The man who scuttled the plan to train “mercenaries” in Dubai for Australian docks 18 months ago turns out to be a mild-looking economist in glasses who has never been to sea or worked on the docks.
But David Cockcroft’s power comes from his role as the head of the giant international maritime union which covers five million workers in 500 affiliates around the world.
That’s raw global power, and Mr Cockcroft, who is in Sydney, is unapologetic about exercising it.
“Look at the global power of capital,” he says. “It is very one-sided, actually. The power that companies have today to shift resources around from one country to another and to play workers off against each other is overwhelming.”
At 46, he has been general secretary at the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), based in London, for six years.
In December 1997, it was Mr Cockcroft who, with local maritime leader John Coombs, visited the London embassy of the United Arab Emirates to send a message to Dubai about how powerful the ITF can be when it comes to trade.
In less than 24 hours, Dubai authorities had pulled the plug on the training of alternative, non-union stevedores for the Australian waterfront.
That move forced the training back home, to Webb Dock in Melbourne, and was one of the more sensational episodes of the docks dispute between Patrick stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia.
Mr Cockcroft, who is here to promote a floating exhibition on the ITF’s campaign against substandard ships, known as “ships of shame”, rates the Patrick dispute as crucial to global shipping.
From the start, he said, the Australian exercise was always going to be crucial for unions and shipowners.
“Port employers have been talking to each other more and more over the years ... and there is no doubt at all that everyone on both sides was looking at the Australian situation to see what happened,” he said.
“To a certain extent it drew a line in the sand. I wouldn’t say that we have no problems ... but we have detected a much greater willingness on the part of companies and governments to talk to the unions than before the Patrick dispute.”
He said the ITF had pursued a harassment campaign during the drawn-out dispute.
“There was never any serious prospect that we could black every ship that came out of Patrick, and that was never on the cards,” he said. “But what we could do was harass and harass in such a way as to seriously disrupt the operation.”
The ITF exhibition is on a former cargo ship, the Global Mariner, which the international union bought a couple of years ago and which is making a circumnavigation of the world to draw attention to the way many seafarers now live and work under appalling conditions. The ship is tied up near the Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour and is open to the public, free of charge, from 9‚am to 5‚pm each day until Wednesday.
Patrick Stevedores has agitated the maritime union by training its managers to drive forklifts - one of the crucial cogs in the waterfront chain.
Workers at Darling Harbour staged a sit-down strike for several hours last Thursday after managers arrived at the dock for training. But the company says it will continue the program at terminals around the country.
The company wrote to the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) last week saying the training would help managers understand the work of stevedores and would have no effect on the employment of union members.
A spokeswoman for Patrick said last night: “It’s very straightforward. It is the company trying to give managers a greater understanding of the tasks on the waterfront.”
She denied the purpose was to train managers to work during a dispute.
“It’s normal practice in any major Australian industry,” the spokeswoman said. “We don’t see any reason for any industrial action ... and we would be puzzled and bewildered by any.”
The assistant secretary of the Sydney branch of the MUA, Mr Barry Robson, said the union was worried the managers would be used to break any future industrial dispute. He said it had been a strange action by the company.
Meanwhile, the P&O terminal at Port Botany is operating normally after workers there walked off a shift on Friday afternoon over problems in bedding down a new enterprise agreement.
The port was disrupted for about four hours before the midnight shift arrived.
