”Trucks you can buy and sell, but the operators are the tricky ones. We have an ageing driver force but a pool of really good, seasoned drivers who come from an era where they were in the cab at five and trucking was well in their blood by 12. By 18, they were licenced and actively working and knew where to stand or how to throw a chain,” says general manager Alan Spilhaus as we discuss the industry’s current challenges.

“It’s a generational shift, let alone trucking’s lost a lot of its sex appeal. So much of the solution is getting good guys and hanging onto them. We’re a family business, and that’s always been part of our ethos … Tom Ryan started the business as one-man one-truck in 1979, and it still is Tom Ryan – just with a few more trucks! It is about being part of a family. Guys leave to chase the dollars, and they come back five or six years later, and I just say, ‘Knock on the door’.”

Like many larger operators, Tom Ryan Cartage has looked to the immigration market to get men behind the wheel. “Over the past 15 years or so, we’ve worked a lot with the accredited employer immigration scheme and had many good drivers come to us. We’ve had a lot of success with drivers out of Fiji, who come engaged in the type of work we do.”

That much was patently obvious in our time with Shashi, Ritesh and Jin. For his part, 53-year-old Shashi Singh got his start in the forests of Fiji, as a bulldozer and digger operator on logging sites.

Ritesh Chand, Jin Chung and Shashi Singh – two decades from youngest to oldest, almost two decades of loyal service to Tom Ryan Cartage.

“We had to go into the bush, cut the logs and bring them down to the sawmill. One day, my boss said, ‘You can drive trucks, so why not start taking the machinery into the forests?’ So that got me into transporting machinery and loading logs to bring out. I did all that for about 10 years, until one day in 2007, I saw a job vacancy in the Fiji Times newspaper for an Auckland roading contractor looking for a transporter driver. It was a good move. I came here alone, and the company helped me bring the family over.”

With his time as a transporter operator, Shashi boasted all the tickets that would make him a perfect fit at Tom Ryan – bridge engineering, self-supervision, piloting, WTRC…

“I started with Tom Ryan as a hiab operator with some training and later got on a low- loader with an Ausa. They were looking for a good machinery driver to replace someone coming off one of the old Moffett units, so I trained with him, and I’ve been on it since.

“If the company looks after me, I look after them,” he comments.

Alan would add: “It’s difficult … We can offer the drivers being home every night, and in good times, there’s a regularity to the work. One-guy one- truck gives them a level of ownership and comfort.”

Also from Fiji, 41-year-old Ritesh Chand started driving on his family’s sugar cane farm. “My uncle used to drive tractors and I started learning how to drive them at age six or seven. Then I moved onto cars and trucks in the field, learning how to manoeuvre them and drive along slowly as the trucks were loaded in the fields. I got my licence and started driving my own sugar cane trucks. After school, I started driving a local bus, which I did for seven or eight years.”

Ritesh’s move to New Zealand came in 2009 when he first drove a tipper truck for a civil engineering company. In 2014, he dipped his toe into metro work with a move to Mainfreight, though it wasn’t quite his thing, and so the move to Tom Ryan in 2018.

Back to Alan: “We’ve looked at cadetship programmes and know of firms that have done it successfully … but it costs. Probably the biggest differences we’ve found is those who fall into trucking from a different path have a different relationship with the job than those who land up in it via natural progression.

“Take crane operation; a lot of it is natural aptitude. You can learn it with a good teacher, but again, that’s part of the problem. There’s not much motivation for firms to invest in training when trucking has such low margins.”

To get a taste of this side of the business, we spent a morning with Jin Chung in his pre-enhancement Quon CW 26 390 6×4 with a Palfinger PK 26002 crane. At 32 years old, Jin is one of the youngest drivers in the team and also one of the newest, having joined Tom Ryan less than six months ago.

“I generally have been one of the youngest drivers wherever I’ve worked. I don’t know any others my age who drive; my friends aren’t interested. One of my main goals is to be able to jump into any vehicle and be able to drive it.”

Born in Vietnam and having lived in New Zealand since age nine, Jin studied IT but realised it wasn’t for him after two years. So, 10 years ago, he went driving. “Trucking wasn’t a thing for me as a kid. I wanted to do programming. I got into trucking and loved it. I’ve been on hiabs for five years now.”

Jin is smooth and methodical with his crane operation. “The hiab thing … it was a skill that came up unexpectedly. Forty hours training to get my ticket and almost eight months to be good and do it by feel … Yes, I had a little mentoring. I listened to good advice when it was given to me, and quickly worked out what works. Tom Ryan gave me my truck within two days and let me get on with it. The other drivers have been good too. It’s hard to find a good company.”

Alan concludes: “We’ve had some good, solid guys come to us from challenging backgrounds. And a decade later, you look back at the hard work they’ve put in to change their lives overall. I think they’re partly a solution to solving the driver shortage – income and a sense of purpose solves many problems.

“We [the industry] should continue to work on these sorts of things to solve our own problems. The crunch on skills is a serious problem, especially if Aussie can afford to pay more. We have to find ways to compete.”