Category: Social Trends

The federal government is rushing to abolish the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal (RSRT) after the tribunal issued a controversial pay order establishing a national minimum pay rate and unpaid leave for truck drivers. This latest move is not surprising as the tribunal has had a short history plagued by controversy.

The government has indicated that, in legislating to abolish the RSRT, it will shift some of its functions to the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR). The NHVR’s role is usually holding various stakeholders, like trucking companies and owner-operator truckers, accountable for implementing safe work practices, but its jurisdiction doesn’t extend to pay orders.

Given that abolition of the RSRT is foreshadowed because of its role in setting pay rates for contractor drivers, it is very unlikely the government will seek to add this function to the NHVR.

The history and purpose of the RSRT is rooted in addressing the problem of a uniform pay for truckers. When it was established in 2012, it was tasked with promoting safety in the road transport industry, primarily through pay.

It was created after the National Transport Commission found in 2008 that there was a link between driver remuneration and safety outcomes for truck drivers. The commission recommended a national scheme to set minimum safe rates for employee and owner drivers.

The tribunal is independent from the Fair Work Commission and regulates both employee drivers and contractor drivers, their employers and hirers and participants in the supply chain, such as supermarkets.

At first the RSRT spent time examining a broad range of stakeholder submissions from all parts of the road transport sector and engaged in widespread and lengthy consultation with industry stakeholders. From this, the main outcome has been two orders: the Road Transport and Distribution and Long Distance Operations Road Safety Remuneration Order 2014 (Road Transport Order) and the most recent Contractor Driver Minimum Payments Road Safety Remuneration Order 2016 (Payments Order).

The tribunal had only been established for 14 months when the Abbott Coalition government in 2013 contracted Jaguar Consulting to assess the RSRT’s operation.
In April of that year, Jaguar Consulting reported that the tribunal had achieved little of a concrete nature (it was yet to issue the 2014 order).

For the Jaguar report authors, only evidence of a decline in collisions and fatalities among truck drivers would have been valid indicators of whether the RSRT had improved road safety. Given that the RSRT had been in operation for such a short time and had yet to make any orders, that sort of data did not yet exist.

The Jaguar report did provide data showing that heavy vehicle collisions and fatalities had declined in recent years by a similar proportion to other forms of road transport. It attributed this to improvements in road safety generally. However, the the latest data on which it drew was from 2012, prior to the establishment of the RSRT.

In making its first order in 2014, the Road Transport Order, the RSRT set out minimum entitlements and requirements such as safe driving plans, payment time, drug and alcohol policies, training, whistle-blower protection and dispute resolution. The only specific provision regarding remuneration was Part 4, which imposed a requirement that when owner drivers issue invoices for payment they must be paid within 30 days.

The payment order in 2016, now the subject of considerable political discussion, established national minimum rates and unpaid leave to come into force on April 4, 2016.

It is not surprising that some owner drivers are anxious about this payment order and want its operation delayed. These drivers are probably among the most poorly remunerated in the industry and have extensive debt wrapped up in their trucks. Many are making a marginal living at best.

However, this situation cannot go on forever. Their situation will not improve until the supermarket chains, product manufacturers and other organisations at the top starting negotiating decent pay into their contracts. If the RSRT is abolished, these corporations will continue to avoid responsibility.

To assist in this transition, the federal government should be looking at developing a structural adjustment policy to ease the concerns of owner drivers as change occurs. Instead, the government is proposing to abolish the RSRT and transfer its powers to the NHVR.

The NHVR is a national body set up by an intergovernmental agreement between federal, state and territory governments. It relies upon matching legislation passed in each jurisdiction. Gaining agreement to substantial changes in its role cannot be done overnight or by the stroke of a pen in Canberra.

If, as the National Transport Commission said in 2008, the remuneration of drivers is linked to safety outcomes, owner driver safety will remain a long way off.

Author: Louise Thornthwaite, Senior Lecturer, Department of Marketing and Management, Macquarie University, Macquarie University

From The Conversation.

The generation of young people who came of age during the new millennium – “millennials”, as they’re commonly known – has divided opinion like no other. Some have deemed them a self-pitying and entitled bunch; lazy, deluded and narcissistic. Others take a more sympathetic view, raising concerns that millennials are at risk of becoming a “lost generation”. After all, they are making the transition into adulthood under much more precarious circumstances than their parents experienced as part of the “baby boomers” generation.

The challenges millennials face include the rising costs of education; an increased likelihood of unemployment and underemployment – even for a growing number of graduates – and falling incomes even when they are employed. For millennials, home ownership is an increasingly distant prospect, and private rents are soaring. To top it all off, young people have been hit particularly hard by benefit sanctions and cuts to public sector funding.

Since the global financial crisis, the supposed plight of the millennials has given rise to the argument that inequality is an age-related issue: young people are disadvantaged, while baby boomers collectively prosper at their expense. This idea is exemplified by the Guardian’s recent series on millennials, and perpetuated by other outlets. With austerity and weak economic growth ensuring that the opportunities for younger people are comparatively diminished, even academics are raising “the issue of youth-as-class”.

Facing the changes

We don’t deny that the experience of being young has changed significantly. But this notion of a single millennial experience deserves some serious questioning. While young people are encountering changes – and often challenges – in terms of employment, education and housing, they do not all experience this hostile landscape in the same way.

By talking about “the millennials” as a disadvantaged group, we’re in danger of obscuring other, more fundamental differences between young people. For example, class background is still a particularly important determinant of a young person’s life chances. Our ownresearch – as well as the work of many others – demonstrates the importance of parental support for young people transitioning into adulthood.

Having a room in the family home or access to other family finances is key to undertaking unpaid internships or volunteer work. A monthly allowance from your folks while at university facilitates access to important CV building activities, which top graduate employers seek from applicants. It ensures that during your exams you don’t have to carry on looking for a job, and it helps you to avoid the choice between eating or heating.

Gifting or loaning deposits for a rented or purchased home is still a middle-class practice. There are many other ways that parents can, and do, use their resources to help their children onto the property ladder.

Class struggle

So, while middle-class young people are clearly facing difficulties during their transition to independence, they are also more likely to have access to resources that are unavailable to their less-advantaged peers, which help to reduce risks and protect them from uncertainties. These resources help young people to “weather the storm” and influence who survives and prospers in the current conditions.

Let us recall some other significant class-based advantages: higher education remains very stratified, and those attending elite research-intensive institutions are disproportionately middle class. Children of middle-class parents earn more than peers of working class origins, even when they obtain employment in top jobs. And while baby-boomers may be holding onto the housing stock for now, the children of the property-owning middle classes will one day inherit it.

As well as class, research has long shown how gender, race, disability and a host of other factors work to shape a person’s future. More recent evidence suggests that the financial crisis and subsequent austerity have had a particularly disproportionate effect on women, certain black and minority ethnic groups and the disabled.

What’s more, proclaiming an inter-generational war unhelpfully clouds the fact that the prospects for certain groups of older people are just as bad – if not worse – than for many young people. Despite the dominant media image of the resource-rich retiree, many older people do not have comfortable pensions, homes or savings to fall back on. And as the state withdraws funding for public services such as social care, older women have been forced to step in and undertake unpaid labour by caring for elderly family members.

Declarations of inter-generational conflict between baby boomers and millennials might grab headlines. But the real story is the same as it ever was; that our society is plagued by long-standing, ongoing inequalities relating to class, race and gender. The portrayal of millennials as victims has allowed the experience of the squeezed middle class to take centre stage. Now, it’s up to us to question who’s really at a disadvantage in our society – and how we can make life fairer for all.