Just in time?
Tranchorn treat by road. Transporting freight by road rather than boat or rail has a huge social cost in terms of traffic accidents, pollution and noise. Cheap road transport also allows top multinationals to gain control of local commercial networks. Søren Kirk Christiansen The main media ignored the 1996 publication of "European transport policy is unintelligent" But the report, by Herman Knoflacher, professor at the Technical University of Vienna, is a bomb under the European Union's transport policy.
According to Knoflacher, the transport of goods by road has a direct, calculable cost in terms of wear and tear on the European road network, and an indirect, but still calculable cost in terms of traffic accidents, pollution, noise and time lost in traffic jams. In 1991 alone, heavy lorry traffic cost the people of the European Union almost 6bn Euros - ten times the cost of the rail tunnel between Britain and France. Traffic accidents caused by lorries costed EU-countries 2.5bn Euros.
These enormous costs are not paid by the transport sector, but by society as a whole.
Not so long ago, road transport competed with other, more reasonable means of transport like railroads and ships. The amount of goods transported by trains and ships has stagnated since 1970, while lorry transport has increased heavily. Today, 10bn tons of goods are transported by the European road network.
Over 40,000 lorries use some stretches of motorway in the German Ruhr every day.
The business community has quite clearly chosen the lorry. *Market
European Union forces" have chosen to do without trains and ships. Just in time
This is not surprising. Lorry transport is extremely cheap and extremely flexible. The cost of transport contributes only 3% to the price of goods inside the EU.
Lorries are often driven with only half loads and returned empty, as components and raw materials criss-cross the continent before reaching their final point of sale. In fact, at any one point, 40-60% of the lorries on the European road network are empty. But capitalists are not worried about multiple trips and long transport distances, as long as costs can be controlled.
The reason for this unbelievable waste of resources is the just in time process. When Scandinavian customers walk into a store and buy a HewlettPackard printer the shop computer informs Hewlett-Packard head office in Stuttgart. A factory in southern Germany immediately produces a new printer, which is delivered to the Scandinavian store within 48 hours. Stocks are kept to a minimum, in the store and in the factory.
This is a marvelously flexible and elastic system but also enormously demanding in transport. The daily caravans of trucks from South Germany to Scandinavia are 25- 50% empty - It would be breaking the principle of Just in time if the lorry did not leave the factory until it was fully loaded. This is only possible because transportation by road is so cheap.
Just in time doesn't only work in distribution for the retail trade. Industry uses just in time driving on a big scale. In Switzerland, high-tech machinery cuts fabric, which is driven to Portugal, where poorly paid machinists sew the garments, for delivery back to Swiss supermarkets. This international division of labour demands a tremendous amount of transport.
With just in time, industry has moved its stocks out of the warehouse and onto the road network. Industry has cut its storage expenses and society is left with the bill. Industries' short-sighted profit interests causes growing costs of pollution, traffic accidents and noise. The drivers
Europe's trans-frontier truck drivers spend most of their days and nights in their drivers cabs, sleeping in lay-bys along the European motorways. A working week of 60 - 80 hours is quite International Viewpoint #317-318 January 2000 7
European Union normal. An export driver must typically be at his employer's disposal for 13 hours a day. He can be on the road for up to a month, though he usually comes home Saturday and takes off again Sunday evening.
These extreme working hours go far beyond the European rules for maximum working time - but the entire transport sector is not covered by this legislation. Truck drivers do not enjoy the same protection against long hours as other workers. They have to be content with the European regulations for driving hours, breaks and resting time contained in EU Regulation 3820/1985. These permit a working day of 12-14 hours. The rules say that the lorry must stand still 8-9 hours a day, so that the driver can sleep. But, in reality, even if the lorry is stationary, the driver can be busy loading or unloading or standing in a waiting position to do so. The tachograph registers only if the lorry is in motion. It does not register if the driver is tired or rested.
Drivers dislike these regulations as it often forces them to sleep in the middle of the day. It doesn't need too much imagination to work out how little sleep you get in a drivers cab at 30C/90F in the middle of the day. But after 8 or 9 hours, however tired you are, the haulage contractor expects and demands that you drive on.
Just in time demands that the goods are delivered within very tight time schedules. If this system is to work at its optimum, it demands the drivers to drive at night when there is less traffic and the motorway network is not so congested. During the day, the risk of delay due to tailbacks on the motorways is too great. Night driving
This is why more and more lorries are sent out during the night. If this development continues, the traffic density of lorry transport will be completely equalised within a few years. In other words, there will be as many trucks on the road at midnight as at midday.
This development is catastrophic for drivers. Swedish scientist Torbjørn Åkerstedt has done some research with export drivers on the 500 kilometre night run from Elsinbore to Stockholm. He registered cases where the driver sleeps while driving for up to two minutes. Only the quiet road, and luck, prevent more accidents.
Most people have an inner clock which reduces the body functions substantially between the hours of 04.00 a.m. and 06.00 a.m. Statistics show that traffic accidents occur for truck drivers 3-4 times as often in these early morning hours.
Already the statistics for lorry accidents are dramatic. According to
FN-reports 1.400 truck drivers died in traffic accidents in 1995 and 38.000 drivers were injured.
