The Petroleum Driver Passport scheme: a case study in reregulation

• Published date: 01 May 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12179
• Date: 01 May 2017

The Petroleum Driver Passport scheme: a

case study in reregulation

Edmund Heery, Leon Gooberman and

Marco Hauptmeier

ABSTRACT

The Petroleum Driver Passport is an example of the reregulation of the labour

market, the development of employment rules that apply across multiple employers

in a given industry, occupation or region. The scheme requires drivers of road tankers

to possess a Passport, indicating their safety competence, if they are to collect and

transport fuel in the UK’s downstream oil-distribution industry. This article presents

a case study of the Passport scheme, which identifies the factors that contributed to

the scheme’s development, assesses its impact and draws lessons for other possible

initiatives to reregulate the labour market.

1 INTRODUCTION

The deregulation of the labour market has been a core element of the Washington

Consensus, the neoliberal framework that has dominated Western public policy for

three decades. Deregulation has encompassed the weakening or withdrawal of sub-

stantive employment rules, designed to shelter workers from market forces or estab-

lish minimum standards. It has also embraced procedural reform, restricting the

opportunities for workers to seek legal redress for grievances or organise and bargain

through trade unions. Finally, it has involved decentralisation of labour market

decision-making, typically through the break-up of industrywide collective

bargaining and the abandoning of employment regulation that establishes common

standards across multiple employers. Reform of the labour market in accordance

with these principles has been a marked feature of the recent Coalition and Conserva-

tive administrations of the UK (Williams and Scott, 2016) and, in the period since the

global financial crisis, has also been characteristic of several continental European

countries (Marginson, 2015; Meardi 2014). The appetite for deregulation amongst

many policy makers remains unabated. For proponents, reform of this kind improves

the functioning of the labour market and so operates to the long-term benefit of both

buyers and sellers of labour. Privileged insiders, such as those organised in trade

unions that monopolise labour supply, may lose access to economic rents as

market-restricting regulation is abolished, but the package of reform is believed to

serve all legitimate labour market interests.

❒Edmund Heery is Professor of Employment Relations; Leon Gooberman is Lecturer in Human

Resource Management; and Marco Hauptmeier is Reader in International Human Resource

Management, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK.

Correspondence should be addressed to Edmund Heery, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University,

Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK; email: heery@cardiff.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 48:3, 274–291

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2017 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

While the deregulationist programme remains highly influential, it has increasingly

been subject to critique by those who question whether its effects are universally

beneficial. One line of critique claims that deregulation encourages a low-skill/low-

productivity dynamic within the economy and so operates against the long-term

interests of capital itself. The claim here is that deregulation encourages a form of

economic development that is excessively reliant on cost reduction and that is not

sustainable over the longer term (Rubery et al., 2016). A second argument points to

the high social cost associated with rising income inequality, which itself is regarded

as the unavoidable consequence of a deregulated labour market. According to this

line of argument, the emergence of a ‘precariat’, a substantial group of low-wage,

insecure workers, threatens social integration and facilitates political volatility, seen

in the rise of populist political movements (Standing, 2011). A third argument claims

essentially that while business may gain from deregulation, at least in the shorter

term, there are serious adverse consequences for labour seen in the erosion of employ-

ment standards and a ‘race to the bottom’in standards of management practice. The

suggestion here is that deregulation is zero-sum in its effects, shifting the balance of

economic returns from labour to capital and transferring risk from employers to

workers (Hacker, 2008; Kochan and Riordan, 2016). Wage stagnation, insecure work

and diminished welfare support, according to this view, are the price that workers pay

for deregulation.

Growing awareness of the potential downside to deregulation has prompted the

emergence of counterproposals. The need to reregulate the labour market has

emerged as a theme in public policy. Advocates of reregulation have tended to call

for new institutions of labour market governance that operate above the level of the

employing enterprise and that can afford fresh protection to workers and re-establish

good labour market standards within industry or occupational labour markets. The

purpose of this article is to present a case study of a successful initiative of this kind,

the Petroleum Driver Passport (PDP) scheme. The latter is a new form of industry-

level regulation that operates in the UK’s downstream oil-distribution industry and

that stipulates and enforces safe working practices in the transport of petroleum-

related products. Under the scheme, petroleum tanker drivers can only collect fuel

from refineries and distribution centres if they possess a passport, which vouches for

their safety competence. The scheme is backed by trade unions, the oil majors, logis-

tics companies and other stakeholders within the industry and represents a concerted,

industrywide attempt to address mounting concern about safety standards in a

fragmented and competitive sector. In what follows, we present an account of the

scheme, identify the multiple factors that caused it to be created, evaluate its success

and offer reflections on the lessons that it holds for the wider theme of reregulation.

Before presenting the case, however, we first examine the literature on reregulation,

identifying core prescriptions and reviewing key pieces of research.

2 REREGULATION

Just as the deregulation of the labour market can assume a number of forms, so might

its reregulation. Inter alia, it can encompass the enactment of new or the strengthen-

ing of existing legal protection for employees, the strengthening of enforcement mech-

anisms through which such protection is given effect and the bolstering of the capacity

of trade unions to organise workers and engage in collective bargaining with em-

ployers (Dickens and Hall, 2003). It can also encompass centralisation and the

275Petroleum Driver Passport

© 2017 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd