Dockers
For hundreds of years, dock workers have done the heavy lifting to keep the world moving. Dockers provide a critical link in global supply chains, loading and unloading cargo in the world’s docks, ports and wharves. In today’s globalised economy dockers handle 90% of international trade in an industry dominated by a handful of global port giants.
ISSUES
Privatisation and market consolidation in the port and wider logistics chain, and global supply chain shocks, have enabled stevedoring companies to rake in record profits. At the same time, the lives and livelihoods of dockers and other maritime workers are being put at risk by cost-cutting, casualisation, sub-contracting, automation and the erosion of safety and labour standards across the industry. The ITF Dockers’ Section is tackling the key issues facing our industry and campaigning globally against those who fail to protect the lives and rights of dockers.
OUR PRIORITIES
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ACCOUNTABILITY
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SAFETY
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FUTURE OF WORK
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EQUALITY
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ORGANISING
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INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS
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The ITF’s Dockers’ Section campaigns globally to secure and improve the safety, rights and labour standards of port workers globally. We do this by:
- Engaging with the major global network terminal operators including APM Terminal, Bolloré, DP World, Hutchison Port Holdings, PSA International and others to set and raise standards globally and engage companies on solutions for joint challenges and priorities.
- Organising and campaigning locally, regionally and globally to build industrial power to secure collective bargaining agreements, regional framework agreements and transnational agreements.
- Shining a spotlight on any attack on dockers’ fundamental rights and holding employers, governments, investors and companies accountable for ensuring decent work, fundamental labour rights and genuine social protections for dockers worldwide.
- Representing dockers in global collective bargaining, engaging with and influencing international policy institutions including the ILO and IMO, and industry bodies like ICHCA to raise key issues facing dockers across automation and digitalisation, health and safety and sustainability.
- Leveraging our global strength to stand in solidarity with unions and dockers under attack – from attacks on workers’ fundamental right to join trade unions, attack the right to strike and the growing threats of automation, outsourcing and other new forms of employment that are putting workers’ lives and communities’ livelihoods at risk.
Through organising, campaigning, negotiating and training, the ITF and dock workers unions globally are strengthening union capacity to shift power from capital to workers.
The Dockers’ Section strategy focuses on key issues that matter for port workers around the globe, including:
- Occupational safety and health - we’re researching fatalities and serious injuries, developing training programs like the “Be more than a bystander’ program and safety apps for workers, through to engaging and working with global network terminal operators, industry working groups and governments on raising safety standards across the industry.
- Future of Work - we’re presenting the facts and drawing the attention of employers, governments and investors to the negative impacts that automation and digitalisation pose to the safety and livelihoods of workers and their communities, and to port productivity and local and national economies.
- Expanding union density and diversity - organising globally and regionally to support dockers’ unions to grow, to remove structural barriers and make the industry attractive to women and young workers, and to develop capacity to campaign and bargain.
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Our Dockers' Section Committee brings together a diversity of dockers’ representatives from across the world working to advance the rights of dockers’ and transport workers worldwide.
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SECTION COORDINATOR Enrico Tortolano |
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SENIOR ASSISTANT Steve Biggs |
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Paddy Crumlin
Willie Adams
Niek Stam
Monique Verbeeck
Viri Gómez
Nick Loridan
Jackie Doe
Gladys Chepkorir
Phillipe Djoula
Mahmoud Mansour Edbeis
Salman Al Saad
Sang Sik Kim
Arasu Duaraisamy
Craig Harrison
Kimihiro Kashiwagi
PM Mohammed Haneef
Terje Fenn-Samuelsen
Marc Loridan
Mark Hughes
Aleksejs Holudnuks
Maya Schwiegershausen-Güth
Jose Manuel Perez–Vega
José Adilson Pereira
Roberto Coria
Guillermo Honeros
Frederica Riley
John Baker
Rob Ashton
We speak with a single, united voice, supporting dockers and our affiliated unions globally in order to build workers’ power that secures a fairer and safer workplace for dockers.