How Container Shipping is impacting Dublin's Dockers, Ireland 1970
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- Опубликовано: 10 янв 2024
- Dublin dock workers jobs are under pressure from container shipping.
Dublin the country’s largest port, handled five and a half million tonnes of cargo and about six thousand ships in 1969.
This film is about the deep sea dockers. Tough men with a hard history. Men who now face an overwhelming challenge to their livelihood and who at this critical time are naturally suspicious.
The dockers face the challenge of the rapid onslaught of new technology and ways of working which have revolutionised the transport industry.
The challenge of mechanisation and rationalisation which will soon make the traditional dockers as obsolete as coachmen or lamplighters.
The dockers fear for the future and at first were reluctant to participate in this report. In the end, they agreed that the publicity for their plight might work in their favour.
Dockers talk about the work they do, employment practices, and the challenges they face as a result of the introduction of container shipping.
These containers are large steel boxes of standard sizes of eight feet square and ten, twenty, thirty or even forty feet long. They can be used over and over again and are easily transferred from ships to lorries. They can contain any type of cargo.
They are standardised and easy to handle.
They are transported on specially designed container ships which allow for easy stacking.
Traditionally, ships are loaded and unloaded by men. However, container ships do not need nearly as many men as traditional vessels. Here lies the challenge for dockers hoping to hold on to their jobs.
Waterford Port has the ultimate in container handling where the container terminal is owned by the Bell Shipping Group. The system involves a complete integration of land and sea transportation in one operation which is all controlled by the Bell Group. The fully automated installation at Waterford means that one man can do the job of many as he operates the enormous gantry crane loading and unloading containers. Apart from office staff, only eight men are needed to operate the entire Waterford terminal.
There is next to no manual labour.
Managing Director of Bell Shipping George Hollwey anticipates that if the same system was introduced in Dublin, the labour force would be reduced to seven units of twelve men. The current labour force is close to two thousand. He says the prospect of potential redundancies is “something quite terrifying”.
132 men to replace 2,000.
Around a thousand men are employed as deep sea dockers and the rest are cross channel. The deep sea dockers are still employed on a casual basis whereby each day they must attend a daily ceremony called the read where the employer selects whatever workers they need for the work that is available.
The work is entirely casual. No guarantees, no basic wage.
The dockers are sensitive about these reads and would not permit filming at the event.
One of the men who has been working the docks since 1917 says the work was very hard. If you did not work, then you would not get work the following morning. Another says that if the stevedore did not know you, then you would not get a job. Despite the conditions, these men returned each day to be selected or rejected.
I think it’s diabolical that we should have to stand there in this present day and age, and stand in front of any man and be picked out like sheep.
This episode of ‘Report’ titled ‘Bye Bye The Button Men’ was broadcast on 19 November 1970. The reporter is Patrick Gallagher and the programme was produced by John Williams. 
Развлечения
Another ‘problem’ for dockers was that as containers were in effect ‘sealed units’, they couldn’t ‘help themselves’ to goods which they previously loaded or unloaded by hand!
You take a little for your pot back home, nothing wrong, tis as old as the hills.
Recent Luddites.
@@neilhatton6018”Nothing wrong” with stealing?! Good man Neil
@@Monaleenian I didn't say stealing. If you want to know more about stealing goto the very top, the very very top, not the little man or woman. You miss the target. Oneday you might get there. Do some research. How do you propose the Royal family got their wealth? It fell out of the sky? God gave it them? Ah no! I know what it was.. the pot at the end of the rainbow! I stand corrected. Now.. Where's a rainbow when you need one.
@@neilhatton6018 The fact that someone richer than you might have stolen, does not justify your own stealing.
Lovely old fashioned Dublin accents, it's becoming increasingly rare to hear it.
That it to true and is happening all over the world, a great shame to lose all those great accents that made you stop, listen very carefully and bend your ear to get to understand for a little while, they you understand and were much richer for the experience
It depends where you go. I hear it often enough. Only the last time in town, I heard it.
It’s nice but be nicer to hear our own language rather than English all the time.
@finola come into the liberties of a Saturday morning and you'll hear plenty of it. Pop into the lark Inn. One of the last decent pubs left.
