There are over 500,000 transport workers in Australia.
But we are all intrinsically and deeply connected to the transport industry. When lives are lost on our roads, they affect countless families and communities. This year and every year we have lost far too many from truck-related crashes — 140 just in 2024, 35 of them truck drivers.
Recently transport reform laws came into effect that will allow us to improve this industry for all participants. Not only that, it will allow us to save lives. That’s pretty big.
It’s so big that to mark the occasion we had guests in Sydney from international transport unions, coordinated by the International Transport Workers Federation which represents over 18 million transport workers — guests from across Europe, Africa and Asia. It’s not just a huge moment for Australian transport, it’s a big global moment.
Other countries are looking on, and last year 67 other unions around the world signed up to a global campaign to secure similar systems. For decades we’ve talked about what these laws would mean to this industry. Now it’s time to use them to actually start fixing things. We’re wasting no time.
Applications are in
Two days after new transport laws came into effect, we made our first applications to the Fair Work Commission to begin making road transport a better industry. These have been informed by discussions with industry over the last few months after we won the laws.
The applications are in three areas — three areas that require critical action.
The first is unfair terms in trucking contracts. We need to ensure that maximum 30-day payment terms are standard, and get rid of terms that force transport operators to dangerously cut costs in their operations.
We’ve seen scores of transport businesses go under because of unsustainable contracts — even leaders in their industry, like Scott’s Refrigerated Logistics last year. Drivers and operators shouldn’t have to wait months just to be paid. This application will seek to lift some of those critical pressures on workers and operators.
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The second is food delivery, where the standards are not just rock-bottom, they’re non-existent. We need to stop the horrific exploitation of gig workers and we need to make sure it doesn’t spread by raising standards to a decent level.
On the day we made the applications we were joined with gig workers like Rosalina, who’d come to the Fair Work Commission seven years previously trying to get justice, and being turned away. Gig workers until now have been excluded entirely from the workplace system, and that needs to change.
The third is the last mile sector, which is exploding in Australia, but with entrants like Amazon Flex, standards are plummeting.
Amazon recently announced it was recruiting hundreds of seasonal workers, “no experience required.” We’ve seen how it will recruit drivers with their own cars, dangerously overloaded, rushing to fulfill a set amount of orders. If they don’t complete them in the allotted time frame, supposedly they can bring the undelivered parcels back to the depot—but in doing so risk being deactivated.
This model is a threat to couriers, to owner drivers, to transport operators, to the Amazon Flex workers themselves. We need to ensure drivers can access fair cost recovery, dispute resolution and consultation. This will stop the Amazon effect that is crushing this sector of the industry.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and after decades of neglect, there’s a lot of work to do.
What’s next?
The applications we’ve made using the new laws are just the beginning — an immediate safety net to stop the dangerous downward spiral, while we work on more involved issues with the rest of the industry. So how will we achieve all this?
This is where industry consultation, the heart of the system, comes in.
There are three main parts to this. First there’s the Expert Panel which will establish and maintain standards.
Second, this will be guided by the Road Transport Advisory Group. Recently Richard Olsen, TWU NSW Secretary, and Peter Anderson, ARTIO National Secretary, were appointed to that group. Both have decades of experience in the transport industry.
The third part are subcommittees which can be formed of other industry stakeholders, so that those who will be affected will have a say.
It’s industry unity that got us here and it is industry unity that will allow us to start reshaping road transport with this powerful tool.
The brilliance of this system is its ability to overcome threats to that unity in the likes of Amazon and Aldi who refuse to get on board.
Aldi is the only major supermarket that hasn’t signed a charter with the TWU on supply chain safety. Aldi and Amazon continue to stick their heads in the sand. But we’ll carry on with or without them, because we’ve already shown that when we join together as an industry there is nothing that can stand in our way.
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