RMC facing national strike?
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• The National Owner Drivers Association (NOVA) gets the results of a nationwide strike ballot at RMC this week. If the union's 360 RMC members agree, national industrial action could begin immediately in support of nine long-serving drivers which the ready mixed concrete company, RMC Readymix, dismissed without notice at the beginning of December.
RMC Readymix's north west region has been on strike over the dismissals since Monday, 5 December 1988, and NODA Secretary Mike Binns is confident that owner drivers in RMC's eight other regions around Britain will support the 66 strikers on Merseyside. Binns says that the nine sacked Liverpool drivers, who each have an average of 22 years service with RMC, are being used as pawns in a battle to reduce NODA's presence within the company.
Building contractors on Merseyside have not been reporting a shortage of ready mixed concrete in the area, though this may be partly due to RMC's rival suppliers increasing their output.
It is also due, says NOVA, to the way in which RMC has boosted the number of full-time company drivers it is using in the Merseyside region. "Out of a north western fleet of about 71 vehicles," says Binns, "16 are now working despite our strike using full-time employee drivers."
This contradicts RMC's truck driver policy as a whole, which is to sub-contract everything out to owner drivers. However, the north west region had retained, prior to the current strike, about five company drivers to act as a day-today buffer zone to mop up work that the owner drivers could not carry out.
NOVA fears full-time drivers will be forced to cross picket lines. RMC Readymix maintains that the nine drivers were sacked because they had created "a long history of day-today conflict".