Finger pointed at trucking firms

Truck drivers are illegally working up to 120 hours a week and say they are put in an impossible situation by their employers.

Truck drivers are not legally able to work more than 13 hours a day, or 70 hours a week, but many do, say three drivers who Stuff agreed not to name. Hours are either tracked by the driver in a paper logbook, or monitored using an electronic logbook, a voluntary system many companies do not use.

Stephen Bryan Davies, who was sentenced this month after breaching his allowed work hours, drove 23 hours in a single day. Davies, the sole director of a truck company, was fined a total of $1620, and disqualified from driving for two months.

‘‘As soon as you go over that 13 hours, you’re lining up to kill someone,’’ said one driver who had worked 13 years in the industry. ‘‘You fall asleep, you’re either going to kill someone or you’re going to injure yourself because by then you’re absolutely knackered.’’

He had worked for at least nine or 10 trucking companies, and had falsified his logbooks at all except one. He had not been asked by his bosses specifically to falsify his logbook or work more than maximum hours, but had been put in situations where he could not say no.

He was often sent off without all the details of the journey, and would discover too late it could not be completed within the legal time limit. Drivers moving stock could not leave them on the truck overnight, and they had to spend several hours cleaning out the trucking trailers once the animals were delivered, a job included in the 13 daily work hours.

‘‘They haven’t told you to break the law, but there’s nowhere to unload them that’s secure, so you’re forced.’’

He regularly worked between

80 and 100 hours a week, compared with the legal maximum of

70 hours including breaks. The chances of being discovered were small, and there was no incentive to speak up. ‘‘If the trucking industry finds out you’re the nark, that’s the last job you’ll ever have in the trucking industry.’’

Every trucking company should be running electronic logbooks, he said.

Another driver, with 16 years’ experience, said it was worst in the rural sector. ‘‘I drove stock trucks years ago and nearly every day of the week I was falsifying my logbook, and I did that for a year and got out of it. I thought, never again. I started working for a multinational and that was absolutely perfect.’’

Jared Abbott, secretary for transport, logistics and manufacturing at First Union, said some companies made sure drivers did not breach logbook hours, but others ‘‘blatantly’’ broke the law.

Abbott wanted regulators to take tougher action against companies that breached the rules.

According to Ministry of Transport figures from 2016, crashes involving trucks were responsible for 23 per cent of all deaths on the road. Truck drivers caused only about a third of the fatal crashes they were involved in.