The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #18530 Message #183993
Posted By: Peter T.
24-Feb-00 - 09:45 AM
Thread Name: Thought for the Day - Feb 24
Subject: Thought for the Day - Feb 24
When I was working my way through college many years ago, I was a security guard one summer at a warehouse/distribution centre for the A & P grocery chain. Since I didn't have much to do, being on the night shift, I used to have long conversations with the distribution coordinator about the whole food business, and how complicated the sales/futures/hauling/storage business was. He had only one real long term concern: he believed that the gradual elimination of the railways would make the food business much more vulnerable to trucker's strikes. (Remember, this is management talking). What he didn't count on was also the simultaneous shift into "just in time" delivery as a policy, eliminating intermediate warehousing.
We have just (in Canada) had our first taste of what this might mean -- a trucker's one day strike and slowdown over the increasing cost of diesel fuel (paid for out of the trucker's pockets). It is clear that a full scale strike, supported by truckers in the U.S., would stop everything, and present people with serious food shortages within less than a week. Here is an example of the law of unintended consequences: huge concentration on trucking, refusal to deal with fossil fuel consumption, and a new management style promoting "efficiency" -- all working together towards an interesting new societal vulnerability, and rising militancy among truckers, themselves pushed to the wall.