Employment here works different than most other countries. There are serious discrimination and chain of responsibility laws. If someone dies on site due to negligence, then the supervisor is fined, the manager is fined more, the executives are fined even more and the directors blown out of the water. There are plenty of cheap training courses from all over the place, but no big company wants to take the risk because the chain of responsibility is larger. However, the smaller shittier companies are really shit and its hard to work with them, even if you are new to the industry.
But, I did forget to leave one thing out in my original post. I noticed that a lot of entry level people are moving into local courier work and working their way up from small vehicles and vans into light trucks. While driving a 4 tonne truck is not really comparable to a B double, it seems to be giving some people some chances. I also notice that there are very few foreigners in local courier businesses.
So the mailman needs to move up to semi driver. It does just sound like the shortage is a cause of over regulation more than a shortage of people capable and willing. I agree with management being held responsible in situations where they actually are, like poor training or bad policy, or being cheap and failing to keep up maintenance on the fleet or whatever it may be, but if the driver just sucks lifes dick one day and runs over a bunch of people or something, that might not exactly be something management should be fined for (unless a certain group of people is statistically running people over in trucks, then they should maybe be held responsible if they keep using said group of people)
No such thing as mail man anymore in Australia. All mail is private operations contracted out to other organisations and people. One day you use one company to sent a letter, next its a 10kg box, next its 8 pallets. What used to be the government mail system was privatised and in many cases is now more expensive than most.
If the business is found to have determined that they did everything int he power to prevent an ACCIDENT, then they usually get a pass. A muslim fanatic probably wouldn't cause an issues. But even if someone falls asleep for a second and causes an accident, goes all the way up the top. Which comes back to trucks too as they have a severe fatigue management system that they have to adhere to. More on the point of heavy regulation.
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