Only Fools Work For Bad Employers
Page 56
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SOME people will see trouble wherever they took, although none may, in fact, exist. I am wondering whether your correspondent T. Boyle, of the B.R.S. Wigan Group, whose letter was published on April 30, is not seeing something that does not exist.
Anyone going along the roads of this country, whether by day or by night, will see lorries pulled into lay-bys or at the side of the road with their drivers asleep. This does not mean, however, that wicked employers are grinding the faces of poor, hard-worked, over-driven men. On the contrary, it more probably means that these drivers are taking the half-hour statutory rest that the law requires them to take at intervals not longer than 5+ hours.
The fact that T. Boyle sees these drivers nodding in cafés and as black as the ace of spades, may mean only that they did not use for rest the period of at least 10 hours that the law requires the employer to give to all road haulage workers in every period of 24.
Is the employer to be blamed because the man to whom he gave this rest period spent it in other ways, possibly in driving a taxi or a coach when he should have been asleep?
a22 It is, of course, regrettable that any employer should, on an odd occasion, send a 20-miler on a journey of about 115 miles commencing at 2 a.m. All good lorry drivers, including your correspondent, should be allowed to sleep soundly at night and should work only between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., but, unfortunately, the trade and industry of the country must go on by day and night and I can imagine Mr. Boyle complaining bitterly, as so many night drivers do, if they are taken off night duty and put on day work for a change.
The fact that the driver to whom he refers was seen by him at midnight on his way home having, according to your correspondent, been on duty for nearly 22 hours, was probably in accordance with his own choice, although he was committing an offence for which probably only he was to blame. In any event, did the driver complain to your correspondent that he was being overworked, or is your correspondent only imagining things?
What do some of these people really want? There was nearly a mutiny at one B.R.S. depot at the suggestion that Servis Recorders should be fitted to their vehicles, and there were dark references to spying on the drivers. Some little time ago there was a strike in B.R.S. at the suggestion that inspectors should be put on the road to check the movement of B.R.S. lorries, no doubt in order to prevent some of their drivers working hours in excess of those permitted by law. Are foremen in factories regarded as spies and stooges of the employers, or are they part of the recognized machinery of employer/worker relations?
In case your correspondent should suggest that road haulage workers are bulldozed by wicked employers into working more hours than they have a wish to work, could not one remind him that the present era is not only one of full employment, but of actual shortage of manpower. Only a fool would continue to work for an employer of that type.
Cambridge. G. W. IRwiN, Secretary, Eastern Area, Road Haulage Association.