Besides not having enough truck drivers to deliver fuel to United Kingdom gas stations, worker shortages have created gaps on supermarket shelves and are forcing farms to cull pigs. Even the finance industry is starting to suffer.
According to CTV News Canada, the Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) said members reported on Friday that 26 percent of pumps were dry, 27 percent had just one fuel type in stock while 47 percent had enough petrol and diesel.
“Independents, which total 65% of the entire network, are not receiving enough deliveries of fuel compared with other sectors such as supermarkets,” Gordon Balmer, executive director of the Petrol Retail Association, told Reuters.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has repeatedly insisted that the crisis is winding down, going so far in some cases as to say it is over. However, on Friday, Reuters is reporting that retailers said more than 2,000 gas stations were dry.
And as far as blaming anything on the exodus of EU workers following Britain’s departure from the bloc, Ministers have dismissed concerns the country is heading toward a winter of shortages and power cuts.
“I am completely, completely fed up. Why is the country not ready for anything?” said Ata Uriakhil, a 47-year-old Afghanistan-born taxi driver who was first in a line of more than 40 cars outside a closed supermarket petrol station in Richmond.
“When is it going to end?,” Uriakhil said. “The politicians are not capable of doing their jobs properly. The government should have been prepared for this crisis. It is just incompetence.”
It is more than just fuel shortages
To make matters even worse, farmers are now warning that a shortage of butchers and abattoir workers could force a mass cull of up to 150,000 pigs. Since August, the weekly slaughter of pigs has dropped by 25 percent, due in part to both the coronavirus pandemic and Britain’s post-Brexit immigration rules
Now, with a shortage of workers, pig farmers need all the help they can get, from butchers to transport drivers, to save the flailing industry.
“As a result of the labor supply issues in pork processing plants, we currently have an estimated 120,000 pigs backed up on UK pig farms that should have gone to slaughter,” the National Pig Association said in a letter to retailers.
So far, the only concession the British government has made was to allow some international workers to come in for three months to drive trucks and fill gaps in the poultry sector. More recently, the government responded with emergency measures that included 5,000 temporary visas for foreign fuel truck drivers.
“What we want to see is an emphasis on high wage, high skill — a high productivity approach to our economy. What I don’t think that people in this country want to do is fix all our problems with uncontrolled immigration,” said Johnson.
According to CNN Business, Farmers, bankers, retailers, transporters, and restaurateurs have warned in recent weeks that then tighter immigration rules put in place after Britain left the European Union are making it hard for them to find workers and keep their businesses running.
Supermarkets are having trouble keeping basic necessities on their shelves, while McDonald’s temporarily stopped serving milkshakes and Nando’s ran out of its signature peri peri chicken.
Perhaps even scarier are the alarms going off in the finance industry. The CityUK, which represents the United Kingdom’s huge financial services industry, said Thursday that its members were seeing “significant cost increases to securing the high-skilled talent that they need to compete on the global stage.”
The financial industry is asking the government to make it easier for workers to come to the UK for short stints. It also wants the government to negotiate with other countries to allow workers to easily cross borders for roles with their current employer.
How long this supply chain shortage will last is anyone’s guess. There is already talk of slashing Christmas turkey production by a fifth, and that may be just the start.
.jpg){kind=link}