The European Transport Workers’ Federation is demanding an end to a loophole in EU competition law that benefits shipowners at the expense of maritime workers.
As Berardina Tommasi, ETF policy officer for dockers, explained the Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (CBER) is “detrimental to seafarers because it allows employers to team up and set their procedures as a group. Companies do not therefore need to compete to attract workers on more favourable terms and conditions than their rivals.”
In the ports, dockworkers suffer because the powerful shipowners exert pressure as a group to have things done how they want, when they want. Schedules for seafarers and dockworkers alike see more unpredictability and stressful peaks of activity
More specifically, Ms. Tommasi notes that “the lethal mix of this exemption and maritime subsidies allows the consortia to act as if they were the only players in the maritime industry and use these advantages as leverage to massively increase their profits.”
Under this aspect, she highlights that the role of the European Commission in the EU should be to guarantee a level playing field, “but the CBER has turned out to be a disproportionate advantage that has caused harm to the workers and the principle of fair competition in the sector.”
Ensuring a socially sustainable sector should be an EU priority; therefore, it’s time to put an end to the CBER
ETF has also made another call to stop CBER recently, saying that:
This has only led to further market distortions, especially in the case of vertically integrated carriers, favouring the dominant position of shipping lines over terminal operators and other actors of the supply chain and resulting in pressure on working conditions for the dockers and the maritime workers at large, due to ever-growing peaks of activity and unreliability of the schedules
On the other hand, the Asian Shipowners’ Association (ASA) emphasized its long-standing policy that competition law exemptions for consortia like the CBER are indispensable for the healthy development of the liner shipping industry and the maintenance of reliable liner services to the entire global trading community.
