U COMMENT A RAW DEAL
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• The collapse of Transworld Distribution could turn out to be the worst disaster to hit rank and file hauliers since the present recession began. Its implications — ruined businesses, lost homes, bankruptcies — are all the more brutal on a human scale because so many of Transworld's creditors are one man outfits.
Transworld promised regular return load work to a great many of our readers. They took on that work in good faith. Now it owes a total of 21m to 1,000 hauliers and other firms. They have been told they will only receive at best 20p in the pound — and even that paltry sum will be delayed for six months.
Hauliers are a tough bunch. They are used to the pitfalls of taking on jobs from companies advertising "guaranteed return loads'' for which they are unlikely to be paid for weeks or months after making the journey.
Their profession is rarely lucrative or glamorous. But even with all this in mind, the scenes at a Cambridge hotel on Wednesday last week were tragic. Up to 100 hauliers had to sit there and be told that, in many cases, their homes, their businesses, everything they had worked for, was lost.
All too often in such cases it is the working haulier who loses everything, and the businessman little or nothing.
Is it really beyond the wit of our legislators to put a stop to this sort of fiasco?