Leeds Hauliers Show the Way
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HAULIERS throughout the country, and especially those who engage in municipal and county council contracts, must be keenly interested in the situation which has been created in Leeds as the result of the determination of the municipal hauliers there to fight the Leeds Corporation on the question of haulage rates, and to challenge the validity of the methods whereby some local hauliers were persuaded to reduce the rates they had already quoted for contracts with the Cleansing Department of that Corporation.
If this action of the Leeds hauliers be a sign of the times, an indication of what is likely to happen in future when attempts are made to brow-beat hauliers or in any other way to depress contract rates and otherwise interfere with the legitimate operations of hauliers, then an important step towards improving the status of the industry, as well as stabilizing rates for this particular class of work, has been taken. That is all to the good and we heartily welcome the tendency.
Too long has it been the case that hauliers have been at the mercy of officials of municipal and county council authorities in respect of the rates that they are paid for work which they do. Admittedly the blame has, in the past, lain with the hauliers themselves, in that ratecutting competition between individuals has brought these rates down to a level considerably below the economic, thus giving those who employ them the apparent justification for the belief that these absurdly low rates do, in fact, show a profit.
That phase, however, has long been passed, and for years now, in certain localities at least, it has been the habit of officials of public bodies to take advantage of the hauliers' willingness to accept a low and unprofitable rate rather than to lose a job to a competitor. Authorities have deliberately ignored that clause in their own contracts which specifies the payment of fair wages, and in other ways, too, have almost connived at that law breaking which is inevitable if the haulier thus employed at these low rates is to live.
That state of affairs was possible only when hauliers were disunited and unorganized. The firm front which is now being displayed to the Leeds Corporation has been built up only because hauliers in that district have organized. The lesson is there for all to see : the moral so pointed that none can ignore it.