"Why are you consistently so nasty and disrespectful of shippers?" – asks a correspondent, who goes on to suggest that as shippers are the customers, they should be treated by people like me with more politeness. After all, the customer is supposed to be always right.
I must plead guilty as charged, but offer some extenuating circumstances to the effect that it tends to be organisations of shippers, rather than individual customers of the carriers, who deserve an occasional custard pie. Just as I dislike children who constantly whine, shippers' organisations moan like the wind in the struts of the Sydney Harbour bridge. They seem to think that whining is what they were put on Earth for, and I guess this is correct, but they seem unable to ever give carriers, who invest a lot of money in ships and their operation, any credit whatsoever.
Take their everlasting opposition to the liner conferences, which, at least in the ears of sympathetic eurocrats in Brussels, was successful in seeing them banned as anti-competitive. Other countries had rather more sense, realising that the stability the conferences brought to shipping capacity greatly outweighed any disadvantages. Maybe in their early days, liner conferences were exclusive cartels, but for at least the past fifty years they have been far less so, and non-conference alternatives have invariably been available to provide plenty of choice.
I always like to cite the remarks of the chairman of P&O, Sir Donald Anderson who, when speaking to New Zealanders in 1968, argued in defence of the conference system that provided shipping servicing the longest route in the world. Ian Farquar's brilliant book "The Tyser Legacy" reports him as saying:
"We carry easy and difficult cargo; we serve good ports and bad ports; we send ships out to New Zealand in ballast because the trade is imbalanced; we get cargo on our merits or lose it on our demerits; we have no patronage, no special privilege, no exclusive rights that we have not earned."
He also went on to suggest that the carriers claimed the right to make a fair return on capital invested, just like the shippers did.
It is no different today, except that the shippers' organisations are perhaps better connected and will go into "auto-whine" mode if the carriers find that all their profit is going on fuel and want to put on a few dollars per box to restore the status quo. And they never stop exaggerating their manifold disadvantages and weaknesses in the face of "mighty carrier power". Chance would be a fine thing.
But I'm afraid that my main objections to shippers these days stems from their inability to prevent so many practices that are actually hazardous for those operating ships, or even port equipment. Just before Christmas, the Tokyo-based International Association of Ports and Harbors joined with the World Shipping Council, the International Chamber of Shipping and BIMCO in their campaign to have containers weighed and the weight verified before they are loaded aboard a ship.
This is a scandal that has been brewing for years, with shippers stuffing containers until they can barely shut the doors and then guessing the weight for the declaration. Port-handling equipment has been wrecked, stacks have collapsed, and on occasion ships have been nearly capsized when their stability has been compromised by overweight boxes being stowed high on the deck stack.
The small Dutch feeder 'Dongedyk' actually turned over in the Mediterranean, fortunately in such shallow water that nobody was killed as she fell on her side. The inquiry into the 'MSC Napoli' loss found ridiculous disparities when it weighed recovered containers against their manifested weights. It was believed these discrepancies probably contributed to the ship's initial structural failure.
If the ports and carriers can be so insistent about the need for correct weights in containers, you would think that shippers' organisations would be quick to join the campaign, would you not? They could be quite influential in educating their members about the dire potential consequences of misdeclarations. But it doesn't seem to be an issue that they believe falls within their terms of reference. That's a pity.
I also have come to dislike shippers and charterers because so often they seem to think that they have no responsibility for ship safety whatsoever, and that their viewpoint must always predominate over the loading or discharging of the ship. Might is right, as they bully shipmasters to load cargo according to their cargo plan, at speeds which might prejudice the ship's structure, and threaten those who protest with "blacking", or demand that the owners or managers replace the recalcitrant shipmaster.
Some 44 seafarers have died in South-East Asian waters in the last year after cargoes of nickel ore liquefied on passage. Who knew of the water content of that cargo before it was loaded? The masters who died in the four ships evidently did not.
I would respect shippers a darned sight more if they
behaved more responsibly over issues of ship safety. The Australian Maritime College took the trouble to devise an excellent short course for bulk terminal loading staff, to appraise them of the issues of ship safety and structural stress. Such courses make a difference, but how many shippers around the world take the trouble to educate their loaders? And how many see the relationship between carrier and shipper as one of give and take?
"You give and I take" – is how shippers all too frequently view life.
Michael Grey MBE