Masked Mob Ransacks Marseilles Port Office

News was prepared under the information support of Online Daily Newspaper on Hellenic and international Shipping "Hellenic Shipping News".

30 Jun 2009

Up to forty hooded people swinging axes and iron bars attacked the offices of the Port of Marseilles Authority June 29 in what appeared to be a major escalation of a long running dispute over container handling. The attackers ransacked the offices of the port director Jean-Claude Terrier, the Port Authority said in a statement.
The Authority said the attackers, who were wearing port clothing, invaded its offices an hour after it had delivered a letter to union officials detailing plans to transfer dock workers from its payroll to a private stevedore.
Dock workers have been staging strikes at the container terminal at Marseilles’ eastern docks to protest plans to transfer them onto the books of private stevedore Intramar to comply with the French government’s port reform program.
Intramar is a 50:50 joint venture between CMA-CGM, the Marseilles-based ocean carrier, and Dubai’s DP World, a global ports company.
Dock workers at six state-controlled ports, including Le Havre, France’s top box hub, accepted plans to transfer around 2,000 container crane operators to private stevedores last July after the government sat through three months of rolling strikes.
But the union officials at Marseilles are still fighting the reforms claiming private stevedores will use the economic downturn as an excuse to tear up agreements on jobs and wages.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy says the reforms, which also loosen the state’s grip over the waterfront, are necessary to boost the lagging competitiveness of French ports, whose share of European box traffic halved from nearly 12 percent in 1989 to just six percent in 2006 and is still shrinking.
Crane operators at Marseilles work around 2,000 hours a year against 4,000 hours for dock workers at Barcelona and Antwerp, according to Sarkozy.
The Marseilles Port Authority insisted it will implement the reforms which were voted by the French parliament last July.
Transport Secretary Dominique Bussereau said today’s violence was “intolerable” and pledged his support for the port authority.

Source: Journal of Commerce