You Asked For It

We just got unionized in a new way. Official-type people seem reluctant to talk about it publicly, which irritates me rather a lot, because I think we’ve just entered a new era in Canadian trucking. Are they afraid to look?

In combination with a couple of other developments, either with us now or soon to come, this will be no less dramatic than the change wrought by deregulation or the original Free Trade Agreement. Nor will it have less impact. It is indeed unnerving for some.

When the Teamsters won the right to organize drivers, owner-operators, drivers employed by owner-ops, and, most importantly, drivers employed by third-party driver-leasing agencies at the general freight division of Mackie Moving Systems in Oshawa, Ont., they grabbed the means to re-organize the entire industry. It won’t happen instantly, not overnight, but things are bound to change.

They’ll certainly change at Mackie. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the 200 or so truckers involved, most of whom seem bent on saying “Yes” to the union idea, will be out of work within months. The thing is, the majority of loads hauled by these guys are to and from General Motors, and is there any shipper tougher than one from the automotive game? The rate paid by GM has already fallen in the last year by eight cents or so, and the margins are thus mighty slim anyway. If union rates are paid to drivers, “slim” will become “forget it.”

It’s not as if unions are new to trucking, of course. The Teamsters in particular, though, have been a progressively smaller force in recent years, thanks to deregulation, the growth of truckload fleets, and really a whole new way of thinking. With this latest decision, though, unionization now stretches to “leased” drivers and those hired by owner-ops. It also says owner-operators are “dependent contractors,” an issue that’s been begging resolution for two decades. Is it now resolved? If so, the new post-Mackie owner-operator will have to be truly independent, with his own authority, or else be just another employee in effect.

So what brought this on? While I think the drivers and especially the owner-operators at Mackie are short-sighted in embracing unionization, they and others say they’re just not making enough money. They say they’re willing to suffer the difficulties of being union members because they want a decent cheque every couple of weeks.

Drivers will also tell you, of course, that they don’t like how they’re treated generally. You can dismiss this as typical whining if you like, and most folks on the management side do, but there really is substance to it. Carried a little further, you could say the industry asked for this Teamster victory.

Take this one example of management practices that get drivers mighty riled: the driver trainer and rookie used as a cheap team. I wrote about it in sister magazine highwaySTAR a couple of months back, and I’ve since had a lot of mail supporting my observation. In one case that sparked my editorial, a driver with 20-plus years of driving experience pulling all manner of loads over all manner of roads, was looking to sign on with a new carrier. Great, he was told, but you’ll have to go out with a driver trainer for the first couple of months. At half pay. Twenty years on the road but half pay. Give me a break. Looks like a cheap team to me, not to mention nervy exploitation. And he’d have been sent out for a few weeks with a trainer who hadn’t even formed callouses yet. Three years on the road. That was it.

In another case a fellow was applying for a trainer job. He’d be taking half-pay rookies on real revenue runs, and would be paid an extra three cents a mile for the privilege. Afraid to crawl in the bunk for a nap for fear of the newbie doing something stupid, and he’d get thirty bucks extra every thousand miles. Once more, it was a cheap team scenario, and he wisely turned it down.

Or how about the owner-operator with almost 30 accident-free years and a generally impeccable record. He’s looking to sell his truck — owned outright — to become an employee driver. His present company might let him switch, but his first two years as a company driver would be at rookie rates.

Sure, these are anecdotal bits of evidence, and it’s true that many, many carriers bend over backward to please drivers these days. But they’re also examples culled from the real world involving fairly big carriers with otherwise decent reputations. And they represent a pattern in at least this one area.

The chips drivers wear on their shoulders came from somewhere. Until the industry finds a way to grind them down, union protection will be appealing. And if that’s the case, the transformation of Mackie’s general freight division to a Teamster shop is just the start. s