Carlos Prades, president of the Valencian Federation of Transport and Logistics (FVET), assured yesterday that until March there were stoppages in transport, no one sat down to really talk about the problem. But the problems came from before. “We want to call everyone’s responsibility, because if we are so valuable in the supply chain, it has to be noticed,” explained Prades. In the graph on the increase in costs that they presented yesterday, the armed conflict in Ukraine is also highlighted.
“Fuel has gone from accounting for 30% to 40% of our direct costs. The associates assure that this increase can cause company closures, a scenario that can worsen even more, if possible, because it is not the only item that is growing”, affirms Carlos Prades, president of FVET.
The transport sector suffers from a situation of generalized “asphyxiation” due to the “runaway” escalation in fuel prices, but also due to the lack of drivers. It is the main conclusion of the survey carried out by the FVET that collects the opinion of 19,000 people and that analyzes the situation of the sector in the Valencian Community.
The lack of drivers is pressing and has gone from affecting one in three companies in 2021, to half of those surveyed. “In the short term, we need to immediately incorporate around 2,000 drivers and, in the long term, a generational change. The lack of drivers already supposes operational stops”, explains the vice president of the Federation, Juan Ortega.
On this issue, Prades explains that it is increasingly difficult to fill the vacancies left by transport professionals who retire. “I am now retiring the workers that the company hired in my father’s time, but it is difficult to find people. There is a problem in society, which prefers to live off patronage,” the businessman told La Vanguardia.
On this subject, Prades highlights the effort that the Federation is making to promote vocational training through an agreement with the Departments of Education and Territorial Policy, with which they are in negotiations. The agreement would go through reserving vacancies in the companies that collaborate with the practices of the modules, so that the students could have a guaranteed job after their studies.
At the press conference they explained how “other autonomous communities, such as Castilla y León, offer help to obtain a driving license and the Certificate of Professional Aptitude. Only these two titles represent about 4,000 euros. We need to be able to remove these barriers. The Valencian Community is the third autonomous community, behind Andalusia and Catalonia, which mobilizes the largest volume of merchandise and, as such, needs qualified professionals”, added Prades in statements to the media.
In the drawing presented by the FVET on the sector, the pessimism is striking. According to those surveyed, the perception has worsened since 2021, despite the pandemic, and now half of Valencian carriers rate the situation as “sufficient”, and one in three as “insufficient”.
Likewise, 90% of Valencian transport professionals consider the growth in costs to be the main problem, which is divided into 68% in the price of gasoline, 30% in difficulties in acquiring vehicles and 6.5 % in the salary agreement. “If last year a general cargo truck cost 80,000 euros on average, this year it rises to 110,000 euros, 30% more,” explained Carlos Prades.
