French ports: a bill project and a strike

Posted on April 25, 2008 by Matthieu Desiderio

A bill project was adopted by the Ministers’ Council

The bill project to reform maritime port authorities was adopted by the Ministers’ Council on April 23, 2008. The law, among other propositions, will impose port authorities to privatize handling activities (cranes operators mainly) and includes a large investment program to increase French ports competitiveness.

The project bill will not only help improving French ports competitivity compared to their European counterparts, but will also allow them to respect European regulation, through the privatization of all handling activities. Back to 1992, dockers activities were also privatized and caused both unions disagreements and long employees strikes: this phenomenon now happens again in the seven ports concerned by the reform: Marseille, Le Havre, Rouen, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Nantes-Saint-Nazaire and Dunkirk.

The four main measures of the project bill are listed thereafter:

privatization of all handling activities (crane operators);
a new State investment plan of €367 million from 2009 through 2013 (€174 million more than previously anticipated for the same period) and a €75 milllion annual program to finance maintenance of maritime access to the main French ports;
the evolution of port missions: each of the seven main French ports will elaborate a “strategic project”, defining goals and local investment programs;
a new governance: each port will now have both an Oversight Council and a Directorate, replacing the sole board currently in place, in order to split control and management tasks.

The crisis that follows the projected law in the French main ports

The social situation in all these ports (Marseille-Fos, Dunkirk, Le Havre, Rouen, Nantes-Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle and Bordeaux) is quite tensed, since the reform announced by Prime Minister François Fillon on January 14, already arose the dissatisfaction of the warehousemen. Now that the bill project has been adopted, these same warehousemen show once again their discontentment by going on strike and paralyzing the ports activity.

When the French Governement announced mid-April that it would evaluate the bill project on April 23, ports activities were disrupted but activity restarted by the beginning of this week (April 21). Since the project has been adopted, strikes restarted in almost every ports and this time could be quite longer than previous ones. Ships, mainly tankers and containerships, might be forced to wait until the end of strike or be rerouted towards other European ports…

References

Article: La grève perturbe fortement les ports français, Le Figaro, Apr. 23, 2008 : here
Article: La réforme des ports au menu du Conseil des ministres, Le Figaro, Apr. 23, 2008 : here