Deregulation spin clogs highways, threatens truckers

Get ready. Here comes an answer to questions like "Why are the highways clogged with heavy trucks? Why do we have to have havoc? Why is your favourite divided highway a combat zone?" I'll get to some answers - but first, a few observations.

Commentary from Larry Solway

  As the song says "The best things in life cost money," so we all have to pay for what we need. In the City of Toronto we are staring bankruptcy in the face (say the doomsayers) unless we either find the money to support the real life and heart of the community or impoverish it to save the money. Mayor Mel Lastman, better at ballyhoo or wringing his hands than at good government, flails out in all directions because the City is in a $300 million in the hole.
  Predictably, the Mayor says we have to tighten our belts, make tough choices. The "tough choices" are usually demanded of people who have it tough already. Belt-tightening and sacrifice always afflicts the most vulnerable. It won't be the guy who just bought a new Lincoln Navigator. It will be the single mom, it will be people who can't afford high rents or day care, it will be 32,000 seniors and kids who give up free dental care. To pour a little salt in the wound, the city's budget chief, upset at the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC's) request for more money declares that transit is a business! Which is how the most vulnerable, people who ride subways and buses, are given the you-know-what-end of the stick. How about - are roads a business? Or cops? Or schools? We pay for them out of general tax revenues.
 

Free enterprise has been hijacked by buccaneer capitalists no better than 19th century robber barons

  I'm still a fan of Pierre Trudeau, even though I cringed when, back in the high-inflation, usurious interest rate 80s he told us we'd have to tighten our belts. That easy to say, coming from a man who inherited millions from his Champlain Oil Company daddy.
  So what about big rigs clogging the highways? Patience. I'll get to it.
  Tomny Douglas said "Free Enterprise is neither free nor enterprising?" Heresy perhaps, but I don't altogether agree. I think that the failure is that Free Enterprise has been hijacked by buccaneer capitalists who are no better than the 19th century robber barons who pillaged the economy for their own private gain. Some people believe that the function of Free Enterprise is to squeeze as much as possible out of the system, while putting in a little as possible. To them it's all about profits and about hiding those profits wherever possible in everything from offshore tax shelters to tax avoidance schemes, to RRSPs that unfairly reward the wealthy.
  I have nothing against profits. Free Enterprise is one hell of a generator of community wealth. At the risk of being called "Neo-Liberal" the epithet for any social democrat who dares to believe in stuff like capitalism, i am compelled to say: i think free enterprise can be wonderful.
 

The buccaneers created globally-competitive newspeak as the mantra of success

  So what about the trucks? I'll get there.
  Adam Smith had it right when he said that capitalism should add to the wealth of the community. (My words, not Smith's.) But the minute capitalism becomes a means to make bloated profits at the expense of others, it is no longer "free" enterprise. It is captive enterprise run by an old-boy network that looks after its own.
  We can protest the World Trade Organization wherever they meet, but until government takes back the obligation to run things, instead of dancing to the tune of Big Money we will be held captive by those who always choose layoffs and downsizing when their profits are threatened. They, the free enterprise buccaneers created globally-competitive newspeak as the mantra of success. But it always translates into an attack on the most vulnerable, from people who need social programs at home, to millions of Mexicans living in grotesque Third World conditions in maquiladoros along the U.S. border, slave labour run by major multinational corporations. Things turn sour, business cuts staff. John Roth quietly lets 10,000 folks go because he overestimated the strength of the economy. Daimler Chrysler announces huge cuts and closings. Nowhere do I see a promise that they will return to profitability by building a better product.
  Softening the profit fall by downsizing is part of the "rush to the bottom." What abut the exorbitant cost of borrowing money to do competition-busting takeovers?
  The key words are deregulation and privatization. Here comes trucking. Thousands of hapless men who wanted to "own a piece of the action" put themselves into the hole and bought expensive rigs, financing them with bank loans. Underfinanced, they flooded into the newly deregulated-trucking business, new servants of the F.T.A and then the N.A.F.T.A.
 

Just-in-time shipment has turned big trucks into rolling warehouses

  A Kingston woman named Susanna McLeod wrote a poignant piece in Facts and Argument (Globe and Mail February 26/01) where she concluded with "Skyrocketing fuel prices, large repair bills, truck payments and other overhead costs make trucking a hard way to earn a living." She and her husband have abandoned their big rig Kenworth. They just couldn't keep up.
  So the mammoth transport truck ties in to clogged highways. It ties into the business of profits. It ties into the principle where we download costs. Governments download to junior governments who download to citizens, the neediest of whom, are then told to "tighten belts.
  Back to trucks.
  More than 20 years ago industry, led as I recall by General Motors, developed a new cost-cutting system called "just in time." They realized they were tying up millions in inventory. They hit on an old giant retailer trick. Years ago, when I had a fling in the cutthroat manufacturing business we would make a big sale to a major retailer. The sale condition was that we warehouse an amount equal to the amount we delivered. It meant we would bear the cost of inventory and the retailer would be off the hook.
  That's what "just in time" is all about. Big manufacturers keep as little as a couple of days worth of component parts in stock. As they need components they call and the trucks would roll. What a deal! Down went inventory costs. But someone had to pay. The supplier had to shoulder the cost of inventory. Classic download. But as you get farther down the food chain you came to the truckers who had to be constantly on call to deliver another just-in-time shipment. What happened then was that these big trucks, and they kept getting bigger, literally turned into rolling warehouses.
  Is it any wonder that the number of registered commercial vehicles in Ontario has risen from about 850,000 in 1984 to over 1,200,000 by 2000! And that doesn't count thousands of rigs from across the country and from the U.S. in a mad game of just-in-time delivery among the thriving NAFTA partners. The truckers were running all the time, running fast because time is money and the customers are squeezing for more speed and less cost.
  Government, at the demand of industry, deregulated trucking. More competition lowers prices. It also lowers quality, bankrupts competitors and eventually raises the cost of doing business.
  Always, always, the cost of doing business will be downloaded to the most vulnerable. We all pay, though, for the destruction of highways by too-heavy loads, the building of more highways to handle more commerce, the carnage generated by crowding.
  The profits made by the just-in-time manufacturer come out of our hide, your hide, my hide, the Ministry of Transportation's hide, and the hide of the truckers like Susanna McLeod who just couldn't carry on.
  But remember, what's good for General Motors...

Posted: March 05, 2001

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