The Strike that Wasn’t

Owner-operators at the Port of Vancouver and in Quebec earned front-page headlines with shutdowns to protest for better pay and working conditions. But the bigger, more far-reaching labor story may be the strikes that never happened: the deals won by unionized workers during bargaining with the Big Three automakers, ending last month with General Motors. The gains are hefty: an inflation-adjusted 14.5% wage increase over the life of a three-year contract. Pensions for current and future retirees will rise by 25% over six years.

These aren’t the modest increases of three or six years ago. They send a strong signal to other unions that now’s the time to push for bigger pay increases. And it further opens the wage gap between trucking and manufacturing jobs.

“In the past, drivers would sacrifice a little pay as a price of freedom,” John Stollery, president of Mississauga, Ont.-based TST Solutions, told me last month. “When a guy can work at the Chrysler plant at $30 an hour, and he’s driving a truck for $17 an hour and missing dinners and soccer games, he starts to think twice about his desire to be independent.”

Unemployment in Canada was at 7.5% in September, the lowest level since 1990. Not only is it going to be tougher to find new drivers, Stollery says, but if driver pay and benefits stay static, trucking companies are going to be up against the wall to keep the ones they’ve got.

But in order to raise wages significantly, fleet owners like Stollery need to push through freight-rate increases first. And typically, those don’t stick until a customer calls and there are no trucks to move his goods. And there never are no trucks. That’s why fleets use owner-operators.

The last thing I’d want to see is an exodus of savvy, entrepreneurial independents. I disagree with their tactics, but drayage operators in Vancouver showed that a strong, rational case for better contract terms can win real gains (an hourly wage, among others). On the other hand, a lot of hornblowing about low pay gets tiresome: owner-operators in Quebec have so far just made a lot of noise, and have little more than a formal meeting with the government and a lot of public ill will to show for it. _____________

BIDING TIME

As we were going to press we received word of a proposed new federal hours-of-service standard for truck drivers (the details are on page 16). What’s remarkable about the proposal isn’t the new 14/10 daily cycle, or that the 120-hour cumulative limit is still kicking. It’s the inclusion of the so-called “48-hour averaging” proposal introduced to transport regulators last May by the Canadian Trucking Alliance (see our September issue for coverage). It lets the driver average his work and off-duty time over a span of 48 hours-to work a little more one day and make up for it with a little more rest the next, which is precisely the way a lot of over-the-road drivers operate now.

The 48-hour averaging schedule hasn’t been an easy sell for the CTA, and it won’t eliminate every abuse. But it’s a such a logical way of regulating hours that it would be ignorant to let it pass.

So it’s encouraging to see some foresight within the government task force that developed the rules. That said, the proposal would only re-write National Safety Code Standard 9, not make new law. Like any other NSC standard, it’s up to each jurisdiction to bring it into force.