Trucking Vets Call for an End to Dangerous Paperwork

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Industry veterans are hopeful that new national Chain of Responsibility laws will put an end to drivers having to wait unnecessarily long hours for paperwork to be signed off after off-loading.

At the recent ATA Technical and Maintenance Conference held in Melbourne, the frustrating and dangerous practice was discussed with the behaviour of some customers proving a particular problem for drivers and fatigue issues.

In some instances long distance drivers have to wait for hours for the paperwork to be checked off after they have unloaded and sometimes the wait is six or seven hours. This means the difference between traveling in the day and the night for some long distance drivers.

Kel Baxter is a bulk agribusiness trucking operator from Berrigan in southern NSW, and is also chair of the Australian Trucking Association’s Industry Technical Council, Baxter said during a session on fatigue, that the problem could not  be discussed without mentioning the problematic behaviour of some customers.

He spoke about how some customers treat drivers and how long they are kept waiting.

He explained,

“A lot of timeslots have come in now, but we find they’re just a guide,” Baxter says.

For example in the grain game: “They’re loading a truck and suddenly a train turns up and they drop all the trucks and load the train.

“Yesterday a driver was sitting around for six or seven hours. Then they’ll drive in the night when they would have had daylight driving.”

Source: https://www.ownerdriver.com.au/industry-news/1612/dangerous-paperwork.

During the session Baxter went on to relate an earlier incident involving fridge vans which were loaded in Melbourne and on their way to Brisbane,

“They’ll start ringing from the other end: ‘Where are you, where are you?’. Well we were six hours late leaving Melbourne: ‘That’s not my problem’. And then when you get there, we were unloaded and criticised, then they would take three hours to give the paperwork back to us – when we didn’t even load the freight in the van – before we could proceed with the next job.”

“That is I think part of this new national (chain of responsibility) law that’s coming in, that it will look at not just post-incidents but the potential to cause incidents. That’s the way I read that.”

Source: https://www.ownerdriver.com.au/industry-news/1612/dangerous-paperwork.

Baxter had said in an earlier session that consignors and consignees were slowly beginning to take interest in chain of responsibility. He commended NSW Roads and Maritime Services for playing a role in this increased attention to CoR, saying,

“They’ve been making a few visits to DCs and other places that hold drivers up for a long time and end up with fatigue issues.”

Read more at https://www.ownerdriver.com.au/industry-news/1612/dangerous-paperwork.

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