BY TIM STEWART & SUE BOLAND
BRISBANE — While the Transport Workers Union was restricted from officially endorsing the blockades of oil refineries here and in Melbourne for fear of legal action, the union's national president and Queensland state secretary Hughie Williams sees the truckers' actions as part of a wider campaign for better conditions in the heavy transport industry.
Williams told Green Left Weekly that the rise in the petrol price, especially for diesel, is squeezing owner-drivers' already notoriously narrow profit margins — 70% of their costs are attributed to fuel costs — and making life very difficult. But the union leader said that drivers are being hit by other issues, too.
"The trucking industry is the most deregulated sector in Australia", Williams said. "It's a safety issue for the whole community, because we have drivers going that extra bit harder, driving that extra hour longer and putting other drivers on the road at risk because of their tiredness."
The TWU reports that, last year, 171 people were killed in road accidents involving articulated vehicles.
Scott Connolly, a spokesperson for the New South Wales branch of the union, also believes the industry is in dire straits, telling Green Left Weekly, "The repossession rates in this industry are up 176% between June 1999 and July 2000. People are really struggling out there."
The introduction of the GST has added to pressures. When the government introduced the diesel fuel rebate as a trade-off for the GST, a lot of freight companies regarded the rebate as a benefit to drivers and demanded that truck drivers accept lower freight rates.
The TWU insists that the extra administration and compliance costs of the GST mean that freight rates for drivers should have gone up, and not down.
Connolly also said that differences in conditions in various states have added to the "pressure cooker environment in the industry".
He said the majority of union's owner-drivers in NSW worked under state contract determinations, which are governed by the Industrial Relations Commission and which allow for freight rates to change in response to fluctuations in fuel prices.
"The members that have a problem are interstate and long distance drivers", Connolly said. "They have no protection of minimum freight rates and no safety standards. There is no regulation. For those members, we're asking for a federal model similar to that in NSW ... Something needs to be done to protect drivers' rates and their earning capacity."
The NSW system is unique to the state, and was won following truck blockades in 1979. The federal Coalition government argues that it cannot adopt the NSW system of guaranteed minimum rates because it would be "anti-competitive".
A national TWU campaign, launched 10 months ago, is seeking the establishment of sustainable freight charges fixed at an industry-wide level; a 14-day turnaround on charged accounts, to end the practice of even big customers like the grocery food chains not paying their bills for months; the registration and regulation of loading agents, in order to improve prices paid per ton of haulage, and to cut down on shonky operators; and the regulation of the numbers of heavy vehicle drivers.
Williams said he favours scrapping fuel excise taxes altogether and replacing them with higher corporate taxes. He also believes there's considerable community backing for such a move, pointing to the support shown to the truck drivers' blockade at the BP fuel depot in Brisbane.
Such a call to scrap the fuel excise is not part of the union's national log of claims, however, and isn't necessarily supported by union secretaries in other states. The NSW union, for example, is still surveying its members as to what action to take.
The union has not ruled out blockades in the future if promised negotiations with the state and federal government soured.