Truckers fume over Pier 1 strike

With the container movements at Durban’s Pier 1 container terminal grinding to halt last weekend as workers downed tools, the container trucking industry has run out of patience. “We were just about to officially complain to the port authorities over the fact that the Durban container terminal (DCT) had shut down three times in the past six weeks because of ‘industrial action’, when this latest Pier 1 strike and shut-down for a whole weekend added insult to injury,” said Kevin Martin, MD of Freightliner and vice-chairman of the Durban harbour carriers’ section of the SA Association of Freight Forwarders (Saaff). This followed an urgent communiqué sent out by Pier 1 at 23:49 on the evening of Friday, July 3, telling truckers that Pier 1 was on strike, and would be shut down till 06:00 on Monday morning. “My own operation, for example, had 16 trucks booked for Saturday morning to collect a client’s import boxes from Pier 1,” said Martin. “This lastminute notice meant we had to get hold of all our drivers, some as late as three to four in the morning, to tell them not to come – and the client didn’t get the import consignment he was urgently waiting for.” This has made the harbour carriers’ letter to the senior management of Transnet Port Terminals (TPT) complaining about these frequent strikes even more urgent. More than half the problem is what Martin described as “a complete lack of foresight” by TPT management. “Where was their anticipation in this latest case,” he said. “They’ve had three sets of industrial action at their sister terminal, DCT, in the past six weeks, and they didn’t anticipate this one?” The reasons for these continuing strikes are still unclear. But three times operations at the DCT, the country’s busiest, were disrupted, with workers demonstrating just outside the terminal gates and with container trucks backing up along the access road. Local journalists told FTW that the DCT workers’ actions seemed to be a matter of a wage dispute, and that negotiations had been going on for several weeks – but with no resolution being reached. A source from the SA Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) – the industry’s biggest – was unable to clarify the issue.