Driven to despair

A letter written by a truck driver’s wife gives voice to the despair and outrage at a Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal ruling.

05/04/2016: Third Generation truck driver, 56 year old Mick Boland, is an owner driver in Melbourne. Stuart McEvoy for The Australian.

The letter, written by a small-business owner, gives voice to the despair and desperation felt across the country by the thousands who find their lives up-ended and livelihood under threat.

“We will lose everything including our truck, the family home which houses three generations, and our car,” the letter warns.

“I am writing to you not only as a partner in an owner-operator business but also as a wife and a mother who will be left to try and pick up the pieces …”

The letter is typical of the many letters and petitions, Facebook pages and websites that have cropped up across the industry. It was sent by a truck drivers’ wife to the Wangaratta office of one-time Liberal member for Indi, Sophie Mirabella. They all highlight the outrage and despair caused by a ruling of the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, better known as the truckies’ tribunal.

The order imposes a “minimum wage” style pay scale for owner-drivers. It was due to come into force three days ago before it was halted by an injunction. But the storm it has caused rages on.

Dubbed “safe rates”, the order was two years in the making, finalised after several rounds of submissions, a draft order in August and a final ruling in December.

It applies to drivers contracted to deliver goods bound for supermarket shelves and other long-distance trips, and championed by the unions in the name of safety. Their argument, embraced by Tribunal President Jennifer Acton, is that minimum rates take pressure off truck owners and stop them driving themselves to death.

Safe rates mandates owner- drivers to charge for breaks, leave, queuing, loading or unloading. And also cleaning, repairs, refuelling and paperwork. Plus “waiting in a location because of a natural disaster”.

It will send us broke, owner- drivers say.

Out on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, grain and livestock transport specialist Rodney Quinn and son Scott run a busy 35-truck fleet out of Cleve. Both are dismayed by the complex and confusing changes.

Quinn, once an owner-driver himself when he started out 50 years ago, says the new rules will force him to lay off about eight owner-drivers. Many are loyal workers of long standing with the company.

Quinn has done his sums. He expects his big customers, such as grain handler Viterra, will not accept a 15 per cent increase in costs, of about $1.60 extra a tonne, to cover owner-drivers’ wages to transport wheat from silos to Port Lincoln.

Even worse is confusion for farmers transporting sheep to Murray Bridge abattoir, more than 500km away. They may have to pay for a whole load even if they only use one quarter of a trailer. “As we understand it, each farmer would have to pay the minimum kilometre and hourly rate to the driver,’’ Quinn says. The cost differences are stark. A company could charge $7 a head for a full load of 600 sheep, but an owner-driver hauling livestock from four different farms would have to charge $28 a head, he says.

After working in the industry for more than 40 years, Metro Freight Lines director Tony Cozzolino hoped to leave his interstate transport business he began in 1994 to son Daniel.

Cozzolino, 63, now expects to stay on, after downsizing his fleet from 44 vehicles two years ago to just three company-owned trucks from July 1.

“I’ve been in the business 40 years and my son was happy to look after the business after I left but I’m not sure I will ever leave here now,’’ Cozzolino says.

A decision to rely heavily on owner-drivers about nine years ago has “kicked him in the butt”.

“Some of my contractors say they will stay to the end but I say they should be out to see where they can place themselves, keep themselves open if we do not survive,’’ he says.

Annoyingly for retailers and other big companies, one clause demands they audit all of their contract truck drivers to ensure they comply with the safe rates. Such red tape will drive up costs by as much as 55 per cent, fleet operators like Linfox warned in submissions ahead of Acton’s draft order. Such costs would flow on to consumers in the form of more expensive televisions, say retailers such as JB Hi Fi.

Nicole Leape and her partner Richard Jenkins are parents to four children aged between eight and 14 years old. “They’re at the pain in the arse age,” she laughs.

Jenkins and Leape are both truckies. They balance the difficulties of long-haul trips, school-age children and their long-term relationship delicately, but were “plodding along nicely” as they put it, from their home in Brisbane.

“At the moment, for example, we’ll quote $1800 between two certain cities, but $900 for half a load. If we have to charge, by law, a full rate for half a load, why would anyone hire us?” Leape says.

“It’s a domino effect. If the prices change, all us owner-drivers would lose out. I wouldn’t pay $1800 for half a load when you can call Toll or Linfox and get them to do it for bugger all.

“If it’s passed across the board, the small businesses who can’t afford to pay are going to hang on until they can pay for a full load. They’ll eventually have to fold.”

This latest, loud consternation from owner-drivers and a dramatic eleventh hour intervention by the Turnbull government, has thrust the issue onto the front pages.

