International Road Transport Association (Astic) Estimates 3-5% of Routes Facing Cancellations Due to Lack of Professional Drivers

Madrid, June 3 (EFECOM).- The International Road Transport Association (Astic) estimates that, on average, between 3 and 5% of international road transport routes experience sporadic cancellations or postponements due to lack of professional drivers.

Its executive vice president, Ramón Valdivia, has explained in statements to EFE that trips are lost on the same route due to a lack of carriers, although others, within that same route, continue to be made.

It also depends a lot on the sectors, some with a very marked seasonality, such as fruit and vegetable campaigns, suffer more, but also other industrialists who, for internal reasons, alternate weekly days of high demand with days without demand.

In addition, there is the issue of the United Kingdom, a country to which, after Brexit, there are more and more drivers who refuse to travel, he added.

The problem of lack of drivers not only affects Spain, where between 18,000 and 20,000 and about 6,000 buses are needed, but all of Europe (half a million are needed), the United States, Japan and many other countries.

This lack of professionals is an issue that is increasingly worrying not only the road transport sector in Spain, which this year will exceed a Gross Value Added (VAB) of 20,000 million euros (2.8% more than in 2022). , contributing 5% to the country’s GDP and generating more than a million jobs as a whole, but also to logistics in general and to the Government.

CEOE OFFERS TO MAKE AN APPOINTMENT WITH INCLUSION

For this reason, the CEOE has offered to arrange an appointment for the carriers with the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration from June 5 to advance the pilot project of “rooting for training”, which is already being tested. with other sectors that also lack workers.

It is about training immigrants who are in an irregular situation, so that, once this training period is over, they can practice the profession of professional drivers of road goods transport vehicles, explained the director of Employment, Diversity and CEOE Social Protection, Rosa Santos, during the Astic assembly held last week.

In his opinion, it is also necessary to take into account the opening of the GECCO Order (collective management of contracts in origin) to the transport sector.

The ultimate goal is to put the three million people who are unemployed in Spain into active employment.

On the other hand, Astic continues negotiating with the unions the third general agreement of companies in the sector, whose initial objective of establishing a single agreement to replace the provincial ones has become “less ambitious, but equally very important”: to limit the differences in key aspects such as salaries, allowances and days.

Currently, more than 70% of long-distance heavy transport drivers in Spain are over 50 years of age and there is no generational change, due to a change of mentality in the new generations, who value issues such as flexible hours, work-life balance, family-professional life or teleworking.

Women is another group that the sector is trying to attract, since, today, barely 3% of truck drivers in Spain are women.

Companies are also concerned about the issue of improving the working conditions of drivers, especially in the loading and unloading areas of goods; enhancing the image of the sector or the lack of truck parking (Spain only has about 40 secure areas).

Other challenges are the increase in costs (labor, insurance, trucks and their components or financing), to which future tolls for using the road infrastructure provided for in the sustainable mobility bill, now in the air, would be added. , after the electoral advance, or digitization, which will help to make the most of the capacity of the vehicles and limit the kilometers traveled empty.

Added to this is the excessive fragmentation of the sector (104,000 companies, with 560,000 vehicles), a reality that, however, is changing as a result of the investor “appetite” of foreign multinationals and investment funds, which in the last two years have led a wave of mergers and acquisitions, especially in the refrigerated transport of food products, mainly fruit and vegetables, whose mecca is the southern and eastern arc of the peninsula.

All these challenges are part of “a scenario full of uncertainty about the energy model”, since the ban on the sale of combustion engine vehicles from 2035, except for those powered by synthetic fuels (efuels), poses endless problems of almost impossible solution in term for this sector. EFECOM

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