[jaclaz]

It is not the UK only, here in Italy there was an entrepreneur (in logistics/transports) who was not finding drivers that pointed out how (for a number of reasons, possibly all of them right) to get nowadays a truck driving license (for TIRs) is very costly (both in terms of time and of money, if I recall correctly something like 6,000-10,000 Euro) and there was the issue on how he could pay in advance the costs but there was apparently no legal way to recover them (by keeping a part of the monthly pay of the worker over a "fair" period, I seem to remember 2 years), as it had happened to him that as soon as the candidate drivers would get the driving license they would resign and find work in another company.

In the UK I believe part of the problem is/was Brexit because a number of drivers were from eastern EU and they didn't want or could not obtain residence/work permit/whatever needed to continue working in the UK, here (where there is not such a problem for workers from the EU) the lack of them is mainly "concurrent retirement" of a whole generation born between roughly 1955 and 1965 and the initial "access cost" to get the driving license for the young people that may want to start the job.

[mmarq]

> It is not the UK only, here in Italy there was an entrepreneur (in logistics/transports) who was not finding drivers that pointed out how (for a number of reasons, possibly all of them right) to get nowadays a truck driving license (for TIRs) is very costly (both in terms of time and of money, if I recall correctly something like 6,000-10,000 Euro) and there was the issue on how he could pay in advance the costs but there was apparently no legal way to recover them (by keeping a part of the monthly pay of the worker over a "fair" period, I seem to remember 2 years), as it had happened to him that as soon as the candidate drivers would get the driving license they would resign and find work in another company.

This is peak Italian entrepreneurship. This guy invested some money in training and then went on TV to play the martyr because he can’t retain employees. Instead of doing the right and most obvious thing, that is paying market salaries, he complaints that indentured labor is no longer legal.

[jaclaz]

I didn't see him on TV, I read an article on a newspaper about the issue, I dont' think that there was anyone playing martyr, nor any intention for indentured labor or similar, it was - as I read it at the time - simply a rant about the scarcity of qualified drivers and the difficulties in hiring new workers (unqualified) and assist them in getting the license, as doing that would become a too large investment for the firm, and asked (this is actually italian entrpreneurship) for some form of assistance by the state.

At least in the interview he stated that the people would be paid the national contract wage, roughly 3,000 Euro/month net, which is "market salary".

Here is the online article (the one on the actual newspaper was longer and more detailed AFAICR):

https://www.corriere.it/economia/lavoro/21_agosto_11/cerco-6...

(not too bad in Google translate).

[mmarq]

In the article it says that he’s not going to pay for the driving license, so the part where he says he’d like to keep the worker for 2 years is missing (I was referring to that as indentured labor).

Said that, if you can’t find workers, you are not paying the market clearing salary. Maybe now you have to offer 4K€ for 4 days of work.

Proposing that the state pays for these licences is not that insane, it may address a market failure. Many countries, Italy included, have similar programs to help the unemployed find a job.

[jaclaz]

I believe you are oversimplifying the issues.

>Said that, if you can’t find workers, you are not paying the market clearing salary. Maybe now you have to offer 4K€ for 4 days of work.

Yes, and 5K€ would be even better, too bad that on the other side (the firm income) prices are de facto capped, so it is not possible to pay more the workers, margins in this field are really thin.

And 3K€/month net is already a rather high salary in Italy.

>Proposing that the state pays for these licences is not that insane, it may address a market failure. Many countries, Italy included, have similar programs to help the unemployed find a job.

Cannot say how much they are effective in other countries, but I can tell you that in Italy these programs in practice rarely succeed in making even a dent in unemployment numbers, for a number of reasons.

[mmarq]

> Yes, and 5K€ would be even better, too bad that on the other side (the firm income) prices are de facto capped, so it is not possible to pay more the workers, margins in this field are really thin.

I'm just saying that if you really need employees and you can't hire them for 3K and, for whatever reason, you can't hire more junior workers and train them, the only option you have left is increasing salaries.

> Cannot say how much they are effective in other countries, but I can tell you that in Italy these programs in practice rarely succeed in making even a dent in unemployment numbers, for a number of reasons.

In Italy these programs don't succeed because the Italian conceives only 5 professions: the priest, the mayor, the notary, the doctor and the lawyer. Everybody else is an "employee" (if you ask some Italians in Italy what they do for a living, half of them will reply "impiegato", which means "employee") that could be replaced by the first rando walking through the door. So when you go to the employment office ("ufficio di collocamento" in Italian, "job center" in the UK), you are offered random courses that are not related to anything you have ever done or studied, because, if you are not a priest or the mayor, then you could be writing software or driving trucks or making pizzas and nobody would know the difference. A friend of mine, after losing his job as a network administrator, was sent to a pizzaiolo course, then he was half-trained as a fire fighter, after that he did something related to shoemaking and finally he decided to move to his mother's village where he can live with 200 euros a month. Needless to say, he still can't make pizzas or climb ladders.

In the past I've worked in a training center in Italy. The courses where quite expensive by the Italian standards (5-6K for 6 months), but all students received a grant from the local municipality or the region that paid the full tuition fee (for reasons that I won't explain, the tuition fee matched the grant exactly). Almost all students found a job within a few months, that in Italy is an exceptional phenomenon. So the system may work. I concede that our students were selected and that the human material that attends a programming or a networking course is not the same that would attend truck driving training.

[JoeAltmaier]

That is astonishingly informative. That Italy still functions at a middle-ages level socially, explains so very, very much.