Dublin Bus has been forced to look as far afield as South Africa in its endless search for bus drivers. The State company has hired 200 drivers from the Rainbow Nation who will be appearing behind the wheel of a bus near you soon.
Welcome and needed as these drivers undoubtedly are, their arrival raises several interesting questions. The first one being why are Irish people not interested in the job.
The money is good. You earn €893 per week rising to €1,034 over six years. It is a permanent pensionable job with a State company, and they don’t come much more secure than that. Add in subsidised travel, a GP scheme, annual bonuses and other benefits including union representation and it’s hard to see what is not to like although the hours are long and can be unsocial.
But there is the intangible benefit of having a job where hundreds of people thank you personally each day as they step off your bus. It’s “Enkosi” in Xhosa if you are wondering.
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The proximate cause of the shortage of bus drivers in Ireland has been well ventilated at this stage. The transport sector – both public and private – has expanded in tandem with the rest of the economy and there is a general shortage of drivers for both busses and other commercial vehicles.
As well as the general shortage of drivers, Dublin Bus also has to contend with the private sector offering better remuneration, certainly over the short term, and you may not need to be based in Dublin.
Driving a bus in Dublin is however very attractive to South Africans for several reasons, not least because it offers a route to naturalisation for those that are interested. Likewise, South Africans are attractive to Dublin Bus for several reasons, not least that their qualifications are accepted here and they speak English.
In many ways the entry of migrants into this sort of job is exactly what you would want and expect in a country with existing high levels of employment.
AI came along
The simple argument is that Irish people are not interested in being bus drivers because they think they can make more money, more easily doing something else.
And by and large they can. Or at least they could. Then AI came along.
The whole thrust of Irish post-secondary school education policy for the last 40 years or more has been about upskilling the workforce to meet the labour demand generated by inward investment and the services sector.
How many times have we heard about a US multinational choosing Ireland over somewhere else because of the young, educated workforce. That did not happen by accident. It was deliberate.
In 1980 less than a quarter of Irish school-leavers went on to university. That was low by EU standards. Now around two-thirds of 25 to 34-year-olds have a third level qualification which is the highest proportion in Europe. The European average is around 43 per cent.
Graduates employed directly by the multinational sector or working downstream are not all engineers and scientists. There are hundreds of thousands working in administration, human resources, logistics and the rest. Someone must do the payroll for the 5,000 people who work for Intel in Leixlip.
Despite paying big dividends with jobs, Ireland’s focus on white collar education is not without a cost. It has been matched by a downgrading of vocational training when it comes to resources and public perceptions of the opportunities it offers.
Our approach contrasts with other EU members such as Germany, where vocational education is still seen to be as important to the economy as third level. It is more than a question of providing training places. It is about creating a culture where training for a trade is seen as offering the same chances of living a rewarding and fulfilling life as a third level qualification.
It is probably overstating things to say that as a consequence of the arrival of iterative artificial intelligence models such as Chat GPT, our undoubtedly successful education policy may prove some sort of Achilles heel.
But according to studies by the likes of the International Labour Organisation and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, up to one in four jobs could be disrupted – a neutral word for lost – by AI. For a country like Ireland with an above average number of people working in the vulnerable roles the impact could be even greater.
It would be nice to think that this “disruption” will see a flow of people back into trades and vocational work where there is a quantifiable shortage of qualified workers that is currently being met by immigration.
It might even get Irish people interested in being Dublin Bus drivers again. At least until AI-operated driverless busses come along.
