Newsletter No. 25
AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2004
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Truckies driven round the world Most truck drivers in the U.K. are destroying themselves and their families by working excessive hours (‘Long hours culture takes its toll on UK drivers’ http://www.usdaw.org.uk 4.2.04). Nearly half of drivers surveyed work 55 hours or more a week and one in four work 60 or more hours a week. Nearly three quarters said working long hours damages their families and 60 per cent said it damages their health. The UK government will enact a Road Transport Working Time Directive in March 2005, to ensure drivers work no more than 48 hours a week, averaged over a 17-week period (with a limit of 60 hours in any one week). This is in line with European Union minimum standards. Meanwhile, ‘global pressures on the timber industry are forcing log truck drivers to spend up to 100 hours a week’ at work (The Mercury 4.2.04). Tasmanian haulage contractors are creating a ‘race to the bottom’ to win tenders from huge timber felling corporations. In turn, they overwork and underpay their drivers, reducing them to insecure and casual employment. The Transport Workers Union, along with timber communities in Tasmania, is calling on contractors to give drivers ongoing work as well as proper award conditions. The overwork of truck drivers is a problem in Australia, as it is in many countries. Highway fatalities involving overtired hard pressed drivers, in an industry driven by cost cutting and squeezed for profits, constantly threaten to boil over into direct industrial action, because federal and state governments stall on substantial reform of the industry. Typical was the threat by NSW truckies to strike before last Christmas (‘NSW truckies threaten Xmas strike over workload’ Australian Broadcasting Commission 2.11.03). A U.S. study shows that since road transport was deregulated in 1980, truckies’ median earnings have dropped 30 per cent and work weeks average 60 or more hours. It says ‘cabs of 18 wheelers are the sweatshops of the new millennium, with some truckies working up to 95 hours a week for what amounts to little more than the minimum wage’ (Sweat-shops on Wheels — Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation Michael H Becker’ OUP, 2000, 224pp). The International Transport Federation puts the changes in the transport industry down to economic globalisation, which appears in the industry as a ‘slow counter-revolution’. A small number of mega-corporations are coming to dominate the world economy and power and resources are shifting from labour and the public sector to capital and the private sector. (‘Multinationals in a Globalising Economy’ http://www.itf.org.uk/) Global transport systems are undergoing a massive restructuring, with horizontal and vertical integration, the emergence of global giants in all modes of transport as it assumes a more important strategic position; and from outside the industry, extreme pressure for efficiency and cost savings Workers suffer ‘flexibilisation’ in the labour market, a ‘bottom to top’ redistribution and disappearance of secure jobs and wages. Rights and regulations protecting labour are being undermined and scope for class compromise is breaking down. The International Transport Federation calls on its affiliates to resist privatisation of transport, coordinate cross-industry wage agreements, increase international cooperation and to copy successful strategies and best practice. In Australia, the TWU & other unions involved in transport should push Labor governments to pass laws similar to the Road Transport Working Time Directive, so road transport workers in Australia can also balance their work and family lives. This could be a precedent for a general directive to benefit all workers. Transport workers can show solidarity with International Road Transport Day, held by the ITF every October to raise worldwide awareness of transport workers’ demands, to help successfully take on what is now a global industry around work-time-life issues. |