Janus comments
Page 66
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
Holding operation
WAGE CLAIMS that might have cost hauliers nearly £40m a year attracted less attention than many a demand in the past on a single operator or a small group of operators. The Road Haulage Wages Council last week took a whole day to reach a decision and there must have been fierce argument with several proposals and counter-proposals. But the outside world took little interest in what was going on.
The trade unions cannot regard the result as a success. On each of the points put forward they were given something but for the most part it fell far short of their target. In particular the £2 a week increase they wanted on the basic rates of pay was whittled down to 10s.
Much the best response would be to regard the final proposals as a holding operation. They introduce no revolutionary principle. Subsistence, extra payment for night work, and holidays with pay have always been included in the industry's wage structure. The extra £1 for the lowest paid workers repeats the innovation of a year ago which itself owed something to a suggestion from that fount of orthodoxy the Prices and Incomes Board.
Wage rates The present wage rates could not remain unchanged indefinitely. They took effect last August after an agreement that included no general rise. The basic rates last went up (by 3 per cent) as long ago as June 1966 although the reduction at that time of the basic week from 42 to 41 hours and again to 40 hours in February 1968 was the equivalent of a substantial wage increase.
Nothing in the latest proposal suggests that there might be an advantage in changing the structure. But the unions and the employers must have had this in mind and may have raised it in the course of discussions. It was only two months ago that the Road Haulage Association published a pamphlet on productivity which proposed sweeping changes and said categorically that well entrenched features in the wages order, such as normal working hours, overtime, Saturday work and Sunday work, should be outlawed.
The established practice of paying for an 11-hour day, irrespective of the hours of effective work required, said the pamphlet, should be abolished. Ultimately "salaried status should be introduced with acceptance of the duties and responsibilities that this implies".
These ideas seem remote from the proceedings of a statutory wages council. They are nearer in spirit to the comments of the Prices and Incomes Board in the November 1967 report on charges, costs and wages in the road haulage industry. A survey by the Board showed that the majority of drivers were on basic weekly rates very close to the statutory minima and that average weekly earnings were half as much again.
Overtime was the most important factor in explaining the difference, said the Board. More than 90 per cent of drivers work at least 45 hours in a week; 39 per cent more than 60 hours; and 10 per cent more than 70 hours. The Board appreciated that the time scale was of a completely different order from that shown on the clock. As the Board put it in the report: "The large amount of overtime represents units of payment rather than hours strictly worked: in other words the size of the pay packet is determined not so much by the number of hours worked as by the number of hours for which the employer is prepared to pay."
The present structure, said the Board later in the report, with its low basic rate and heavy dependence on excessive overtime "is unsatisfactory for the men themselves, breeds lack of control on the part of management and is totally out of keeping with the technological improvements which are continuously and rapidly taking place in the design and capacity of vehicles and in road transport generally".
For the Board the subject is congenial. The Board returned to it in December last in a report on a number of productivity agreements by hauliers. Still fresh in the minds of many of the operators concerned must be the relish with which the Board established that any resemblance between their agreements and productivity was fleeting or merely coincidental.
Missing link The transactions of the wages council the other day have little relevance to the ruminations of the RHA and of the Board. Both of them referred to what may prove to be the missing link. The Board had a number of suggestions, including a "strengthened employers' association"—without explaining exactly what was in mind—and assistance at regional level by the manpower and productivity service of the DEP. But the Board also called for an effort to re-establish a national negotiating committee for the road haulage industry "concerned, as the wages council is not, with productivity and conceivably sub-divided into sectors corresponding to different parts of the industry".
The RHA pamphlet suffers the strictures of the Board with fortitude. "The employers' side", it says, "is not ashamed of its record in the dealings" of the national negotiating committee. There is a hint that because the committee has failed it should be abandoned and some new initiative sought.
Events may show that this is unnecessary. The generally accepted version of what happened is that the unions withdrew from the committee because the RHA could give no undertaking that every one of its members would observe whatever agreement was reached. The unions must have had other reasons which they did not disclose. They knew in advance that an association cannot bind its members. The hope may have been that swifter progress on the wages front would be made by other means.
PI B strictures For a while this policy paid off. The unions reached advantageous individual agreements with several operators including those who subsequently had to endure the strictures of the Prices and Incomes Board. There was, at times, a general impression that the hauliers were on the run.
This phase may now be ending. Regulations cannot be long delayed which will bring into effect the reduction in drivers' hours laid down in the Transport Act. Drivers paid on the present scale will expect to receive the same money as before. A straightforward wage increase on the old pattern will not be accepted by the Government and will be condemned by the Board if it has the opportunity.
A new general agreement will have to be made which introduces the principle of productivity. The wages council is not a suitable body to deal with the matter. Other machinery must be used and there is no reason why this should not be the national negotiating committee. As on a previous occasion its decisions insofar as they are concerned with pay can be ratified subsequently by the council.
If a development along these lines is inevitable it is more than ever regrettable that the negotiating machinery was abandoned before it had made much progress.. With the necessary goodwill plans could by now have been drawn up for a comprehensive wage and productivity agreement —with alternatives to cover specialized activities—ready to come into operation when the time was considered opportune..
Now is the time to revive the idea. The manoeuvres which have served the unions well in the past may not work so well over the next few months. A general wage agreement in the past has been the signal for whatever increase is included to be applied equally to drivers already receiving a wage far above the basic rate. A rise of lOs offers limited scope for this. At the same time it may not seem much to the lower paid workers who may have been hoping for and perhaps needed something more substantial.
These workers are as much the concern of the unions as the others. The need to help them should be a strong inducement to start or re-start discussions on a completely new wage structure which will look after their interests while taking into account the many changes that have taken place and that are to take place in the months to come.