But the political storm has been brewing for years, since the Gillard Labor government created the tribunal in 2012. Acton was appointed to the head of it by then workplace relations minister Bill Shorten.

With the Coalition government positioning itself to make the abolition of the Tribunal a key election issue, the industry heads for full-blown war.

In Wangaratta, Mirabella, picks up another letter. “Myself and other owner-drivers in the same position stand to lose everything,” Mirabella reads aloud from a letter from a truck driver who feels “helpless and to a point worthless, as the security I’ve worked so hard for is on the line and it appears out of my control”.

The distress has been caused by “uncertainty” in the industry, with contracts slowing and tensions running high, Mirabella says.

The truckies’ plight spurred the former Coalition MP, dramatically ousted from her seat in 2013, to act.

Never one to shy from publicity, it should be pointed out that Mirabella sat down with drivers before the issue found its way into the mainstream media spotlight.

Last month, Mirabella marched a small delegation — three drivers and one spouse — down to Canberra to meet Employment Minister Michaelia Cash. “We had an excellent hearing, she was au fait with the problems, and the issue,” Mirabella says.

Subsequently, the government threw its weight behind an application from industry body AI Group to the federal court to stay President Acton’s order. Senator Cash then announced legislation that would force a delay in the ruling until next January, to be introduced into parliament on April 18.

“There was a bit of a sigh of relief last weekend when the stay was granted, but the issue is by no means resolved”, says Mirabella. “These people are genuinely fighting for their livelihoods.

“Like most normal small business people they are not engaged in politics, they just want to work hard, earn money and have something for their children.”

Such as Angelo Guarino, 54, has driven a truck for more than 13 years. “We all are out of work,” he says simply. It’s been three weeks. Not good. What do you do?”

The big companies, he says, don’t want them. “Once we’re gone, once we’re out of the market, they can turn around in six months and say we’re putting the prices up.”

Transport Workers Union national secretary Tony Sheldon concedes the despair shown by drivers opposing his hard-won ruling is real, but says they are “misinformed”. “This is an industry where ... people are doing extraordinary hours, drivers out on the road and partners at home raising the kids, and their business is submarginal in many cases.

Suicide is “rampant ... that’s not Tony Sheldon speaking, that’s coroner’s reports,” he says.

“(To that) fearful cocktail you add Michaelia Cash who wants to exploit them, (industry group) National Roads and Transport Association, which wants to exploit them, and big business which doesn’t say no to clients who want to screw them down.

“The ­Coalition is hellbent on closing the tribunal because it’s a creature of the Labor Party. “Cash is an ideologue,” Sheldon says of the Employment Minister. Her moves against the RSRT come, he says, from “hating the Labor Party and what the Labor Party stands for, proper community standards”.

Asked about criticism that the TWU has thrown owner-drivers to the wolves in favour of union member employees of fleet operators, Sheldon fires back that the TWU has 20,000 owner-driver members affected by the ruling, and the union is looking out for them, too.

But with truck drivers writing in despair to conservatives — and reportedly booing union lawyers at an RSRT hearing in March — Sheldon denies the strength of the opposition to the RSRT order blindsided him. He admits he’s “frustrated” that his message isn’t getting through. That message is simple: safe rates prevent deaths and the suicide, the “people incinerated by economic pressure”.

Yesterday, there was a foretaste of an even bloodier phase of the campaign. The TWU issued a press release after a rally at cabinet minister Christopher Pyne’s office yesterday naming 25 drivers it says died on the roads in March.

Mirabella says the safety argument is “insulting” to owner-drivers. “There’s an attempt to rebut (owner-drivers’) arguments on a safety platform, as if to imply their trucks are less safe, but it’s these people’s lives and their livelihood.”

In Adelaide, Beattie Transport managing director Malcolm Beattie has his own disturbing view about the impact the ruling will have on drivers.

Beattie, who began in 1969 as an owner-driver and runs the company with his son Josh, says his 130-strong truck fleet, half of which were subcontractors, had lost money every week since January under a current tough economic climate.

The move to a minimum wage for owner-drivers would push more freight onto rail, causing the loss of more driver jobs, he says. “I’m at the age where I’m thinking of closing it all down because it’s getting too hard,’’ Beattie says.

“I’m not about to go into this economy climate and buy a whole lot of trucks. We’ve lost money every week since January.’’

Beattie says the situation could drive some owner-drivers to suicide — a greater cost than the initial safety concerns posed to the industry.

“There will be blood on their hands if people start knocking themselves off,’’ he said

Additional reporting Sam Buckingham-Jones