Eh no it isn't. You'll hear it all over Dublin.
I used to be a Stevedore
We would load or unload packages of frozen Fish (22-30KG)mostly.
Also Potatoes(65Kg), Butter(10KG), Cocoa(75Kg), and Meat(35 -110Kg).
We would get a bonus, when loading/unloading 18,000 Fish packages with a 10 man crew!
And sometimes, starting at 7 AM we hit that mark at 12AM and then every extra 1000 packages would give us an extra hour of wages.
Working in minus 10C, U need a real crew, rotten apples were picked out in an instant, also because U could not rely on them regarding safety!
I remember sailing out of Liverpool in the 1970s and if there was a cargo of whiskey from Glasgow to Liverpool, You could guarantee it would be accidentily broken open and all the dockers would be legless before 1000 in the morning.
Quite right. Experienced the same in 1970 with danish cargo ship ‘Sargodha’. We traded 20 cigarettes to a bottle of Cutty Sark or Ballantine whisky fresh nicked from the cargo.
The good days then. I’m on there now and that doesn’t happen unfortunately.
A lot Of Liverpool Are Irish , If it Wasn’t Nailed In Dublin It Would Nailed 8 Hours Later In Liverpool, Hence The Saying Pay on The Nail, They Are Old Metal Bollards That Ships Were Tied To In Bootle Port Liverpool, The Money Was Counted Out On Top Of The Nail , Bought and Sold.
The impact of these dockers losing their livelihoods resulted in a heroin/crime epidemic in Dublin City Centre in the 80s which is still with us today.
I was working in the docks as a contractor around 2004 and there were plenty of these fine men still employed picking up rubbish and sweeping yards.The port company had an education centre for upskilling these guys and some of them took up the opportunity.That's 20 years ago so not sure what is happening now.
0:46 how Dublin has changed! That rusty bridge is still standing on Sheriff St. still carrying traffic over the Royal Canal. I cross it several times daily.
I’m sitting in my modern apartment watching this video just yards from where this scene was shot. The men are standing beside the canal which now has cycle lane, footpath and grass areas for people to walk their dogs or sit & relax during the summer.
Spencer Dock apartments were completed in 2007 as the largest apartment building(s) in Ireland (and N Europe I think).
The whole area is barely recognisable. The Docks and government housing estates gave way to gentrification. The IFSC flourished followed by residential and office buildings along the North Quays from George’s Dock/ Bachelor’s Walk all the way to The Point/ Tomas Clarke bridge.
Most residents were moved out to the western suburbs of Dublin but there’s still a good population of old school working class Dubs living in the area around Sheriff St & Seville Place. I chat to people in the local Pubs and there are a few older men still around who used to work on the docks before containerisation of the port. Even though the economy and quality of life have massively improved over recent decades, they speak with nostalgia about the good old days of “the badge men”.
Edit: “button men” not badge men.
Used to live down that way myself til 2005, there at the Ringsend rowing club by the East link. It's certainly changed a lot since then.
Containerisation destroyed traditional docks all over the US and Europe. The cost savings and need for deep water ports meant it was inevitable. There is a very good book about containerisation called "The Box". Before containers the vast majority of the time and monetary cost to ship a consignment across the Atlantic was spent in the docks - not the voyage itself.
Containers are not the problem. Government economic planning was the problem in every country in the west. US ports are too small and too concentrated. Those container systems should have allowed the ports to expand and for distribution centres to have formed all over America. Dublin port is too small and is one of the reasons for the high costs. Governments have been given too much leeway without enough political pressure from the unions and corporations.
Men trying to make a living...❤❤❤ feed their families...
You've got to love our way of describing the world back in our ignorant days. Dublin people talking back then is something to behold. They were tough days the 60s, unemployment was rife. The boat to England was the only option. Give a taught for other's when faced with the same problems having to come here. We're all human trying to survive best we can. ✌️☘️
I grew up In Waterford. Remember vividly the Bell lines yard & the crane on the Ferrybank side of the Suir. Moved further downriver now.
