Wasted assets in dockland
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The failure of port authorities and dock employers to take a strong line in this year's dockland disputes is matched by their readiness to perpetuate practices which, to the outside world, appear to stem largely from a dog-in-a-manger attitude.
For example, road transport operators who occupy sites in the old Surrey Commercial Docks in London are eagerly awaiting the outcome of the Travers Morgan Report which may or may not release the covered accommodation which they rent and make it available for warehousing. At the moment these operators can only park vehicles on the wharves. Any warehousing work is restricted to dockers because it is "a dockside activity" ; but the problem is that there are no dockers at Surrey Docks. When packaged timber replaced loose timber, the cargoes and the dockers finally moved to Tilbury, except for a few taking severance pay.
We know of one large British international haulier who occupies a site in the dock where Iwo vast warehouses are standing empty, like many others in dockland. The company brings in groupage and unit loads from the Continent through Dover but cannot put them into its dockside warehouses. The PLA view, confirmed to us last week, is that traffic from abroad arriving on a semi-trailer is considered dock work if the journey terminates at a wharf, whether or not the wharf still accepts vessels.
Amazing, you say? Not in this fairytale world. The PLA spokesman said that dockers considered that ships' cargo, including roll-on/roll-off semi-trailers, was considered to be "completing its voyageafter leaving the docks by road for its final destination. Fortunately, he agreed that the dockers had not suggested — as a logical outcome of this reasoning — that lorry drivers and their mates should belong to the National Union of Seamen. Yet such a suggestion would be little more nonsensical than some of the other peculiar situations which dock authorities accept.