Pickets on the wharves

Press, 7 October 1988, Page 8

Pickets on the wharves

Less than a week after the Government’s reform of port management took effect, work is coming to a standstill on the wharves. One ship has been held up in Auckland since the beginning of the week; loading of supplies aboard the Holmdale for the Chatham Islands has been halted at Lyttelton; direct unpacking of containers was stopped at the Lyttelton container terminal; and the dispute is likely to spread to ports throughout New Zealand. Members of the Harbour Workers’ Union have thrown up picket lines on the wharves and watersiders have stopped work rather than cross them.

Legal action has been started by employers to force watersiders to ignore the pickets; and damages of $60,000 a day are being sought from harbour workers in Auckland. In a separate court action, an injunction will be sought to require the Lyttelton harbour workers to remove their picket lines. The confrontations on the wharves, the wrangles in court, the bitterness and resentment that is growing between the two work-forces on the wharves, and the costly disruption to shipping and exports should cause no surprise. The problems were foreseen months ago and the Government warned of them.

The central issue is that, under the Government’s new regime, stevedoring companies may now employ watersiders and use their own or hired equipment to do work that traditionally has been the preserve of harbour workers and harbour board plant. Harbour workers object to being done out of a job; so a serious demarcation dispute threatens to close down the country’s ports. This is not an unavoidable teething problem of port reform. By the way in which industrial implications of the reform programme have been allowed to drift, it must be assumed that the Government has decided this is the best or easiest way to solve what always was going to be the most troublesome aspect of its reforms. As recently as last week-end, the Minister of Transport, Mr Jeffries, said that the Government is considering a review of waterfront labour, particularly the costs and

inefficiencies of the Waterfront Industry Commission. Yet he and his Cabinet colleagues could not have been unaware that seeds of industrial unrest were being sown with their ports reform legislation. A review of waterfront labour is coming far too late. The Government’s reforms, if they are to achieve the efficiencies and cost-savings claimed for them, inevitably require hundreds of workers at New Zealand ports to be laid off. The legislation makes it more likely that harbour workers iwll bear the brunt of redundancies; but Mr Jeffries would have the public believe that only now is the Government beginning to think of facing the problems of waterfront labour.

The demarcation lines and doublemanning that make New Zealand ports such expensive places for moving cargo will have to go. The ports have indeed been a costly and sometimes inefficient link in the export chain, as Mr Jeffries says. An idea of how costly can be gauged from recent figures which showed a handling cost of $1.25 to move a lamb carcase from the wharf gate to the ship’s hold; and this on a lamb for which the farmer received $5.85. No matter how lean and competitive the producers of primary exports become, they will be unable to compete if their produce is weighed down with such heavy charges. There must be a better way of reducing these costs, however, than allowing the ports to close down while watersiders and harbour workers slug it out to see who will save jobs. Almost certainly, a single, industry-based union on the waterfront will emerge as a logical extension of the management and administrative reforms that the Government has begun at the ports. The present course makes eventual amalgamation of the two unions more difficult to achieve as antagonism between the two work-forces grows. As a means of reducing over-manning on the wharves, the present ploy is a crude instrument that also damages trade and harms the embryonic port authorities that the changes were intended to benefit. The Government may yet be forced to step in to limit the damage.