Ye the cranes blew down in a storm so they moved
I used to go to Dublin on the Browning,a Lamport& Holt vessel in the early 80s, good times in Dublin,funny how the dockers with no hard hats ,or safety gear on. the same when i first went to sea, imagine the health and safety in this day and age.
Many years ago I worked in a wages office for a large national company. Originally there were 25 people working out the weekly wages. After installation of a computer 20 of them were made redundant.
In the early 1980s I saw the same in a factory with the decline employment for iron workers as NC lathes and NC bed oxycutters were introduced; in the warehouse, with automatic stock management; the mailroom, with the number of emails increasing; drawing office i.e. blueprints and technical manuals, now all stored in electronic format; electronic project management; and the files office.
There was no longer any need for the lower level learning positions and over 10 years staff was cut by 50%.
The classic was a biennial report. The print run was halved every two years for 10 years. The last year the print run was 20, that was considered the minimum required as interested parties could access it online.
A pallet load of 14 year old biennial reports was discovered in the basement and the office junior had the task of ripping off the covers and sending them to the reycling centre.
Yep. Jobs slowly disappear as newer jobs appear. The IT consultant appeared as the wages clerk/bookkeeping jobs ebbed away. Where is the TV repair guy anymore?
Most modern wage processing is a disaster.
Docker working since 1917 proper grafters.
Proper grifters
Yeah bet that fella had some stories to tell.
What a big change in the past 50 years, cranes would unload in a few hours what those dockers a week to do 50 years ago, It is understanable that those dockers were afraid of change as they would lose their jobs, it was well known that the dockers in Old London town accidentally dripped/ damaged goods they were unloaded to they could take some items home or sell outside their work place. Years ago you would have seen hundreds of people go to work in one place of work. Now most work are done by machinery even the manufacturing of food, no longer made by human hands any longer of the same quality, years a man/woman/child made gave an extra special feeling of best quality to items they made even if it was a loaf of bread, Maybe it is because I am very old yet I feel and work like a person of 30 years of age.
This was a problem dockers and families never went hungry
The Pool of London and it associated docks has long gone. The London Container Port is 42 km to the east near Tilbury Fort.
Most old ports faced the same, with the container ports being built kms from the original ports as they need deep water and modern transport access.
The reason they got concerned was because they knew the Irish government would sell them out and that is what happened. The state of Irish docks today is that they are very expensive to process and no where near as fast as many claim. The docking system in Dublin is a fraction of its firmer size and simply has no overhead capacity to deal with a crisis.
Amazing how the new system was far more efficient.
Fascinating
Very interesting video. Liverpool's docks were the same. 80,000 people employed in and around the docks at their height. Now it's about 850 dockers, with maybe 1,000 more jobs at most servicing the port. The city never recovered. At the same time, the practice of day labour was a major source of inter-worker competition that fuelled Catholic-Protestant sectarian resentment and prevented the dockers becoming properly unionised. Liverpool might be known as a solidly Labour city now, but for a long time (right up until the 1950/60s) the Tories dominated by tapping into this sectarianism to win the Protestant vote. It was only when sectarianism declined that Liverpool workers rallied around the Labour movement to try and protect what was left.
Industry was a mess in the uk. It was run into the ground post WW2 by government economic planning. Same happened to mining, steel, auto and general manufacturing.
@@Art-is-craft indeed. We're all " consumers" now. As long, that is, there is a cheap and plentiful supply of oil. Cant imagine what's it going to be like like without it.
Times change.Hope all your kids and grand kids had it better.
no they didn't, politicians let heroin destroy the inner city
Very true@@shutup2751
The one aspect of AI technology I love is seeing the smug, comfortably off classes suddenly nervous about technology costing them their “careers”. It was all completely rational and acceptable when it was stevedores, checkout staff and factory workers. But now that people who thought they were indispensable can see that they might not be, they’re very concerned all of a sudden.
Well said
So how do 2 wrongs make a good ? Its not just going to affect the comfortably off, indeed the most vulnerable will suffer the most, again.
I’m alright Jack is as old as time, people are selfish and only care about themselves.
@@errisgloshfan Everyone is concerned about having enough to survive comfortably. But not everyone only cares about themselves and we shouldn’t normalise it. In my opinion.
