Owner-drivers damned if they do, damned if they don’t

The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal order on ‘safe rates’ radically altered how much contractors are required to charge their customers.

Truck Driver, Craig Prosser

Truck driver Craig Prosser was on an outback road yesterday morning after ferrying mining equipment between Queensland and his home in Murray Bridge, South Australia, when a customer phoned.

It was a manager at one of Australia’s biggest logistics firms demanding to know if Mr Prosser, who owns a three-truck haulage company, was targeted by a ruling from the “truckies tribunal” that came into force on Thursday night.

The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal order on “safe rates”, or minimum wages for truckies, radically altered how much contractors delivering retail goods or covering long distances are required to charge their customers.

Big freight companies Toll Holdings and Linfox, alongside retailers such as Coles and JB Hi-Fi, face penalties of tens of thousands of dollars if customers fail to comply.

Many have demanded owner-drivers swear statutory declarations about their liability in recent weeks, creating a “huge amount of stress”.

“I’ve got a subbie currently engaged in a job for me, I don’t know whether I need to start paying him a new rate from today, or when he’s finished,” Mr Prosser said.

Mr Prosser, who travelled to Brisbane and then to Newcastle to deliver his load, is frantically trying to figure out how much more he will have to pay his own subcontractors. If he gets his sums wrong, he could be penalised tens of thousands of dollars by the Fair Work Ombudsman. If he gets them right, he could lose customers for hiking up his charges.

“I don’t know what my exact situation is at the moment,” he said. “(The order) has only come in last night ... I’m flying blind.

“Everyone’s running around panicking. Whenever the governments starts something, they’ve always … given us six months’ grace … there’s been no grace period with this, it’s just been ‘bang, snap, here we go’.”

He blames “big business” and the Transport Workers Union, which has promoted the tribunal and its order as being critical to improve road safety, for “pushing” the order at the expense of small operators.

Mr Prosser belongs to the Independent Contractors Australia lobby, which is preparing to lodge a High Court challenge to the order on Monday. It is understood the application will claim the tribunal is engaged in “price fixing”.

“It’s like a tribunal being created under the industrial relations act to fix the price of chocolate,” said ICA executive director Ken Phillips.