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It's 'List not good enough
Page 9
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Mr X bemoans the poor condition that truck drivers have to put up with — and calls for road transport professionals everywhere to make their feelings known.
Think of a profession — say building. Now ask yourself whether we would expect builders, after a hard day's work, to go horr and sleep somewhere with no hot food, no showers, the constant rumble of traffic passing inches from the door and the only toilet facilities either a wide-mouthed plastic bottle or spiky hedgerow. Oh, and let's not forget the possibility of being robbed, assaulted or hijacked while they sleep.
No, we wouldn't expect them to suffer this kind of indignity and humiliation you might even call it inhumanity. Yet this industry expects, mainly out of necessity, that its employees will endure the sort of conditior that. if they were inflicted on animals, would have the RSPC/ round faster than you can say 'battery farming.'
You might also ask whether a truck driver who has sufferel sleep-deprived night in a busy lay-by, or a night waking at th slightest noise while parked up on a lonely industrial estate, really in a fit state to spend a day behind the wheel.
This isn't the fault of anyone in the industry — you can only use the facilities, such as they are, that are provided. But it's high time that we all made our feelings known. Write to your councillors, berate your MP — send them photos of the conditions that you have to live with.
These people have an obligation to look after some of our hardest-working, most-undervalued workers and it's time thi remembered who pays their wages.
And before local councillors bemoan a lack of funding to pay new truck parks, it might be as well to jog their memories as to \ closed our truckstops and sold them for housing in the f irst pia This industry urgently needs better facilities for its drivers —government, at national and local level, has to make this happen. And if you really want to bring this home to your loc MP you could always park your artic outside his or her front gate overnight and pee on the herbaceous borders.
"It might be as well t their memories as to closed our truckstops them for housing es
That might get their attention.