Advanced AI is coming off it's rails. Keep watching!
"machine with the strength of a hundred men... can't feed and clothe my children... can't greet a sailor comin in... or know of desperation"
As an owner driver I once hauled Bell containers out of Avonmouth until they went bust.
Docker have always been trouble, management were glad to get rid, automation will be next, too many humans
Automation just shrank the system to the point that it now has no overhead capacity. You might think it was all market based progress but it was all government planned. Guess what the outcome was increased taxation.
Also, the computer and the automated crane tend not to steal 15 per cent of the cargo crossing the docks.
It was said that in Liverpool docks 30% of all the whiskey shipped disappeared in transit. I know in the 1960s my father in law had to make a trip there and came back with his tea flask full of best scotch. They were surprised he had such a small container and told him to bring a bigger one next time.
Those figures are nonsense.
Mickey Pearce at the back
Theres something very odd/creepy/offputting about that geezers limp flacid hand at @ 6:24
Montgomery Burns?
@@thelastdetail1😂 oh man, totally 😂😂
Were there no combs or brushes in the cargo they offloaded?
Who is that man at the end?
5.06 beware of a werewolf.
2024 people live in the same containers and call them home if there lucky
The mentality of these fellas is incredible! I understand they are concerned about their future but for them demanding to stop Dublin from taking part in the global container revolution is unbelieveble!
only natural when living in a system that will be so punishing to those without work
You see it the world over. German farmers are moaning about getting their diesel welfare cut when the whole world needs to be giving up fossil fuels as temperatures shoot up.
Their mentality was that they would be doing more work with less men. All that automation was government regulated and has decreased Irelands docking capacity. The relative cost in those years has increased.
For the first time ever thieves was reduced and no need for the cage.
Yes. Nobody like change. USA has a huge industry like this along its Pacific Ocean coast. Plenty of good people with good jobs that did not prepare for change. Stay safe.
Current capacity cannot handle the volume and has zero ability to expand. Not something to boast about really same for Ireland.
01:10 I was expecting a couple of lurchers and a caravan as well
I was thinking exactly the same thing 😅
It is lesson to people for why they should stay in school if possible. Manual work can always be caught up by technology.
Even a computer 😂
Essentially the complaint is that they can’t drag their feet unloading and steal goods.
Nope. Their complaint is that they have no input and probably feel that they are about to be forced out.
All I see is these lads sitting on pallets in groups and 4 lads standing watching one working throughout the whole video haha
The oul headscarfs were all the go back in the early sixtys,
Scary to think the MD was a werewolf back then! Mad times.
Fascinating. But probably they work much harder than many Government Staff pushing paper.
The irony is that Dublin docks was all part of government planning.
Tough Men with a Hard History.
Lot of them wouldn’t work to keep themselves warm
They would be begging for this if it was the overriding issue now.
5:02 Wolverine
Decade after decade we move more and more towards a reality where there'll be a working elite and the vast majority will be living from the state.
Even a software developer like me has the job at risk in the next 10/15 years with the upcoming of the AI.
re skill . . .
Use the technology to your advantage. The docks and government used the technology to shrink the size of the capacity and now have no room to grow. The problem is not the technology but organisations that lack imagination.
Unemployment is pretty low across most of the developed world at the moment. 3.7% in the US at the moment. Seems fairly low. What's your take on that?
I didn’t fully understand, but did the guy in the beginning just say: yes but you have to hire 19men? As in if there is only work for 3 (which there is in the next shot) still 19 need to be employed? 😂
That is not what he is saying. He knows full well that they still need teams to work. Less men means more work loads. Ireland has always had an under developed docking system. Automation just shrank the system further.
The younger man is Paddy Daly.
I'm just looking from a health and safety perspective. It seems quite hazardous. And of course old mutton chops there, could be something out of a Dicken's novel.
That was my first thought also. No safety protocols. Scary!
Mutton chops, is no more hora
@@fiddlejohn9305ah would ya stop
@@fiddlejohn9305
All that health and safety over regulation has created an expensive and not fit for purpose industry. Dublin docks have no overhead capacity and all it will take is one crisis.
