Exclusive
Status: 04/22/2022 10:26 am
Cargo ships are piling up in front of many ports around the world – including Germany. Pandemic and war disrupted the global flow of goods. An internal letter from Hamburg shows the extent of the unrest.
Dozens of cargo ships that want to dock in Bremerhaven or Hamburg are floating along the North Sea coast, but they are doomed to wait days and even weeks. Tiefwasserreede is the technical term for patience at sea.
Employees asked to work overtime
Only eight of the waiting ships want to go to Hamburg’s Burchardkai, one of four container terminals at Germany’s biggest port. A letter from the terminal administration to the workforce, which is available to the NDR, gives an idea of the extent of the outage. “We want these ships to dock with us,” write the two terminal chiefs in view of the freighters waiting in the North Sea. They complain about an “extremely tense operating situation at our company” and ask employees to work overtime and not take days off. “We need about 800 additional shifts a month to break the waiting cycle for ships and deal with the avalanche of containers.”
Management at Burchardkai, which belongs to the Hamburg-based port logistics group HHLA, offers employees concrete financial incentives for overtime, around €100 on top of their normal salary for not having a day off and €50 extra for four overtime hours. The manager’s persuasion ends with the words, “For Q&A, we invite you for coffee this week between shifts.”
The works council has not yet approved the offer. “Negotiations are still ongoing,” an HHLA spokesperson said when asked about the NDR. In any case, the request for overtime seems somewhat paradoxical in view of other efforts by the HHLA to reduce the workforce on the docks and increase automation.
Containers are stacked on the pier
In fact, things are stagnant at Burchardkai. The “Ever Given” is symbolically located in the middle of the three berths. The container ship became stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021, blocking the waterway for six days. Now the port of Hamburg cannot keep up with the movement of cargo. This is mainly due to the increasing number of containers that need to be temporarily stored at the port. Although the HHLA has created new parking spaces, it still lacks space – and apparently staff – to move the “avalanche”.
“Burchardkai primarily deals with services from the Far East. That’s where we have the biggest impact,” Jens Hansen, HHLA board member responsible for the operating business, said in an interview with NDR. “At the moment there is still a hold position. We are talking to our customers.”
Is the worst yet to come?
As the HHLA board of directors strives to spread hope that the chaos will soon be resolved, independent experts warn that the worst is yet to come. “The situation will worsen dramatically in the coming weeks,” predicts Jan Ninnemann, a professor at the Hamburg School of Business Administration. The economist, a specialist in logistics management, refers to the traffic jam in Shanghai, the largest port in the world, where more than five times more containers are handled than in Hamburg. At the moment, Shanghai is not on pace, mainly because of the corona lock. But suddenly, too many ships will be heading to Europe at once, Ninnemann hopes: “Then we’ll have the big wave here. The traffic jams will be even bigger.”
The situation with regard to container ships waiting in German Bay is already critical. “With operating costs of $50,000 a day, you can literally see dollar bills flying up chimneys,” comments the economics professor. The economic losers are neither shipowners nor terminal operators. Both even make high profits: shipping companies, because they have increased freight rates enormously, and terminal operators, because they charge high fees to store the containers. Explosive costs are passed on to the recipients of the goods: businesses and consumers. Chaos in ports fuels inflation.
Container jam in front of Germany’s biggest port
Jennifer Johnston, NDR, April 22, 2022 9:22 am