Due to the regularity, frequency and predictability of port
business that containerization brought
about in less than 50 years, casual labor
has been regularized and port work has
become a respectable and well-paid profession. Many people might still remember
the old days when, each morning, the dockers would show up at the gate where
a tallyman would thumb in those needed for the day, usually with criteria
such as age and physical strength (if not with some other criteria of a more
‘pecuniary’ nature…). The rest would go back to the tavern, or to whatever else
it was they were doing, waiting for the next day and hoping for the best.
During those days, shipping was a very risky and unpredictable business. Once a ship set sail, God only knew if, when and where she would end up to. Often, in
banking, risky loans are still called ‘sea loans’.
The new container-handling technology, on the other hand,
substituted capital for labor and it was thus strongly resisted, if not
sabotaged, by trade unions. Incidentally, the word sabotage derives from the wooden shoes (sabot, or the famous Dutch klomp) workers wore on the sweat-floor,
which they were throwing onto the new machines that were stealing their jobs, in the early years of the industrial revolution.
But as port labor was being made redundant, port
productivity was increasing by leaps and bounds. The graph I attach shows
increases in labor productivity in the 30 years since the introduction of
containerization in the 1960s. Labor was cut in half, while tons handled went up 6
times, from the time when a strong young man would swing a sack of flour over
his left shoulder and walk up the gangway, to the day when a quay crane driver would do 12 times that
much (and of course much more today), with a joystick in hand, sitting
somewhere comfortably, even remotely from home through an internet connection.
And it was this increase in labor productivity that allowed the fortunate
dockers who stayed with the job to enjoy the high salaries -the exceptionally
high salaries, some would argue- they do today (if one drives around a modern
port today he will see more Mercedes and BMW parked there than in any other
part of the city center).
Higher taxes were consequently paid to the government,
whose role is to redistribute income and wealth to those who, as a result of
technology, have lost their job. There is little doubt, in a civilized society,
that those who lose their job must be respectably compensated. And there are
laws and strict restructuring procedures for this purpose, which didn’t evolve
overnight. In the Netherlands, labor restructuring procedures are amongst the most
advanced (and generous) in the world. Sometimes, the restructuring process has been painful; elsewhere,
like for instance in Malaysia, it was plain sailing, with more than generous
severance packages and golden handshakes
(for interested readers, in the mid 90s, and after having looked at more than
100 ports around the world, I wrote 3 reports for the International Labor
Organization (ILO) which culminated in my guidelines
for successful port privatization -available on academia.edu). Having said
this, though, if in today’s world one believes that jobs can be guaranteed at
the cost of progress and competitiveness, he is under a big fallacy. Employment
today is as much a right as it is an obligation. By this I mean that the
worker can no longer sit back and enjoy life as before, but often he has to
take life and his future in his own hands, improve, better himself, invest in
new competences and skills, or look around for new opportunities even outside
his sector; and he should do this sooner rather than later.
The port workers in Rotterdam claim that the port is
creating too much new capacity and this will cost jobs. This is not true.
Excess capacity does not cost jobs and in Rotterdam, before Maasvlakte II was
developed -a project that had been discussed for more than 20 years- the port
had lost, in 10 years, 10% of market share to Antwerp and Hamburg, just because it
didn’t have enough capacity. The real
problem is that the new capacity is highly automated and labor-saving. But this
is not bad, and is a fact of life. Since the days of the industrial revolution,
capital has substituted for labor and it was only through innovation,
implementation of advanced technologies and the consequent increases in labor
productivity that we have the advanced economies, societies and welfare
systems we are enjoying today (so far…).
The Netherlands is well known to all for its famous polder model: A model where the social
partners - employees, employers and Administration- sit around a table and
eventually come up with the white smoke of a reasonable win-win solution.
Industrial action is not common in this country, to say the least. I am quite confident this will again be the case, and the unfortunate incident of today’s strike,
causing millions of euros in damages to the country’s economy, will soon be a regrettable
history, allowing this great port, the port of Rotterdam, to continue unhindered being
the indisputable leader of the European port industry. HH
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