The sad reality is that labour is only ever employed when it's necessary. Any enterprise that can avoid labour will avoid it because employees eat profits, and the working person will always come out the worse in this situation. These men were part of the labour martyr generation who made way for what we have now. Back then there weren't many emploment alternatives for these men and I'd bet a lot of the younger ones left the country as economic migrants.
I was born the year before this film was broadcast. I can imagine that in those economic and social circumstances the older man could have looked at the baby I was and ask, "What kind of future is there for this poor little fella?". He may well have been alive when I left school in 1986 that there still weren't many opportunities for me. There were more for me than there were for him, for sure, but not enough to prevent the diaspora. The 20th century in Ireland was a long, slow, halting, incremental, hesitant and anxious crawl forward.
I'd hazzard a guess that the old guy is probably about 60 years old, give or take. That's what a life of hard labour does to a man. So at 54 I'm in the region of 6 years younger than him and only now does the difference between us seem so stark. I's hard to spot the increments as they're happening but things have always been better for me than for him. Always better for me than for any younger me. The poor little fella's grand.
They spent more time in the early house pubs along the quays than actually working
If you looked crooked on them they threaten strike
Working in dock is dangerous.
It was the loss of a skill also born and bred locals
Its like the tail wagging the dog
Containerisation was inevitable. The social consequences were immense for Dublin 1. Education standards were generally poor this coupled with unemployment and the availability of heroin in the 80’s led to an absolute car crash. The grandchildren and great grandchildren of these men make up some of the recent unemployable rioters causing mayhem in Dublin City centre.
Your a nasty person
Ah would you geway. First of all that was young lads running amok, breaking into JD sports to steal runners and into mcdonalds to use the milkshake machine. It is only called a riot because the culchie gards couldnt deal with the young lads the way any teacher from Brunswick Street or O Connells would have.
Second Im the grandson of a docker and Im not robbing shops. My granda worked on the docjs, my Da the warehouse, and I worked in the office. Ive mates that work customs even now and that takes degrees.
None of us are thieves.
The real problem was that the containerisation was an excuse for government to over regulate and it created a smaller industry.
Progress…..
Glad Waterford came out of it so well anyway!
As Tyson fury says what a bunch of dossers
They work manual workers in a dock that has since been destroyed. Once globalisation collapses those docks will be a mess.
Should we have left it that men would have to go down into the hold of ships to scoop out tea and wheat
Yes.
Nobody likes it but u wont change it ! Change £ thats the way the World goes around and round
Fine tradition of turning away the famine relief. Greed before your countrymen.
It was worse than a Fagins den of thieves
8:34 how long?
Does any of ye lads an lasies get idea 💡 what Ireland was trou out all world, does anyone see 👀 building trou Dublin, digging and ollddd freaking blocks of old building?
Yeah all I walked yust this day in Dublin is build(read founded)in 1800 s, yeah right, all that loads of building structures¿‽¿?¡¡!!! Yeah Irish people, not British, tartari , now was druidIrish established suchSuperKingdom as Milenium of Christ our lord,eather they risen after Noa time deam don't know! It's up to ye Irish,not my history! Off us all!
Ah, the auld Carter's were turning into monkeys , what with all the Bananas and fruit they were atin..Sure , they started healthy eatin habits , everyone knows..A ripe yellow banana, and PT of plain..with a sweet Afton afterwards...
The Dubliners always had there hands in there pockets.They think they can stand around just getting attendance allowance. The old saying was you never see a Jackyn work or a Cork man skint.
They were all workers and did manual jobs. Let me guess you think they should be running around all the time.
Ask carl lennon stallin bush Kennedy Republicans democrats money wealth helps
everyone l o l 😅 😂 great people bring the sheep in
1917 and that 1970,53 years wow He wud have never heard of woke.
Ludditism at it's finest
You never heard of the "dark satanic mills"
Seems like progress just leaves bodies in its wake when its all about the bottom line..
Fucking planet is circling the drain because its profitable, people pushing for green energy are deemed "crazies" in many sectors,all because the old guard make money from the alternative.
Yes everything was fine then
That’s When Men Were Men and Turkeys Chewed Tobacco,
Not a High Vis Jacket 🦺 To Be Seen,