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REPORT PINPOINTS CONTAINER DEPOT-OVERMANNING DANGER
Page 38
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CONTAINER DEPOTS are in danger of being overmanned through a possible demand by dockers' unions for the depots to be manned by registered dock labour, in a report on container services by the British Shippers' Council.
"So far as we know", says the Council, "it is a difficulty unique to the United Kingdom." And the Council stresses: "It would be wholly wrong for the manning of container depots to become a preserve of registered dock labour".
Its objections to the dockers' view is this: Packers' skills are not the same as those required by dock labour and experience shows there is a place for female labour. The docks are, by tradition, a male preserve.
An efficient container depot depends "on a high degree of mechanization and therefore of capital investment. Economy, as well as a smooth throughput of cargo, will depend on shift working. Yet at manyports there is a tradition of hostility to shift working and even to weekend working".
Government commitment to a policy under which port authorities are soon given sole right to employ registered dock labour "would be utterly inconsistent with the principles underlying public inland container depots which were agreed in 1965".