bird's eye view by the Hawk
Page 34
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• Secret weapon
Ken Jackson, the TGWU's top road haulage negotiator, has a most surprising secret weapon — a pocket calculator. With this useful gadget he can calculate whether a proposed pay rise is within or outside the new pay norms.
He tells me that he has had occasion to speak to a Pay Board official several times and finds the Board incredibly stuffy and bureaucratic. "You can understand a civil servant nattering about a pay rise that is way over the odds but these geezers are pedantic about .01 per cent."
I gather that the Pay Board is mulling over the latest Wages Council recommendation. As an experienced fisherman Ken must expect that to stick like a fishbone in the Pay Board's craw.
• Fire!
If any delegates to BAR's conference at Harrogate anticipated a quiet afternoon nap the other day they had no joy; there were' two fire alarms, causing the total evacuation of the Crown Hotel within an hour. All slightly off-putting to speakers, and journalists but it was fun to watch the fire brigade arrive in force. Major building operations at the hotel also displeased the organizers. Why do hotels let conference rooms which are due to be attacked from above by noisy power-tools?
• Bon mot
As well as benefiting from the excellent English-language papers presented, Britain's reputation got a totally unexpected boost at last week's Daimler-Benz seminar for transport operators from 15 countries, at La Baule on the French Atlantic coast.
Representatives from some of the national delegations were expressing their public thanks to their hosts at the end-ofseminar dinner when up pops Henry Adler, chief engineer of SPD Ltd, and records the appreciation of the British operators in a non-stop three-language tour de force which rocked the Continentals and warmed the hearts of the British.
Just to rub it in, Henry congratulated the EEC for deciding to join Britain!
• The most
Interesting facts about the importance of road haulage in various countries were given in a slide presentation at the opening of the seminar. Seems that 78 per cent of freight ton-mileage goes by road in Denmark, 76 per cent in Switzerland, 75 in Britain, 56 in Sweden, 54 in Holland and Norway, 45 in France and Belgium, 38 in Germany and 23 per cent in the USA.
• The long roll
I met a Dutch haulier at the La Baule event (it's surprising what one finds to talk about while floating dreamily in a heated openair pool) who told me that he'd been running some fleet trials with a new truck tyre — a radial from a well-known company which shall remain nameless but whose name begins with M. He said he'd already got 120,000 miles (yes, miles, not kilometres) out of a set.
I then discovered that several of the British fleet operators present were running similar trials on sets of these new covers and although none had yet reached the Dutchman's mileage, several were around 80,000 and reporting very little sign of wear.
Something to look forward to.
• Hoffa comeback?
The former president of the Teamsters union, Jimmy Hoffa, recently the subject of a long profile in the BBC's Midweek programme is now free from the jurisdiction of the US Parole Board which had governed his activities since his release from a long jail sentence. Hoffa is lobbying to have lifted the seven-year ban on his holding union office; the White House may be reluctant to re-license this resourceful operator in view of the Watergate scandal.
If Hoffa eventually gets back his old job as Teamsters president, American road hauliers will face tougher pay negotiations than they have experienced with his handpicked successor, Frank Fitzsimmons; 13,000 Teamsters in six northern California "locals" have asked their national leaders in Washington for freedom to negotiate their own contracts — a golden opportunity here for an ambitious ex-president to "mixit" with former colleagues.
• Bugs
American truckers are experimenting with tiny "bugging" devices — not to discover trade secrets, but to protect valuable loads. The "bugs" are actually electronic beam transmitters with a range of 30 miles and capable of transmitting continuously for up to 90 days. They are hidden on the vehicle or buried in its load and enable its path to be tracked by suitable equipment.
One snag is that the signals from the bugs interfere with the activities of radio "hams"; also, cheap, throwaway bugs are round the corner whose use would save operators the trouble of retrieval.
The Department of Transportation is said to be researching several types of electronic truck-alarm systems requiring no action by truck drivers. One system involves a little black box which can be questioned as to its location from central control points within a city or from a helicopter, without the driver's knowing about it. If these infernal tools become popular how long before every decent drivers' café is equipped with a bugging suppressor?
• Happy couples
Artie operators bedevilled by matching problems will find the coupling situation for 32-ton-gcw tractive units set out in great detail in a 50p (post free) chart just produced by Transport Press Services.
On one side it compares the principal relevant statistics for 33 tractive units on the British market and on the other side a series of graphs showing the maximum weight that can be imposed on each tractive unit for any fifth-wheel position.
Strictly within BSI limits, not much more than half the units will couple to a trailer with 40in. front overhang, but in practice a bigger tolerance is acceptable. The chart shows that four units weigh less than 5.25 tons in running trim — Bedford, DAF FT200, Volvo F86 and Scammell Handyman. The cheapest 32ton tractor? TPS says it is the Scania LB 80.
If you are interested, TPS is at 19/20 Cowcross Street, London, EC 1M.
• Lending line
If you see a Freightliner driver parked up, and reading, the chances are — at least in the near future — that it will be a hardback rather than the more usual literature. It seems that Freightliners Ltd has been given a contract to carry bulk quantities of books between London and Yorkshire— one of the results of the forthcoming amalgamation of several of Britain's major libraries to form The British Library.
The operation is being carried out in such a way that books will only be briefly out of circulation, and no library will have to close.
They say that 14 miles of books are involved in the operation. I haven't the faintest idea how many books makes 14 miles, and if you see a uniformed driver at the roadside laying out books end to end you can assume it's a Freightliner man with an enquiring mind.