“LET ’em have it in the comments!”
We wouldn’t want to be the well-known forestry firm which was absolutely raked over the coals on the Forest Machine Operators Blog last month, after their latest job vacancy went live.
Sharing the ad, a member said: “£23k a year for a trainee or £26k for a fully qualified operator with all your tickets doing a job that actually provides a product that the country needs! Or £38k for sitting behind a desk doing f*** all. They couldn’t be any more out of touch!”
READ MORE: Forestry: Does anyone want to work in the UK's industry?
What do you think? Does £26,000 a year sound low for a fully qualified operator? Other Blog members certainly thought so.
Comments included:
“Everything there that’s wrong with this country!”
“It just shows how out of touch they are. Need to realise that men who can operate machinery to a high standard are worth considerably more than pen pushers and are a lot harder to come by.”
“Based on a 37-hour week like the advert says, that’s about £14 an hour for a harvester operator. Good luck!”
“Who can actually work for £26k and keep a wife at home raising the family? Mental times.”
“It doesn’t pay to drive a machine nowadays. I came off the machines at the end of last year and went onto the saw because you need to work about five to six hours a day longer to make the same sort of money on a machine. Especially with the amount of poor-quality timber boys on machines are expected to cut these days.”
“That apprentice wage is the same as a fully qualified craftsperson who has to do manual cutting and it’s the same money if you’re 18 and have never used a saw before or have been cutting for 30 years. You also have to be computer literate, draw maps, check for constraints and write a risk assessment every time you take a step. Forestry has gone mad!”
“Is the hourly rate right? Gone are the days of £10–12 an hour. You get £22 self-employed on a 360 on a building site. That’s outside London!”
Others made similar comments, drawing attention to the apparent gulf between what young forest machine operators get paid and what they can make in construction.
Said one: “I always wanted to come into the forestry industry, but it’s the wages that kept stopping me. I get just under twice as much now for only working five-and-a-half months of the year on earthmovers!”
Another remarked: “And that’s why I went to farming full time three weeks ago after serving seven years in a forwarder. Sadly it was the money why I made the move. Hours are pretty much the same.”
We’re so used to hearing such doom and gloom around prospects for farmers that switching forestry for farming sounds like a leap from the frying pan to the fire to us. But maybe we’re wrong. Maybe pay has been allowed to stagnate for so long that agriculture offers better opportunities.
READ MORE: Bites from the Blog: Forestry operators on dealing with the public
We know not everyone would agree. Just this month we spoke to trainers who claimed there’s never been a better time to get into the industry, with firms offering great pay and conditions for operators – if you know where to look.
Still, we can understand why even the most enthusiastic young operator would quickly become disenchanted. As one said: “Most people think I’m stupid for being in the woods.
You’re working for less money than you’re worth, you’re not even recognised as a skilled person in this country and you struggle to find well-paid work in an industry that’s apparently desperate for young people. A site manager said to me recently their main role is to ‘make sure the operators don’t ruin the site’. Most of us are highly skilled individuals and until there’s some recognition of that, young people would be foolish to think they have a good future in logging.”
On the subject of forest managers making sure operators don’t ruin their site, that was the focus of another discussion.
Posting images of a murky brown stream by a forest road, one contributor asked: “Why is pollution off forestry roads never addressed but if the same pollution comes from inside the forest from a forwarder, all Hell breaks loose? Pollution shown was a passing tractor and trailer with one pass. You can imagine the mess once the lorries start moving. It’s always baffled me as it all goes into the same drains, so why does pollution from forest roads not cause concern?”
He went on to elaborate: “In the forest harvesting sites we normally have to dig drains on the high side of forwarder tracks and divert it, put log bridges in and all the rest.
What I’m saying is, if it’s run-off from vehicles using the forest road, very little is said/done about it compared to if it’s a forwarder/harvester causing it in the wood itself.”
Taking the question seriously, a member replied: “In my personal view, if this is coming off a forest block then it should be managed according to forest and water guidelines. If it is coming off a farmer’s field then they should be following their industry standards.
“However, if this is a certified site then the forest manager should have overall responsibility for the whole estate/woodland and should make sure it is dealt with. If there was an audit it would be picked up and reported as a non-compliance.
“At the end of the day, it is down to the individual manager to pick up and fix these issues or it should be reported to a forest manager so it can be addressed. We are all working towards the same goal and with more and more red tape being introduced in our industry I think we all have a responsibility to try and eliminate any run-off to the best of our abilities.”
The discussion brought to mind memories for one operator who said: “I remember the forest works manager bouncing up the road as fast as he could in his pickup to stop a site I was on and after putting him right to the fact that it was 11 lorry-loads of logs, one after another in the same day after the snow melted, he just said ‘Can’t stop the lorries’ and left.”
Another remarked: “Big difference between a bit of dirty water off a stone road and a sea of skitter getting pushed along forwarder ruts and into burns and ditches.”
The original poster responded: “Maybe so, but it’s all classed as pollution. This was just a single tractor going past once. That would seriously increase if there were wagons in and out, day in, day out. Believe me.”
An American forester weighed in: “I can’t speak for your part of the world, but over here when you start asking why something’s not being addressed, you’re just taking a big risk of bringing more attention to yourself and what you’re trying to do.”
We suspect it’s the same all over.
To keep up with the latest chat and offer your own thoughts, look for the Forest Machine Operators Blog on Facebook.
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