Thanks a lot for the link - the article is very long, but it was interesting. I agree with it.

My father (retired) used to work for a logistics company, he was one of those who organized the deliveries (get new clients, write down proposals, compute costs, get in touch with border admins to clarify requirements/documents/approvals, etc..., all that admin&logistical stuff to have ultimately literally anything delivered from A to B).

Already at that time (~15 years ago) it was an extremely competitive business with very low earning margins and high risks (e.g. all kind of delivery delays as mentioned in the article, damages to the goods while driving or un/loading them or due to temperature/water, thieves, accidents, receiving company not being able to pay for the goods, strikes/events/whatever impacting the ETA of the delivery, etc...). I don't want to think what it has become now.

My father "lived that life" and he kind of liked it (a lot of personal responsability, had wide improvisation margins, etc), but once, on a particularily bad day, he told me directly "don't become a truck driver - it's already now a bad job and it will become worse".

He said that because the whole "poetic" side of being a truck driver (travel through many nations in Europe therefore being able to see a lot of stuff, deal with different kinds of people, be independent, etc...) got replaced by very strict delivery/pickup deadlines & monitoring & regulations - I DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT TO SAY that that's bad is general (e.g. I do love regulations about sleep time & truck maintenance, and as a company owner I would definitely like to know where my trucks are located, and deliveries/pickups are supposed to be done on time) but what I want to say is that their combination and the level of "how strict they are" can become toxic. The limits are "grey".

Nowadays truck drivers can get as stressed as a stock exchange broker but get a fraction of such a salary and in general their lives are very hard (thinking about family & living conditions while being on the road, which is most of the time). I guess that you must be born for that kind of profession + you need a lot of luck to land an "ok"-job in that area.

Concerning the Brexit & related extra truck driver visas I personally don't see that having a big impact on the current situation: admin effort does not change, risk (the articles reports about Calais - that's really a horrible situation) is still very real, in general it's just more reliable and less risky to deal with stuff in the EU (and Schengen) even if the profits are potentially not great.

Personally I think that there are other factors in play currently in this whole story (e.g. the Covid pandemic, the Suez-canal blockade, the container shortages, ...):

during the previous months we had in Switzerland because of all that several delays about buying all kind of stuff (never seen anything like that during the last 35 years - e.g. no plastic forks available, hehe), now things are slowly getting back to normal but retail delivery services have increased their prices, e.g. I'm changing flat right now and I have to pay ~150$ extra (each) to have my new bed & couch delivered to my flat (assembling is extra), which is as well for a swiss person not cheap and I think that in the past the same was priced max 50-100$ (or even included in the selling price especially for the couch) => I assume that the same happened as well in general to bigger truck shipments (e.g. from the manufacturers to the retail vendors), therefore I assume that e.g. Switzerland (for sure as well partially DE, FR, NL, ...) is basically "stealing" truck shipment capacity because it's just more remunerative (UK people are in my opinion more "picky" then others) and less risky => this makes the extra visas issued by the UK become just some background noise and that won't change unless the remunerations are increased.