Across the Eurozone a shrinking labour pool is hitting the logistics sector hard. And with HGV drivers, warehouse order pickers and operators of forklifts all in short supply, supply chain disruption has become a serious issue for many organisations.
While Covid and the economic and social upheaval that has followed in its wake is partly responsible for the current workforce crisis. Other factors – including a falling population of ‘prime age’ workers – suggest that the problem isn’t simply a ‘bump in the road’ but something with which the logistics industry will have to learn to contend in the long term.
In Germany – Europe’s largest economy – the ageing population combined with low birth rates recently prompted the Federal Labor Agency to warn that the country must attract at least 400,000 skilled immigrants every year.
“The fact is Germany is running out of workers,” said Federal Labor Agency Chairman Detlef Scheele. “From nurses to logistics personnel there will be a shortage of workers everywhere.”
Even in countries with high levels of unemployment such as Spain – where the unemployment rate is currently hovering at around 14% – warehouse staff and forklift operators are in high demand due to the low supply of qualified personnel to do the jobs.
And in the UK 13% of respondents to a recent survey undertaken by the trade association, Logistics UK, reported severe warehouse staff shortages, with a substantial decline in the availability of forklift drivers cited as a major problem.
Of course, fewer staff in any traditional warehouse where manual picking and packing are core activities, puts significant strain on the existing employees and makes an already taxing job even less appealing to potential new recruits – so its easy to see how the logistics industry’s worker shortage problem is likely to become worse before (if ever) it improves.
Throughout Europe the lack of workers means warehouse operators have to offer increased wages to attract the quantity and quality of the personnel they need. In the UK, for example, in November 2020 the average forklift driver’s salary advertised on online job-search engine Adzuna was £21,972 while warehouse staff positions typically paid £19,995 per annum. By November 2021 the remuneration for both forklift drivers and order pickers was up 8% year-on-year. Over the same period, vacancies for forklift drivers had surged 169% while other warehouse job postings were up 143%.
Given that human labour is already one of the most significant costs associated with running a warehouse the handsome financial packages that are now required to tempt forklift operators or other warehouse staff are prompting more and more logistics companies to seek new ways of providing the same service levels with less staff.
For many, this means switching to automation and, unsurprisingly, a growing number of Europe’s warehouse and distribution centre operators consider driverless forklift truck technology represents the optimum solution to the recruitment and employment cost challenges they are facing.
Driverless forklifts undertake every type of task that would be expected of a traditional manually-operated forklift – including vehicle loading and unloading, pallet put-away and retrieval in both standard and very narrow aisle racking configurations, as well as pallet and stillage movements throughout the warehouse.
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Media contact
Rebecca Morpeth Spayne,
Editor, International Trade Magazine
Tel: +44 (0) 1622 823 922
Email: editor@logistics-buyer.com
