COWBOYS

BY 'You're loading a ship without seeing the sea'-ex-dock officer now a superintendent at one of Britain's biggest inland container depots.

The container base has become an increasingly familiar feature of Britain's industrial horizon over the last four These depots, where the containers are packed and unpacked with cargo, are one of the fastest growing industries in the country. There is hardly a town or city without its container bases. They vary • from the small converted haulier's yard to the vast complexes owned by the shipping consortia or the National Freight Corporation.

The ICDs, as they called, are the centre of the row on the docks. Dockers say the work of stuffing and stripping is traditionally their own. Many add that the depots have deliberately been built inland to get round the problem of employing registered These claims are only partly true. The loading and unloading of containers is undoubtstevedoring work and its transfer inland does not alter its character and certainly some employers have deliberately moved off the dock so they can stop employing dockBut there are good sons for inland operations.

Without groupage, containerization would not pay. Transporting a half empty steel box is even more expensive than shifting the cargo by conventional methods. Groupage is done inland to get the full benefits from the new method. Goods must be stuffed into the containers as near source as possible and unpacked as close to destination as possible. So the depots which handle the trade of big industrial areas like Leeds or Birmingham are built in those very regions, by the motorways, hundreds of miles inland. Most depot owners plead that they did offer jobs to dockers. But in most cases this is a phoney defence because a condition of employment was that the Dock Labour Scheme - the sheet anchor of dockers' rights since 1947—would not operate. STEPHEN JOHNS Understandably few dockers wanted to move inland like gipsies and leave the registers, especially in 1968 when there was no serious labour shortage due to union-employer promotion of the severance pay schemes.

Depot employers openly admit that they did not want to extend the workers' rights embodied in the scheme their premises.

John Reid, head of the Containerbase Federation, put it this way: 'We didn't want to be recognized as a port or as port employers and pay the levies under the scheme? He was referring to the payment port employers must make towards cost of the severance scheme and to the revenue pool necessary to support dockers on the unattached register who have no work.

Another smaller operator who had been severely hit by a black on his depot put it more bluntly: 'No one would touch you if you employed registered labour. For example• be all would soar. It would right if everyone was in the same boat and had to take the dockers on, but to do it on our own would have been impossible Transport and General Workers' Union was happy to see bases recruit non-registered labour who often joined the union's commercial section. It was in this encouraging atmosphere that the 'cowboy firms' began to proliferate round the ports. These operators were often ex-shipping In the main they concentrated vocative operators to the on the short sea routes, where docker, are not the most land costs are a greater pro- important employers. They portion of total costs, therefore exist very much on the fringes diminishing the advantage of of the industry. moving far inland. The issue of groupage, in Other firms latch onto the tact, has been given too much big operators. A superintend- importance. Figures on how ent at the Birmingham depot ennas are not readily avai of the Containerbase Federapresent time and 2,250 in roughly a year's time. Ignoring for a moment the plight of their workers if the dockers were to get their jobs, this figure is clearly not half enough to absorb the 5,000 plus surplus dock employers say already exists at the ports. The groupage demands of would docks for to drift wher and stripping.

Then It advantage big inlanı depots when became the eceiver from premises. Panalpina on and lorry fleet, to exporters and the busines. once again.

Fifty per cent of the work groupage and height of its operations the company says it dealt with 500 tons container cargo customs and has been plagued by overcapacity since it started in 1968. Originally a 24-hour shift was planned at some depots. The amount of trade to justify round-theclock operations materialize and last year there were substantial redundancies.

Losses have steadily declined from £300,000 in 1969. Containerbase chief John Reid claims the company would have broken even this year if the introduction of the Far East container trade had not been delayed by the Japanese seamen's strike. The company expects to increase its groupage tonnage from an expected 255,000 by October this year to 493,000 by October 1973. This compares with the 218,213 tons in the 12 months ending October 1971.

One problem Containerbase faces is the increasing move to full container loads (FCLs— that is containers packed full at the point of manufacture). Ford and Massey Ferguson have recently started packing their own containers-this has been a blow to the Federation's Birmingham base. Ironically the consortia themselves often encourage the move to FCLs. OCL has a team East trade will smooth things out and fill the empty spaces in the sheds.

Leeds is a typical, busy containerbase. It lies half a mile from the end of the MI motorway and shares a few acres of wasteland on the outskirts of the city with a British Rail Freightliner terminal.

It employs 43 freighthandlers, six supervisors and four fitters. The freighthandlers work two eight-hour shifts (6 а.т.-2 р.т., 2 p.m.-10 p.m.) for a £32 basic plus f5 a week shift bonus.

Management says labour relations are good and claims a complete • free-strike record during the three and a half years operations. Leeds supplies the Australian and Far East trade, reflecting the interests of the main users, OCL and ACT. The bulk of traffic is shipped through Tilbury and Southampton.

The depot is lined with stacks of containers — in the groupage export shed about five were being packed during my visit.

Main users include Benn Line Containers Ltd, ACT, KilMartin, Leeds, Crowe, Louis Duforest, Thomas Cook & Sons Ltd (freight department), LEP Transport Ltd, Systems Interfreight and AllJULY arrival.

Superintendent John Kendrick (40), an ex-dock officer from Liverpool, says this is a major advantage over the ports where lorries can wait for days to load or unload.

The Containerbase Federation appears to be a group with nothing to hide. It co-operated rapidly with the Workers Press and did not refuse any information requested — as the spokesman pointed out, the union agreed to everything. .. love: Tim O'Lear Below: table capital invested ises as of July 3, DENTIA