• COMMENT TIMES CHANGE
Page 5
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
• This week the Road Transport (Commercial) division of the Transport & General Workers Union reaffirmed its opposition to agency drivers. This has two important and related effects. One is that an increasingly large number of drivers are not accepted by the country's biggest drivers' union. The second is that the country's biggest drivers' union is, partly by its own choice, representing an ever-smaller percentage of the country's drivers.
The implications for the road haulage industry are not good. For a variety of reasons, the rise in use of agency drivers has been rapid, and they are now a large — if unorganised in union terms — body. If the established drivers' unions do not take on the representation of these drivers, they will eventually have to organise themselves. That means at least one more major union with which employers will have to negotiate, and an even higher chance of annual pay negotiations becoming annual leapfrogging negotiations as each union tries to outperform the advances in pay and conditions of the others. That is a recipe for chaos in an industry which has never been known for good industrial relations at the best of times.
In 1979 the TGWU had some 210,000 drivers in membership: today it has fewer than 130,000. That is, at least in part, a reflection of the hammering which the hire-and-reward sector has taken over the past few years, and a reflection of the growth in alternative means of organising the movement of goods, such as contract hire.
It is interesting to note, however, that the drop in driver membership of the TGWU is almost exactly paralleled by the drop in membership of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Both industries have been rationalised: many of the old-style, highly-unionised big hauliers have gone, just as many of the big traditional pits have gone. Paradoxically both industries, having shed a lot of manpower, now find it difficult to attract in people willing or able to take on the new jobs according to the new labour practices.
Such problems will not go away. The changing face of the road haulage industry and the driver market are things which the unions are going to have to face. If they are to continue to make a positive contribution to the welfare of the workers in the transport industry, and to the safe and efficient operation of that industry, they may well have to accept the changes which they are currently trying to ignore. While their fears of the industry becoming one of part-time drivers with no job security are real, they are also exaggerated.
Their chances of ensuring that inevitable change will not harm drivers and their employers depend on their being seen to be relevant to the industry as it is now moving — not on desperately trying to retain a structure which economic forces and changing driver opinions might well have made redundant.