International

This week in Strasbourg we vote on the European Parliament's input into the negotiations over the new Port Services Regulation. In the past there has been a great deal of perfectly justified unrest surrounding EU legislation on this issue. Ports would have to be privatised. Pilotage must be subject to competition. Moreover, rules protecting port employees must be annulled. The text on which we were asked to vote this week takes precisely the opposite line: member states must determine how they organise their ports, but the rights of employees, including those negotiated in collective labour agreements, must be respected. British ports in particular are up in arms, but it's great that the trend towards liberalisation and privatisation has been turned around, firstly in the case of inland water transport, and now in relation to port services.

Foto: Pim Stouten

Adriaan Visser, the Rotterdam senior local councillor with responsibility for the city’s port, said recently that he would be taking a more active role than did his predecessors. In Rotterdam the Port Corporation has been distanced from the local authority, although the council retains a majority interest. Visser is now also seeing, with the arrival of automation, in particular in relation to container processing, workers under pressure. Their work is changing and the number of work places is declining. This demands carefully worked out social plans. Whether Visser's plans are really going to materialise remains to be seen, but at least he will now be under orders from Brussels to take proper account of the social rights of the workers. And should the dockers decide to strike? In that case the draft regulation states that a strike may not be broken on the grounds that it goes against the vital interest of the port services.

Is there then nothing but good from a Brussels which now recognises also that ports are there for all of us? Here we need still to exercise caution. First of all this concerns only the European Parliament’s position and negotiations with the Council of Ministers, under the co-decision procedure which means that the two bodies must come to an agreement, are yet to begin. In addition, the British port corporations’ lobby in Brussels is powerful. The fact that the European Commission’s proposal in the end shunned compulsory liberalisation of port services was a result of the intervention of Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc, whose own services favoured only optional liberalisation, probably following intensive lobbying. But for the time being the SP finds itself with a proposal for which we can vote. Who would have ever thought that?