‘Low staff morale at the root of port inefficiency’

Bring back the old guard and revitalise the flagging morale of those in the field… that is what it requires to restore Cape Town Container Terminal to true efficiency, says John Berry, chairman of the Cape Town Harbour Carriers’ Association. He has seen it all during an eventful 32-year freight career. He was one of the very first cartage drivers involved in containers when they were introduced into South Africa in the mid-1970s, so he’s well able to separate the wheat from the chaff and he and his fellow association members do not like what they see. Forget, if you will, concerns over lengthy downtime of the new Navis system, still hiccupping four months after implementation, as Berry focuses on other problems – not least of which is “widespread” low staff morale affecting all stakeholders “In the old (Portnet) days a bus would pick up off-duty operators right at their cranes and deliver their replacements at the same time to start work immediately. “Nowadays operators sometimes arrive late, resulting in cranes standing unattended for 30 minutes or even longer. That is not on and needs to be sorted out soonest. There was a time, he well remembers, that terminal morale was very good. Indeed, quayside teams took pride in what they were doing and worked hard to outdo each other. Many of the experienced old hands, frustrated over what they saw as a bleak future within TPT, accepted retirement packages and their skills and knowledge were lost as a result. Berry believes there is no substitute for experience, an essential ingredient sorely lacking at the terminal. So why, he asks, not re-recruit some of those with the know-how? Back to problematical Navis and the gremlins in the previous Cosmos system. “I don’t know from whom Transnet has purchased these systems but were they previously tried and tested in other ports around the world?” he asks. “If so, surely problems would have been ironed out before implementation in Cape Town and elsewhere in the country.” Berry wonders whether TPT fully grasps the implication of all the Navis downtime – up to six hours a day is not unique, hence the association lodging a complaint and receiving two extra free days rather than the one initially allowed following the most recent failure when trucks were prevented from entering the port from 3pm till mid-morning the following day. “Customers are forced to go into overtime by paying more for casual labour, cranes, forklifts and other equipment, a real financial burden, but it is not only they who are suffering. It’s the cartage drivers, the clearing and forwarding agents, everybody at the end of the day, so the terminal has to get its act together.”