By Nick Gibbs
THE DANGEROUSLY long shift hours of the average chauffeur have been exposed to the wider world in a new survey that reveals nearly 60 percent of drivers work more than 11 hours a day on average.
The results, although unlikely to surprise those in the industry have prompted a major union and a leading safety charity to call on the Government to set limits on driver hours and enforce those limits with tachographs. However their calls to action have been met with a cool response from bosses within the chauffeur industry, who say that extra legislation is the wrong way to deal with a business that thrives on flexibility.
The survey carried out by General Workers’ Union (GMB) revealed that half of the 600 or so drivers interviewed at Heathrow were struggling through weeks of 70 hours or more. Not only that, but six out of 10 drivers interviewed said they’d experienced coercion from their employer to take on extra work, with all of those coerced drivers saying they felt their job would have in jeopardy had they not accepted.
The GMB is putting the blame squarely on the door of the chauffeur companies, whether their drivers are waged or self-employed, and is aggressively highlighting the danger of having “up to 10,000” potentially weary chauffeurs and private-hire taxi drivers on the road each day. “The next Selby is going to be caused by driver working for a licensed company,” said GMB head organiser Martin Smith, referring to the deadly 2001 crash caused by a sleeping driver.
“If we know the company has coerced that driver to work long hours, then we’ll prosecute to the full extent of the law. If the law can show that the company is to blame for a driver’s tiredness and subsequent fatal accident, then corporate manslaughter charges can and have been brought. Driver tiredness is a hot-button issue right now with legislators and safety organisations. Research from safety charity Brake suggests that around 300 people die on Britain’s roads each year as a direct result of someone falling asleep while driving.”
“This report is extremely disturbing,” said Brake’s head of campaigns Cathy Keeler, speaking at a GMB/Brake co-sponsored meeting to publicise the report. “The Government needs to tighten up the law and provide effective enforcement to ensure that employers do not put pressure on drivers to work horrendous shifts, putting themselves and other innocent road users in danger.”
Brake, along with GMB, wants chauffeur hours to be brought in line with a piece of European legislation called the Working Time Directive. That currently doesn’t apply to chauffeurs here because the UK was able to get exemptions for some workers, including those drivers not covered by current tachograph rules.
Right now chauffeurs are technically governed by the UK Domestic Drivers’ hours rules, which set a limit on the working day at 11 hours, with 30 minute breaks after five and half hours of continuous driving. However, even this can be legally exceeded if the driver signs an agreement with the employer.
All this would change if the European directive was enforced, with the work week capped at 48 hours. “The bill’s already in place to start a campaign to bring in the Working Time Directive and we think it’ll be successful,” said GMB’s Martin Smith.
However chauffeur companies are adamant they don’t need legislation to create a safe working environment. Doug Claringbold, operations director at Tristar Cars, which operates more than 400 Volvos and Mercedes around London, points out that the company already has measures in place to limit driver hours. “We set minimum standards. Drivers have to take 11 hours between shifts and have to take breaks after three hours,” he said. Monitoring Tristar’s 400-plus waged chauffeurs are GPS-based telematics systems that allow the company to check when the driver gets home and when he starts out again in the morning.
“Tachographs would be hugely expensive and where would they go?” said Claringbold. “This isn’t an HGV, we provide a premium chauffeur service, so where are we going to fit a tachograph? On the dashboard? Is that what the client is going to want when he gets in his S-class and sees what looks like a meter?”
Then there’s the problem of exceeding driver hours mid-job. “A tachograph is clearly not an option for the service we provide,” he said. The main reason for the long hours isn’t always coercion from above, according to the drivers themselves. “I’m under no pressure to work hours, but at £5.50 an hour you’ve got to work a lot of hours to get a living wage out of that,” said Dave Singleton, a chauffeur driving a Volvo S80 for Tristar.
“I aim to work 300 hours most months, but if the Government brings in a maximum of 48 hours, then drivers won’t earn enough to live on. All south east and London workers need at least £7 an hour. The long hours are voluntary, if you don’t work the hours you don’t get the overtime, and that’s why we all do it. The whole industry is paid poorly.”
Of course the GMB union, which claims 40,000 professional taxi and private hire drivers among its members, is working on that. “We’ve got to introduce higher wages before we decrease hours,” said Martin Smith. “Some organisations are with us, and some aren’t”. Smith estimates they’re negotiating with companies that account for 25-30 percent of chauffeurs around London.
Tiredness: A chauffeur’s view
DAVE SINGLETON works for Tristar driving a Volvo S80 as part of the firm’s contract to chauffeur Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class passengers out of Heathrow. He regularly works 70-hour weeks.
“Occasionally I’ll get tired. I call them micro sleeps. I think I had one yesterday. Exiting a junction off the M25, I said to the customer ‘it’s the next junction sir’, but a few seconds later he was shouting ‘we’re going off here’. I was away briefly and it can happen. At that point I’d only worked seven or eight hours.
I’d say my job is 50/50 driving and waiting. People think chauffeurs have a lot of rest time, because we hang around so much, but a lot of the waiting for me is at the airport. You’re not resting in the car, you’re waiting in the terminal, standing around talking. There’s very little seating at Heathrow.
When you’re in town, none of the industry pays car parking fees so you’ve got to loiter around on yellow lines, so you’re sitting there waiting, but you’re not really sleeping because you’ve got one eye open for a traffic warden. You get to know little quiet roads where you’re safe from the wardens, but it’s not them you need to worry about now, it’s the cameras.
Tristar has improved on the health and safety big time, but we don’t get overtime until we’ve done 10 hours a day. Then it’s time and a half.”
