By the Left Foot
Page 7
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Two aspects of the Queen's Speech should be actively engaging if not acutely troubling the minds of road transport operators today: the re-introduction • of the Trade Union Bill and the plan to put seaborne traffic, once it is within a five-mile corridor of a waterway, into the hands of dock labour. They both carry enormous if not obvious threats. While there is no statutory obligation in Michael Foot's Trade Union Bill for an employer to introduce a closed shop, if he does not wish to, harassment by the TGWU on employers to do so is more than a probability. Indeed with dockers' support it will become a certainty, The support of the dockers is almost guaranteed for although their initial scope is to be "confined" to five-mile corridors, ports and ICDs, their lust for its extension is inevitable. Most of the companies with warehousing facilities at these locations are national organisations or large group subsidiaries with other inland depots which will be regarded as rich pickings by the dockers who enjoy much higher rates of pay and vastly superior, if undeserved, conditions of service than their lorry driving brothers.
Look out, then, for dockers' promises of support for drivers' claims for enhanced wages and conditions in exchange for an extension of the "dock work" definition. Such an alliance would give the TGWU enough strength to cripple Britain in days. A development that operators should oppose now, before the die is cast,