Lorries make up only 5% of the vehicles in Europe, but they are involved in 14% of fatal traffic accidents. Dutch investigations suggest that one in three accidents where lorries are involved are due to the fact that the driver was too tired to drive. In the USA, over half of the accidents where lorries are involved are the result of driver fatigue. Over 9,000 US truck drivers died in traffic accidents in 1995. In many parts of the USA, parents of schoolchildren have formed groups to protest against tired truck drivers.
Health tests in Denmark draw a rather depressing picture. In relation to other groups of workers the export drivers experience their work as a very big strain, over half complain about too little sleep, and even more complain about the strain of the work.
Most of the drivers don't get a hot meal every day. Enough is enough.
In 1997 the International Union of Transport Workers (ITF) launched an international campaign under the title "Enough is Enough". The goal of the campaign was to reduce drivers' daily working time, and improve regulations for driving hours, breaks and rest time, and special rules for driving at night.
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In 1997 and 1998, the ITF underlined their demands by carrying out a series of lorry blockades in Europe. The road blockades in September 1998 alerted the media, but in fact the ITF and their European sister organisation, FST, have been in unfruitful negotiations with their employers' organisation, the International Road Transport Union (IRU) since 1993.
EU transport commissioner Neil Kinnock, even threatened to intervene if employers would not come to some voluntary code to improve conditions. Kinnock was called "a socialist and a railway fanatic",by top IRU executives when he issued a "White Book" arguing that that loading and unloading should be counted into drivers' working time. • But Kinnock contradicted himself during the 1997 French truckers' protests. They carried out extensive road blockades in France to underline their demand for better pension and better working conditions. The blockades to some extent paralysed French society, but they were relatively peacefully, and there were no major clashes between the drivers and police.
These blockades infuriated IRU, who complained to the European Commission. IRU said that blockade activities threatens the free movement of goods - which is a pillar of the whole EU project. The Commission unanimously agreed with IRU. They proposed new regulations that would give the EU the right to directly intervene in road blockades that threaten the free movement of goods. All over Europe, the trade-union movement protested strongly, and said that the commission was trying to restrict the right to strike. Eventually, the suggestion was rejected in the Council of Ministers. But Kinnock warned that the Commission "can and will take measures against nations that don't, with all their appropriate forces, try to break up eventual road blockades." Cheap road transport
Cheap road transport and the free movement of goods are a cornerstone of the single European market. It is this policy that makes it possible to make a profit on transporting fresh milk from Germany to Greece where it is converted into yoghourt and then transported back to Germany. • EU Commissioner Martin Bangemann was guest speaker at the 1998 IRU world congress in Morocco. He assured haulage contractors that their trade would be one of the main beneficiaries of the single market, and of globalisation as a whole.
The IRU congress repeatedly criticised Switzerland (not an EU member), which has forced most transit traffic from road to rail, as the result of a popular referendum. Austria had to abandon similar limitations on lorry traffic through the country when it joined the EU. The result has been a steep increase in the heavy lorry traffic through the Alps.
In 1994 Danish Commissioner Henning Christoffersen presented plans for an extensive enlargement of the EU transport infrastructure. This "TransEuropean network" b requires the construction of 12,000 kilometres of motorway, a number of high speed railroads, and expansion of many air and sea ports. All of these improvements of the infrastructure are to be partly financed by EU.
Behind these plans it isn't difficult to see the workings of the EU's strongest lobbyist group — the Round Table of European Industrialists. This select group consists of Europe's biggest industrial groups can get telephone access to any of Europe's leaders within 48 hours. Europe's big industrial groups are the only real winners when the politicians spend our money on bigger and more elaborate transport infrastructure. Unintelligent
Austrian professor Herman Knoflacher is one of the strongest critics of EU transport policy. He sees cheap road transport as a weapon which big groups use against smaller businesses. With cheap road transport the big industrial groups monopolise the market and destroy the local economic circulation.
For proof of this, go to Denmark, where MD Foods has deliberately closed many local diaries. Because of cheap road transport, it is more profitable to collect all the milk into a few central diaries, and then redistribute milk products all across the country.
Knoflacher says that more of the external expenses should be counted into the price that society pays for the cheap road transport. Cheap road transport creates unemployment. And yet, trade unions have almost always supported big new road and bridgebuilding projects, as a job creation measure.
Knoflacher goes one step further, and criticises European transport policy for being unintelligent. While mobility has increased in European economic life, the intelligence in economic life is falling, he argues. Knowledge and know-how is lost, while the consumers have to live with standardised products that are brought to the supermarket from far away. Increasing mobility actually leads to a technical regression for our civilisation. True progress is based on inventions that enable us to use less effort to achieve a better result than before. But the increase in just in time systems and road freight transport is having the opposite effect - bigger and bigger energy costs, for achieving less and less results.
The problem — as always with the market economy — is that a large part of the real cost is paid by society as a whole. The argument that consumers benefit from the cheap prices of goods is an illusion. Because society as a whole pays a heavy cost for "just in time" trucking. * International Viewpoint #317-318 January 2000 6
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