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STATI OF THE UNIONS
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Even the unions admit that with margins so tight, many operators would find it almost impossible to increase their drivers' pay.
David Harris reports on what the unions hope to do for their members.
What place is there for unions in 21st century road haulage? You might think that a trade union is about as unlike a commercial business as it is possible to be. Bosses and unions are traditional adversaries and this remains true today, even if modern management language might like to characterise industrial relations as reasonable dialogue between partners.
But where unions and employers remain similar is that for both of them the bottom line is about money. A company may talk about profits and a union about pay packets, but a wage negotiation is essentially a question of how much money is available — and how much of it ends up in the pockets of the workforce.
Ron Webb, national secretary for the Transport & General Workers Union (T&G), is clear about this:"Wage negotiations are number one, and we feel that pay and benefits do not in any way reflect the responsibilities that many drivers have nowadays," Webb bluntly dismisses many of the wage packets of drivers as "outrageous-, saying that some companies pay their drivers £6.50 an hour with bonus schemes so arduous that they are unlikely to swell those meagre pay packets: "I think the industry is outdated in what it pays and it only has itself to blame for its skills shortage. Just look at what they pay [drivers]."
However,Webb recognises that the haulage bosses themselves are often in a tricky spot. "The margins are continually picked at so that it is very difficult for some hauliers to provide any more to drivers for training, in health and safety for example," he admits."And for the cause of that you have to start looking at the customers like some of the retailerswhere the competition is quite vicious."
This also gives the unions a headache when it comes to negotiations, because one of the reasons given by hauliers for not being able to pay drivers more is that they are being forced to work for rates that cut profit to the bone.
Webb says: There's no doubt this is true hut we aren't allowed to negotiate with third parties -there's no mechanism to do that." The answer might be to campaign with the direct employer to persuade the company for which it is hauling to pay better rates, says Webb, But not surprisingly, few hauliers would be prepared to go down that path because of the fear they would simply lose the work.
No direct contact
Webb adds: You sometimes find that the customer will move in right at the end to solve the problem, but we've got no direct contact with the them.We can only deal with the direct employer."
Dealing with the direct employer is not always a problem, however, particularly if the haulier is a large company with the muscle to make its own decisions. It is among this sort of company that unions have won some of the better deals of recent years.
Last November, for example, the T&G struck a deal with parcels giant UPS which gave the company's LGV feeder drivers a minimum of LI l/hr, rising to I .24/hr from July this year.TheT&G was also happy with the final-salary pension scheme negotiated for 74 BP tanker drivers last November.
But such deals are uncommon and, rather depressingly, Webb does not expect the climate to improve: "I can only see things getting worse because of commercial pressures. We just haven't found the answers to attracting UK labour to the industry "I know that there has always been a high turnover of staff, hut it's now even more difficult to retain people. Long hours, dangerous conditions and changing attitudes have all taken their toll. Some 30 or 40 years ago people might have put up with things but now they just say 'sod this for a lark'."
Working conditions, perhaps the second most important union issue after pay, have not improved as much as is sometimes suggested, says Webb, who believes that the Working Tune Directive has a fatal flaw: "It hasn't addressed the problem. It's my view that 'periods of availability' are being massively abused and just used as working time. Nobody is enforcing this, so some drivers are still working a 65-hour week."
The result, Webb fears, is that drivers' careers are rarely as long as they used to be: -If someone starts driving in the industry at 22 I don't think they would get to being 50 in this business without being burnt out. knackered. There are too many pressures. Other union chiefs share Webb's rather gloomy analysis of relations between unions and management, particularly with the problem of not being able to negotiate with big customers who have huge influence on how hauliers operate.
Mel Thornton, national officer at the United Road Transport Union (URTU), the union with the second-biggest number of truck drivers after the T&G,savs:"We have to negotiate with the direct employer. Often they say that they would like to pay drivers more but that 'the customer says no'."
The result,says Thornton, is that the people with the power are not directly involved in negotiations— but are a constan t presence behind the scenes.
Thornton sees the same pressures on the number of hours worked — he knows of drivers working 84-hour weeks without breaking the letter of the WM, again because of the periods of availability. "Essentially this means that you could have a driver driving between the 83rd and 84th hour in a week," he adds. "No wonder so many are leaving the industry" But Thornton also believes that long-term trends have other causes: "I've been an industry official for 18 years and I firmly believe that the widespread introduction of sleeper cabs has been one of the main causes of longer hours. It makes the drivers self-contained, means they can sleep on the job and adds the task of unpaid watchman to the job of driving." • Are periods of availability being abused?
Industry fragmentation
Mick Cash, senior assistant general secretary at the Rail Maritime &Transport Union (RMT), says that one reason unions have not achieved all they could have for their members is that the industry is so diverse: "It's very fragmented, and where a sector is fragmented it makes it difficult for us to organise and operate — which means in turn that it's harder for us to do good deals." Cash feels that this particular difficulty could be eased by company takeovers and consolidation in the industry: "As haulage groups get bigger, it might present staff with an opportunity to organise better and conduct negotiations with one large company, both across depots and across contracts. At the moment, too many negotiations arc depot-based." But if this does happen, Cash warns that the unions will need to talk to each other:"We need a joint strategy with one another. We don't want to fight one another for members because the only people who will benefit from that will be the employers."
Having accepted that many operators are operating on such tight margins that boosting drivers' pay is a real problem, union officials are not blind to the fact that the same pressures are at work on conditions, such as drivers' hours.
The underlying challenge for unions and employers alike may be that improved pay and conditions for drivers is not really of much use if it puts the employers out of business and the union members out of work.
'Ibis was what was suggested by the survey commissioned earlier this year by Conservative MEP Philip Bradbourn, which questioned 500 hauliers in the West Midlands. It found that tightening up the drivers' hours regs would put such extreme pressure on smaller hauliers that some would be forced to close.