Steve Shearer
I write with very grave concern and disappointment at the story posted in T&Lnews on 8 December regarding truck-related deaths. In that story the TWU continues to peddle its outrageous and utterly false accusations and claims that all, or even most, truck deaths are caused by low rates paid to operators and to the demise of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal (RSRT). I make the following comments in reply, so that your readers are not left being mislead by the TWU. I make these comments as the longest serving trucking industry CEO in Australia, with 23 years in the role, and as someone who predates Tony Sheldon’s term as National Secretary of the TWU.
The first point to note is that the mere presence of “safety” in the name of the RSRT does not in any way mean that it was actually a road safety entity. The RSRT was set up, in a deal cut between the TWU and then IR Minister Bill Shorten who appointed the wife of his then Chief of Staff as the Tribunal’s president.
Matters came to a head when the RSRT not only acted in a manner most inappropriate for a judicial tribunal, in the view of a great number of experienced lawyers, effectively bullying and disrespecting witnesses and threatening them with six months’ jail if they failed to show up, with barely 24 hours’ notice, for hearings over Easter. Worse, the RSRT set rates that would be applicable only to some 35,000 owner drivers and small family businesses, not, repeat not, to employee drivers. Those rates were set at such ludicrous levels that they guaranteed that the owner-drivers would be priced out of the market. Indeed, there are a great many documented cases of these poor folk being advised that they would no longer have any work.
We even had senior TWU reps who came to one of our industry meetings, which 215 alarmed operators attended, and to everyone’s absolute amazement the deputy state secretary of the TWU dismissively said during one of his outbursts: “We don’t know what you’re worried about, the work will still get done, you’ll just be working for someone else.”!
This outrageous comment was his response to the angry statements by many of the 215 present that they would lose their businesses. It was clear that the TWU knew that and that they just didn’t care and seemingly the TWU actually wanted to eradicate owner drivers and have them replaced by employees of bigger businesses in the hope that more of them would join the union. This view was personally confirmed with me by a union official as being the policy being pushed from the very top of the TWU.
So, unsurprisingly, the industry rallied against the RSRT like never before and certainly never in my 23 years in this role. The TWU’s spurious argument, which the RSRT had swallowed hook line and sinker, almost as if it had a predisposition to do so, was arguing that:
- The owner drivers were all unsafe.
- That this was entirely due to the allegedly poor rates paid to owner-drivers.
- Incredibly, literally, that simply by paying them more, those who are operating unsafely (e.g. by working excessive hours) would miraculously become safe, rather than continuing to work the excessive hours and pocket the extra money.
All of this is clearly patently false. I have met monthly with the police for 20 years in a committee that I chair and they know, right around the country, that the TWU claims are baseless and that the vast bulk of the industry is in fact safe. If that were not the case the police would be all over the industry like a rash every day. In the words of the police, it is a small recalcitrant minority of the industry that they are concerned about, as are we, and we fully and actively support enforcement action and policies that either force them to lift their game or force them out of the industry.
There were many other issues and fatal flaws with the RSRT Orders that are too complex to explain here other than to categorise them as being impractical for the industry and showing a fundamental lack of understanding by the RSRT of how the industry actually operates and needs to keep operating. For example, the blindingly obvious reality is that not every truck operator has the same cost structure and hence they can and do safely and legally operate under differing rates that they charge.
So the RSRT was doomed to fail and to its great credit the Federal Government and all but one of the independents in the Senate saw through the TWU’s false claims and its gross misrepresentations. They saw the truth of the matter and the factual evidence that we presented to them about the reality of the dramatic reductions in truck crashes, which is completely contrary to the misleading claims by the TWU.
This graph of Government fatal crash data clearly shows that over the past 32 years while the number of trucks and obviously the number of truck movements and mileage travelled have doubled, the number of fatal crashes is less than half and that as a result the rate of fatal crashes has plummeted to less than 20% of what it was and it is still trending down. All this without an RSRT and all this with market rates in place.
The TWU to this day still shamelessly rushes out with public statements moments after any truck-related fatality and repeats its fallacious claims that the death was caused by poor rates and the abolition of the RSRT. They don’t even bother to check if the driver was an employee, as most are, and to whom the rates would never had applied and hence the TWU claim that the death occurred because of low rates is a complete sham.
They also don’t bother to check if the truck driver was at fault. This is a very serious failing by the TWU because as proven by the recent release by the SA Labor Government’s Minister for Road Safety and Police, 91% of fatal truck crashes involve another vehicle, and of those a massive 80% are actually caused by the motorist, not by the truck driver. These figures are an increase from the 76% caused by the motorists in the previous figures of four years ago. Yet more proof of the improvements within the industry.
So where does that leave the false claims by the TWU? Utterly discredited.
That said, the industry does agree that:
- Everyone should be paid appropriately for their work at levels that reflect the realities of the costs and the quality of the work. This must include an eradication of the utterly unethical practice of some large transport operators who knowingly grossly underpay their subcontractors in respect of fuel, by setting their fuel levy by the Terminal Gate Price which is some 25 to 30 cents per litre below what they know the subcontractor actually has to pay for their fuel. That is a shameful disgrace.
- Everyone should be paid promptly and certainly within a maximum of 30 days, something which far too many customers, including some large truck operators abuse with payment terms of 90 to 120 days. This is why we have always supported the push for a 30-day maximum payment terms. The TWU’s pathetic assertion that the government action to investigate payment terms is somehow an admission that they got it wrong when they abolished the RSRT is disingenuous to say the least. This investigation is something which we negotiated with the government and the Independent Senators as an integral part of our successful campaign to have the RSRT abolished and we continue to support it and it has nothing to do with the TWU.
This is why we met with the Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman earlier this year and encouraged her to investigate these issues.
In summary, these outrageous claims by the TWU are the equivalent of Tony Sheldon walking outside in the dark and claiming that somebody has stolen the sun, when in fact we all know that it’s just night time.
The TWU should also be ashamed of its ongoing refusal to sit down with the industry bodies to discuss the real safety issues and work cooperatively on effective solutions. They don’t even bother to attend the meetings of the industry’s peak national Council, the ATA of which they are a member, where there is ongoing serious discussion of safety issues and effective solutions.
Steve Shearer is the executive director of SARTA.