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All plain sailing?
Page 9
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Barry Proctor stands in disbelief as complacency sedates our industry and makes it slumber through some of the biggest changes to threaten it yet... wake up boys, before ifs too late.
At the moment some sections of our industry behave like the captain of the Titanic; quite happily steaming along, safe in the knowledge that they're in charge of something unsinkable. Unfortunately there's a great big iceberg looming on the horizon that could send a lot of them under. Yes, I'm talking about the Working Time Directive. And yes, I'm sure a lot of this has been said before, but quite frankly, until someone in government starts listening, I'm going to carry on shouting this from the rooftops (or the crow's nest if you want to continue the nautical theme).
First off, it's going to cost me, at the very least, an extra 15-20% on my bills. Whether this is through extra trucks or extra staff remains to be seen but it will cost more. That said we are certainly going to try to pass this cost on to our customers.
However, here we run into the thorny issue of ownerdrivers. In France and Spain, I gather, a firm with anything up to four trucks still counts as an ownerdriver. And ownerdrivers are exempt from the 48-hour week until 2009.
Which presents us with a slight problem my customers will try and pass the 15-20% cost onto their customers, who will turn round and tell us that in future they'll get someone else, presumably an owner-driver, to pick up the load for them. This is what I just don't understand the WTD is being implemented for health and safety reasons, yet the sector of the industry most prone to doing its own maintenance and administration after a day behind the wheel is exempt. It makes no sense at all to me.
We're in the dark, really. No-one's even decided what 'working time' is yet
It's an oft-repeated joke that Euro legislation is invented by the Germans for the British to observe and the French to ignore. That said, our own government's consultation paper on the issue is somewhat delayed no-one's even defined what working time is yet.
Still we don't have to do anything about it for a couple of years, do we? After all, this industry's unsinkable...