Stop Talking: Start Doing
I hope Recovery Operators are as impressed as I am with Richard Goddard’s excellent article in last month’s Professional Recovery magazine. Everything was well explained and well written and once again sums the job up. The only trouble is that like some other people and me several times, he is raking over old coals. We need some new ideas and some radical thinking to try to move forward. Richard obviously has more faith in the All Party Group than I have. Although it is not quite the same, there is an old adage that those who cannot do spend more time talking about it and we need to be somehow starting to do.
I have noticed over the holiday period Clubs have been having more and more difficulty getting cars moved about and more and more Operators are telling me they are getting extra money more frequently, although each person’s criteria seem to be different. We have had extra money from time to time and then at other times we have just been told to get lost. There has been a situation where an extra payment has persuaded an off duty worker to turn out.
It is obvious before embarking on this sort of thinking, you need to be prepared not to do a job: it’s no good caving in. One approach (which is now going to send shivers through the Clubs) is that groups of Operators, maybe only three or four, in certain areas could target one of the minor Clubs and demand a higher rate for every single job. If it failed it would not matter because it is a minor Club. If it succeeded they could move on to the next one and so forth. But it won’t work where there are several Operators at each other’s throats, and that is the problem of course.
Mind you extra money is not even a short term fix as the infrastructure has gone: there was no way all the necessary vehicles could be moved straight away on the first day back after the holidays because there are no longer the number of trucks around, not to mention staff.
I also agree with Richard that the work providers ought to get together, but having spoken to a few of them, in my opinion it is not going to happen. I think the main problem is that we are dealing with Insurance Companies and everybody in the world knows how pig awkward and difficult they are to deal with.
Not getting confused with the people we deal with on a day-to-day basis, like our friends Ben Johnson and Nigel Ashton the people running these organisations have no humanity: they are not unlike the bankers of the financial crash: they are only interested in how much money they can grab. They do not give a damn about anybody, which includes ourselves and even their members. If they did care they would do something about the looming crisis. They are so full of their own corporate twaddle. If a mini bus full of people were left to freeze to death on the motorway they would first of all blame global warming for slowing the Gulf Stream and lowering the temperature, followed by further demands to close the Drax Power Station, instead of expressing regret that they had put the local Recovery Operator to the incident, out of business with cheap rates.
I wonder if we would have a case for Corporate Manslaughter if this happened, even to one person.
One thing is for sure, it is certainly coming to a head but who will be the casualties? Have the super operators had their best times, or will something take a strange turn? But most of all, who will rise from the ashes? It’s going to be anybody’s guess.
Fred Henderson
Breakdown Doctor