THE WILLING DRIVER.
Page 27
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
Why Commercial Vehicle Agents Should See that New Users of Motor Transport Do Not Ask Too Much of Their Drivers.
By " Vim."
AT FIRST glance the conditions governing a commercial vehicle driver's employment may not seem to be a very intimate concern of the motor agent who sold the vehicle. But a second glance shows that an agent, who is determined that every chassis he sells shall give satisfactory service, cannot ignore the fact that it will not do so unless its driver treats it as a friend, not as an enemy. And if it increases sitbstantially the burden of the driver's work, he positively will come to regard it in anything but a friendly light.
Owners and managers of big fleets know, of course, precisely how much their men can reasonably be expected to do in the way of driving, loading and unloading. The agent who is lucky enough to number large users of mechanical transport among his customers, obviously need not worry about how their drivers are treated. Even if their employers asked too much, it may he taken for granted that the men themselves, who are usually taken on as experienced hands at the game, would be quite capable of explaining matters when the limit of their endurance had been reached. No, the kind of customer I have in mind as requiring the agent's fatherly advice and guidance on the point of not overworking his driver is the tradesman who has bought his first motor van or lorry to replace a discarded horsed vehicle, and who has had his horse driver trained to drive the new acquisition.
Overworking the Driver Reacts on the Machine.
Over andover again I have found when trouble has cropped up with a comparatively new vehicle, which should have run for three or four times as long without complaint, that the whole of it has been caused by overworking the driver rather than the vehicle. The fe.ult has rarely been deliberate, on the part of an employer ; more often the employee has been to blame for not having protested when he realized that the work he was asked to do was beyond him. On both sides, total lack of knowledge of the fundamental difference between the conditions of horse and motor transport has been at the root of the trouble. The employer has found. his new conveyance able to do so much more than his old one, that he has delightedly kept it on the go from first thing in the morning until last thing at night, perhaps going to the extent of taking on outside jobs when opportunities have offered. The driver has struggled gamely to keep pace with the powers of his vehicle, being afraid to admit that he was being worked to death because, in his ignorance and his anxiety to prove himself adaptable, he has imagined that any qualified motor man would gladly take his job from him.
Let me quote an actual case of this description, to explain exactly what I mean. It is a perfectly true story, and only one of many that have come to my notice ; I quote it because it nearly ended in atragedy, and so serves particularly well to emphasize my point :—
A coal merchant in a comparatively, small way of business decided to scrap his horse and cart, • and bought a 1-ton motor lorry instead. His carman was —and still is, heaven be praised—one of those sober, intelligent, industrious and conscientious men of Whom we hear so little in these days, but who still exist in plenty. He had been with his present "boss" some ten years when the motor lorry was purchased, and was as eager as his employer to get rid of the horse and cart, so he took to the motor as a duck takes towater. An hour or so's tuition served to make him sufficiently competent to handle the vehicle in the quiet, almost rural, district where the business is situated; and with the agent's assurance of ready help should any mechanical defectstbe revealed yri he was left to it.
Seen three weeks later, the driver was looking worn out and ill. Questioned as to what he had been doing -with hirnself, he expressed himself astonished at the quantity of coal -that he had been able to deliver with the motor lorry as compared with the best he had ever done with horse, but confessed.to a fear that he was "too old" for the job, for it "took it out of him properly." Four weeks afterwards he was in hospital with pleurisy and double pneumonia, and only a very strong constitution pulled him back from death's door.
Speeding r' Operations Upset the Balance.
His illness was caused entirely by-overwork. In the old days of the horse and cart, the man would toddle down to the railway station, load up a couple of tons, perch himself comfortably on some sacks, and, then recuperate his strength while his animal ambled at the rate of three or four miles an hour to the place of delivery. The strenuous labour of unloading the coal completed, there would be another long rest for the driver on the way hack to the station, always provided there was enough of the morning left to make another delivery worth while before dinner time. With the advent of the motor vehicle, the whole scheme of his work was changed, 'although neither he nor his " boss " properly understood this. The periods of rest, which were absolutely essential to rapid loading and unloading, were completely washed out. Ten minutes with the motor sufficed to cover the same distance as took half an hour with the horse; and even that ten minutes represented only a-change in occupation, not in any sense a rest. Consequently, in trying to justify his employer's and his own faith in the time-saving property of motor transport, he overtaxed his physical resources, and a chill soon followed as the result of getting overheated while handling the shovel.
A less conacientioua man would have discovered, as:many another has alone, that a rest period could easily' be obtained by making' things .go wrong with the lorry, and sending the vehicle back to the agent to be put right. I, for -one. -could hardly have blamed him if he had done this. To my way of thinking, the agent would have been more deserving of censure for not having helped -the owner to appreciate-that, by substituting motor haulage for horse haulage, the conditions of labour for the human being in charge of it had also been altogether changed. By persuading him to give his driver a labourer to halve the work of loading and unloading, not only would he have avoided the complete disorganization of his business which came when his man's health gave way but the labourer would have paid for himself by cutting down terminal delays. When an agent begins to get trivial complaints about a new motor vehicle that has been in use only a short time by a customer who has but recently abandoned horse haulage, he should probe the matter a little beyond the chassis. It may be that the vehicle is really defective: or that the driver is incompetent ; but, in my experience, overworking awilling driver is more commonly: the cause of the trouble.