-return.html

or here

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/e...nds-and-ounces

"Since Britain formally split from the EU on Jan 1, after nearly 50 years of membership, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has touted his vision of a "Global Britain" that would flourish without being shackled by rules imposed by the 27-member bloc.

British officials have pointed to developments, such as changing the colour of British passports from the EU's burgundy to Britain's traditional blue, which was dropped in 1988, as bold and triumphant symbols of the country's new freedom."

Nevertheless, Mr Frost said on Thursday that the move towards the imperial system would be part of the broader changes Britain was making to "capitalise on new Brexit freedoms".

Bold, triumphant inching forward to freedom.
I sometimes thought there may be some really queer lifeforms on this planet. Now i know.

I did see a tweet from a person from weights and measures recently, it did state there has never been a problem with working in either imperial or metric, its just as other European nations often use metric so we followed suite.

I find this proposal just dumb to be honest.

[Kapitan]

Originally Posted by August

Which might seem like a lot but the cost of a new tractor trailer cab is about $125-150 grand and that's not counting insurance and all the other related costs. It should probably more like x4 or x5.

Theres a lot of expenses in road transport some of which i didnt realise until i did my transport manager CPC which takes each cost down to fractions of pennys per KM / Mile

Owner operators beware its not that easy to maintain trucks with low paid freight, the trick is to get atleast one decent paying contract for a small company and build around it.

A lot of owner operators in the US and Canada are way to focused on RPM and not gross after all RPM doesn't pay the bills but try explaining that to them is like trying to put my head through the eye of a needle, guess thats why so many fail.

[vienna]

Its not just the UK and EU who are dealing with shortages caused by trucking and shipping deficiencies; the US is going through the same pains and it is particularly evident in the combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which directly abut each other; Long Beach is the older of the two harbors, a natural harbor, while the massive LA Port is a man-made facility built on landfills and reclaimed ocean floor; the combined ports are the largest in the US and the 9th largest in the world; a very substantial percentage of the goods imported into the US or exported out pass through the ports and their impact on the US economy is massive...


At the moment, the waters directly off the ports looks like an invasion fleet has massed offshore:

Backup in port of Los Angeles affecting truck drivers ability to work; cargo delivery --

https://ktul.com/news/local/backup-i...cargo-delivery


The report notes that nearly 70 container ships are anchored offshore, waiting for open berths (a local report last night stated the number at 66 ships); keep in mind, that is just container ships; there are some 25+ other ships (tankers, etc.) also waiting for berths, so the total is nearer to 90 ships idling offshore...

In the report, you see the truckers blaming the Ports and the longshoremen ("they get paid by the hour, we don't")and the Posts management blaming the Feds; sad to say, the various factions are trying to milk the situation for their own agendas: the unions to wrangle higher pay and loosened working quotas and perks; the trucker for, also, higher wages and perks; and, the Ports management for a larger slice of the Fed funds; all of this is not at all helping the situation...

Even if the Ports were to be able to process out the cargo in a timely manner, there are other problems; merchants who are receiving the containers often have a lag time between when the containers land, are processed, are ready for pickup, and the actual time the do, indeed have the containers hauled; sometimes this is due to the merchants not having sufficient available storage space on their own properties to take the containers, so the containers are stored at the Ports, and the usual outside port storage time is about 30 days; however, that storage time is now averaging over 60 days, and. in a rising number of cases, is approaching 90 days on average; decreased sales at brick and mortar retail sites and increased mail-order sales have caused inventory backups on many items taking up valuable storage space; with no space in their own warehouses, they are letting the containers sit at the Ports; also, they are equally dealing with a shortage of drivers for their trucks, so even if they had the warehouse space, they are in heavy competition to find drivers to move the products...

Since the beginning of the Pandemic, a lot of workers have rethought their career priorities and have shifted away from jobs they once thought they were only suited for; in addition to a large number of older drivers who opted to retire during the Pandemic, a large number of drivers have found employ in other field, often with better pay and conditions, and coaxing them back into driving again will be difficult; new drivers are equally hard to find since younger workers, often armed with college degrees, are not going to be flocking to jobs that are comparatively far more arduous than careers for which they are more qualified...

Then there's this to consider: despite what the Far-Right has claimed , that the woes are caused by the unwillingness of workers to seek employment because of unemployment subsidies, the figure coming out of states that ceased those subsides show the cutoffs have had little to no effect on turning around the inability of employers to find workers; why? well, according to the latest US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, there are some 8.4 million unemployed workers in the US, and the BoLS also reports there are some 10.6 job opening; it doesn't take a great deal of maths skills to see, if you have some 2.2 million more openings than you have workers, even if all the unemployed were working, the country would still be in a hole, jobs-wise...






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