You don’t often get a group of a couple of dozen truck drivers, baggage handlers, food delivery riders, employers and union officials walking through Parliament House. But at the beginning of September we took a transport delegation to Canberra to talk about the impacts of new laws on the industry so far, and what still needs to be done.
What’s refreshing is that this government is willing to hear what the transport industry has to say about what needs change. And there’s a lot that needs change – we made that clear.
We have powerful tools now to start fixing road transport. Our first industry applications to start making transport better have almost finished the consultation phase, and soon we’ll see new, better standards to start lifting the industry.
But the work is not over yet. These first applications are just the start of improving the industry, and we’re working together to figure out what most urgently needs to be tackled next.
Over the couple of days we met with members of parliament from right across the political spectrum. Dozens of meetings in total, including with the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, who both commended the unity of our industry in driving change. They heard from some familiar faces – like Tony Matthews, an owner driver who’s been in the industry for decades and wants to leave it a better place than what he found it.
Like Steve Newton, an employee driver delivering parcels out to Dubbo, seeing sub-contractors taking risks like using rear trailer breaks because their bosses have told them it’s too expensive to change brake pads. There was Cameron Dunn, an employer who pays his drivers in seven days, his tow operators in 14 – but sometimes isn’t paid by his clients for 120 days.
But there are also newer stories, not just from trucking but from the gig economy, which desperately needs standards to stop the free-fall. Yaser, who’s a rideshare driver, has a wife and three children to support, and a mortgage to pay. But after his rates were cut again unilaterally by Uber last year, he’s working 14-hour days just to make the same amount as he was a year ago. He’s purchasing second-hand tyres because he can’t afford new ones.
Alexi, a food delivery driver, works across multiple apps because it’s the only way to get enough work. We also heard from Simon Earle, the CEO of TEACHO, and the most recent research on road transport which has painted a stark picture of what needs to change – like how transport operators suffer as one of the lowest profit segments in the economy.
The study demonstrates that large client profits are built by increasingly shifting work to cheaper, more dangerous operations. Those in the industry will know this intimately: the sub-contracting out to the lowest bidder, not enough money in a contract to ensure proper safety and training.
As we heard in Canberra, more work is also going to the gig economy, which is why it is so urgent we get standards in place there with the new laws. The hope for this industry lies in our continuing to work together.
What was different about this time was that we also brought aviation workers with us. The aviation industry is plagued by many of the same problems as road transport: a race to the bottom on standards and conditions, clients like Qantas splitting up the workforce and splintering workers’ power.
At the end of last year, a young ground handler in Brisbane almost lost his leg in a horrific incident, at a company called Swissport which has received a large proportion of illegally outsourced Qantas work. Only recently, another labour hire worker in the Qantas supply chain was involved in a tragic incident – and this one, devastatingly, took his life.
Ground handling workers in Canberra spoke about companies with broken or outdated equipment, where there was pressure to rush just to get planes out on time. It’s the same as what we’ve seen in road transport with the immense and deadly pressure to work fast enough to keep a contract.
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Recently, illegally sacked Qantas workers had a huge win in the Federal Court: a $90 million fine imposed on the airline, Justice Lee saying it had taken part in “performative remorse” over the sackings. The five-year court battle run by the TWU was one that to begin with, nobody thought we could ever win.
Qantas told these workers that they were delusional just for challenging the sackings. And much of the public believed them. Damo, one of the illegally sacked workers, joined our delegation to Parliament House, and spoke about how what Justice Lee said had rung true: depriving people of work illegally was depriving them of their dignity. In both aviation and road transport, we are steadily restoring dignity to industries that used to thrive.
60,000 TWU members stood behind those Qantas workers: truck drivers, garbage collectors, cabin crew, delivery riders, bus drivers, pilots all supporting them, because we knew it was a fight worth having. And so is the fight for our industries to be safer and fairer – like with the Qantas battle, if we keep sticking together we can make it happen.
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