'The industry needs to get to grips with its identity crisis'
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g read with interest Ilona Richards' views
on the role of women in the industry (Sound Off, CM 22-28 Oct). I hope that she is right, but Jam afraid that equality may be very much a side issue.
Recently I saw driver Greta Shepard in TV's Off the Back of a Lorry presenting just the image the industry needs in the nineties. Drivers featured in most TV programmes are more in line with out-of-date stereotypes that the media loves to perpetuate. I wondered, just when did the abyss that exists between one end of the transport spectrum and the other, and between the PR image and the actuality, come about?
Part of the answer was provided by Public Eye's film Motorway Menace. As soon as the chill of financial adversity strikes, all the bad habits are there waiting to be resumed. While the profits to be made by flouting the law are far in excess of the penalties imposed, who can blame the cost-conscious haulier for exploiting the system?
Perhaps it is not in the industry's interests to employ smartly dressed, intelligent drivers in these circumstances. They might have the brains and ability to fight back and make the management look very shabby.
I have four years' driving experience. Not a vast amount, but it is more experience than some of the people who instruct me upon the routes I should travel, and what time! am expected to reach my destination.
Before I became a lady trucker I worked in various office jobs for 10 years. I know no instances of desks being hit by heavy congestion, extremes of weather, untreated roads or mechanical breakdowns The cab of a lorry is soon to become a mobile transport office and the trailer a mobile warehouse, so closely is the movement of each load mirrored by its electronic or paper trail.
The distribution function is the latest to suffer standardisation. The technology that should empower us with better communications, greater ability to react and improved working conditions has so far been used in a quantitative form, reducing the driver's performance to another service level statistic. It is not pleasant to know that your job is on the technological hit list. The technology may be amazing but, regrettably, management is the same old management.
The licence to drive big lorries is a privilege and it is up to me to maintain it. The technology that is removing my selfdetermination is not removing my legal liability, and if the technology is to be used in this manner then the liability should be lodged with the people who make the rules not minions like us. But does it really matter? After all, with nearly three million unemployed, drivers are expendable.
Is the PR at odds with reality? On the one hand there is the environmentally conscious, squeaky clean, equal opportunities, career structure PR hype—on the other there's still the "I don't care if you are on your break, get back here now" mentality. These latter depots are effectively run by a black-hand gang of a few drivers who think they have a mandate on who should work there; probably dependent on which pub you drink in. The Greta Shepards of this world must come as a nasty shock to their systems.
The industry needs to get to grips with its identity crisis and address the glaring inconsistencies that exist in its philosophy and working methods. Maybe once the male workforce has the benefits of equal opportunities, the women will stand a better chance of the same.
0 The author makes it clear that she considers her employer, Asda, to be a reputable outfit.
If you want to sound off about a road transport issue write to features editor Pat,* Cunnane.