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Pay checks
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With ever-tightening margins, pay rises are hard to come by in haulage. June's Trucking Britain Out Of Recession survey delved into the issue
ONE OF THE BEST barometers of a business sector's health is pay — more specifically pay rises In June's Trucking Britain Out Of Recession survey, we asked operators if they have awarded a pay rise to staff in the past 18 months — and 59% responded with a 'no: Given all that's happened in the past 18 months, that answer is hardly surprising.
However, further analysis reveals a much more skewed picture: 70% of own-account operators have awarded a pay rise, compared with 50% of logistics and contract distribution firms, and just 19% of hire or reward hauliers And it's no surprise that the larger the fleet, the more likely an operator is to have awarded a pay rise: 66% of fleets with 51 vehicles or more compared with just 26% of fleets with 10 vehicles or fewer; fleets with 11 to 50 vehicles sit squarely between those two ends of the spectrum at 47%.
Among those who did award pay rises, the increases ranged from 1% to 8%, with the vast majority awarding between 1% and 3%. One respondent noted that while there had been a rise of between 1.5% and 3%, there had also been some reductions, notably to the senior directors who were honoured with a cut of up to 25%.
We then asked operators that had not given a pay rise in the recent past whether they intend to do so in the next 12 months — and a significant minority (41%) do not intend to do so.
Indeed, analysis by operator type shows that nearly two-thirds of hire or reward hauliers that failed to issue a pay rise in the past 18 months do not intend to provide a boost to staff's pay packets within the next 12 months. With the launch of the Harlequin consortium (Currie European Transport, Jack Richards & Son, John Raymond Transport, R Swain & Sons, and Prestons of Potto, led by Jigsaw Solutions founder Paul Smith; see the 16 June issue of CM), we thought it appropriate to ask about partnering.
Just 14% of respondents said the recession had driven them into entering partnerships with other operators. It's no surprise that the majority of operators that have entered into partnerships serve either the retail/wholesale or the manufacturing sectors.
One respondent said: "We have shared resources with local hauliers in an attempt to offer more services with little or no outlay.
"There has been greater intertrading, and greater trust built on a local level in an attempt to counter the effects of the recession. Work together!" Optimism bouncing back Optimism among respondents ran at a higher level in June than in May, April or March. A total of 76% said they were either very optimistic or fairly optimistic about the prospects for their business over the next 12 months — that's 10 percentage points higher than in May's survey.
Meanwhile 23% said they were either not very optimistic or not at all optimistic (compared with 31% in May), thus generating an optimism index score of +53 — the highest score since February's +55.
However, it should be noted that logistics and contract distribution firms are twice as likely to be confident than hire or reward hauliers: their respective optimism index scores are +69 and +37 A total of 34% said their business has already recovered from the recession, while another 32% expect to recover within the next 12 months. • The next Trucking Britain Out Of Recession survey is now available online. We want to know how your haulage business performed in Q2.
Go to wwvv.roadtransport.com/ britain to take part.