VANCOUVER — Disgruntled gravel truck owner-operators in B.C.’s Lower Mainland have decided not to play Scrooge during the holiday season and will until the New Year to decide how to deal with declining hauling rates.

Members of the B.C. Teamsters Union have grown concerned with what they say is a continuing trend of downward sliding rates from industry-wide levels in place earlier this year.

“We met with the key leaders of the owner-operator group,” said Don McGill, president of the BC Teamsters Union. “We had what I would call a cornerstone meeting where the group decided this problem was not going to go away unless the owner-operators themselves took concerted action.”

As well as not interfering with the Christmas season, the group also made a firm decision to avoid interfering with the Olympics at all costs, added McGill.

“There was absolutely no appetite in the room for any action which would disrupt the Olympic Games,” he said.

In the interim the union and its members will concentrate on talking to both union and non-union truckers on the job to inform them of the facts and to explore a variety of solutions to the problem of low haulage rates. McGill said the union will also inform and educate legislators, consumers and the news media on the complex details of the issue.

They will continue to emphasize fairness in haulage rates and the consequent safety issues with trucks.

In November, more than 200 gravel haulers gathered in Surrey, B.C. to ask the Teamsters to come up with some options to deal with unacceptably low trucking rates. The focus of their anger was reduced gravel haulage rates from previously established levels on the Port Mann Bridge expansion project.

The hourly rate for a tandem gravel truck in the B.C. government’s Blue Book is $93.45 an hour, but the union says Kiewit is only paying $65 an hour.

McGill said the truckers in the meeting – both union and non-union – were clear and direct. They can not survive with these low haulage rates, particularly if they become the standard on other projects such as the South Fraser Perimeter Road.

“We need a healthy, vibrant trucking industry in B.C. to help us complete these important infrastructure projects, and this rates issue could destroy that,” said McGill.

McGill said the meeting decided that nothing short of an entire industry-wide shutdown is required to rectify the situation, and meetings in the New Year will make the decisions on when, what, where and how.

In June of 2004 BC’s independent truckers shut down the construction industry for two weeks. The issue at that time was haulage rates as well as gasoline surtaxes. The truckers went back to work only after government-appointed mediators engineered an industry-wide agreement on rates.