Scottish lorry drivers' strike
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When will haulage contractors learn that there is a great deal of common sense in the old cliche "Unity is strength"? The truth of the statement is amply illustrated by the success of the Scottish lorry drivers' strike.
Six thousand men, organized by an amateur committee without official union backing, no strike pay and very little reserve funds — how much can you save from £28 a week? — held out for almost four weeks and had their wage demands met. Even before the first pay packet has been made up, the employers are wailing that the extra expense will put many of them out of business — and why? Because they say their customers won't pay a sufficiently high additional rate to meet the extra cost.
Well, the answer is simple — don't supply the service. They should take a leaf from their drivers' book and withhold their services. Indeed it's so simple that it raises another question: why did they not think of it before? The answer to that one is equally simple. They're afraid. Afraid of losing business to colleagues who will accept uneconomic rates and so they take a job which cannot pay.
This suggests to me that you've got to be more intelligent to hold an hvg licence than to run a haulage company. The drivers won't work for uneconomic rates; that's because they're united.
Furthermore, the drivers argued a _reasoned case before the Arbitration and Conciliation Board. Are the employers less able to argue a similar case before their customers? Their diffidence leads one to think so.
Then there's the question of secrecy. Every man, woman and child in the country knows how much or how little the drivers' basic rate and bonus payments amount to. They even divulge their conditions of service.
Is it too much to expect hauliers to issue a •joint statement showing a basic hourly rafe for each weight of vehicle? Perhaps not. It might be too much to ask them to stick to these rates. They seem determined to go out of business by the long and painful route of insolvency. COLIN GAVIN, Wilmington, Kent,