Unloved Memorial
Page 67
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THERE seems to be a general assumption that the Road Haulage Wages Council, when they meet on January 15, will be asked to discuss the consequence of the increase to 30 m.p.h. in the speed limit for heavy goods vehicles. In the event, neither side may care to raise the subject. They will have enough
material for debate in the already promised demand from the trade unions of a "substantial" increase in wages. The fuel shortage adcls at least one complication, and nobody would blame the Council for dodging as long as possible the conundrum of expressing miles per hour in terms of wages per guaranteed week.
Perhaps the Council do not hope to evade the issue for ever. Hauliers expect them to discuss it, and, if British Road Services happen to reach agreement with the unions, the Council are almost bound to consider whether they ought not to follow the example. There is still more than a doubt that the subject will scarcely be ripe for plucking on January 15. , No sensible solution can be reached merely by tinkering about with the road haulage wages structure.
It would have to be fairly thoroughly . revised. .. ibe Wages Orders give no information about the speed
limit. They are not even concerned with unladen
weights. The carrying capacity of a goods Vehicle" decides what the driver should be paid. Special con cessions to the heavy goods ehicle driver for being allowed to do what he has probably been doing illegally for years past would mean the introduction of a number of new categories. They would become more and more incomprehensible as people gradually forgot the reasons for them. • Except for the apparent insistence of all the parties concerned, there is no necessary connection between the speed limit and wages. If the maxiritum speed,fOr all goods vehicles had always been 30 m.p.h., the wage scales would probably be exactly the same as they are. But the pattern of operations would be different.
Activities of Office Staff
Trunk operators and drivers will be particularly affected, although few of them seem to have grasped the fact. The driver who runs to a timetable may take his vehicle out at a set hour each evening, and aim to arrive when he is expected. His journey regulates the activities of the vehicles on collection and delivery work and even of the office staff.
If, with the increased speed limit, he saves perhaps two hours during the night, the feeder vehicles will have two extra hours available during the day. They may be able to put these to good account, possibly by extending the radius within which they work. Whether this particular forecast is accurate or not, it is reasonable to expect that there will be some fairly big consequential changes until the organization settles into a system very much like what would have developed had there never been a differential speed limit.
In a few cases the change will be profound. The experiment conducted by The Commercial Motor two years ago showed that the journey from London to Birmingham took 64 hours with a 20 m.p.h. speed limit, and 43 hours with a 30 m.p.h. limit. The 13 hours saved means that in future a driver can reasonably hope to
travel from London to Birmingham and back in a day, and keep comfortably within the permissible driving time of 11 hours.
There may be drivers who do this already, thus breaking either the speed limit regulations or Section 19. There seems no good reason why they should expect to receive more pgy when their position is legalized. In the natural order of things, the driver who now does the single journey in a day will earn more overtime from the double journey. There is equally no reason why he should expect, in addition, extra pay to compensate for the greater mileage.
The 20-m.p.h. speed limit is the kind of restriction that can vanish without an ultimate trace, and it might be best for all concerned if this were to hatipen. The manufacturers who have expended so much energy in devising ways and means of keeping chassis and body within the limit of 3 tons unladen weight will be able to relax. No doubt some of them have already done so, and are turning their ingenuity to other problems.
More Gradual Change
The change in the national fleet of goods vehicles will be more gradual. The statistics still reflect the fact that the upper limit for the maximum of 30 m.p.h. used to be 23 ,tons. When the number of vehicles in all the other weight categories is increasing, the number lfetween 2 and 21 tons continues to go down. For the next few years we may expect a greater increase than usual in the nufinber of heavy vehicles, until practically all the existing vehicles have been replaced.
Other results, perhaps not so important, will follow
the final abolition of the lower speed limit. For example, there will be an end to the committee of trade and industry on the heavy goods vehicle speed limit, a body that chose their title better than they knew, as a means of reminding themselves through the weary years of what they were supposed to do.,
When so many things combine to make one forget the speed limit, it seems a pity to give it a permanent memorial in the Road Haulage Wages Orders. There are one or two fossilized remains already. There is the stipulation that drivers in the London area—but not in the provinces—of vehicles with a carrying capacity of over 1 ton but not over 8 tons, who were in employment as drivers on June 8, 1932, and "have remained in the service of the same employer," receive an extra shilling on their basic weekly remuneration. It would be interesting to know how many drivers are affected, and whether, when the last of them has taken his wages and departed, the evidence of his existence will be expunged from the next Wages Order.
Nobody minds this kind of ancient relic. The employers in London who have to pay the extra shilling know its history, and are proud that their companies have played some part in shaping it. They do not begrudge any clerical time taken to work out the differential.
Hauliers are never likely to feel the same way about new wage categories introduced to reconcile the trade unions to the coming change in the speed limit. The extra tables in successive Wages Orders would be an unloved memorial to something that operators, and perhaps their drivers also, would like to be forgotten.