Referring to the recent ruling of the Council of State, published on 19 July, regarding the petition against of the Port System Authority of the Western Ligurian Sea advanced by the shipping company Grandi Navi Veloci in order to to obtain the authorization for the performance, in self-production, of commercial vehicle lashing and unlashing operations on its ships, the USB Ports trade union organization has denounced that "on the issue of self-handling in ports, playing, for some time now, a fierce tug-of-war between companies shipowners and port companies and cooperatives' and - noted THE UNION - "The comment on the recent rulings of the Council of State, by GNV's lawyer, is only one of the pieces of this war that is currently being played out more in the courtrooms and on the docks. Because, it is It is good to reiterate this in the introduction, avoiding hypocritical and instrumental issues, dozens of reports of cases of "unauthorized" self-production in various Italian ports".

"The attempts by the shipping companies, in the more or less conscious silence of the various port subjects, to use seafarers for lashing operations and delashing - highlighted USB Porti - are now almost daily. Salerno is certainly the most emblematic with the Intempo dockers, who have carried on the battle against self-production, "move away" and left without shifts, it seems, at the behest of the owner himself. But also Palermo, Livorno, Trieste and so on. While the regulatory framework at the moment does not seem to have changed, despite the statements by the GNV lawyer, on the other hand it is clear that it is It's just a matter of time. Without real opposition before all on the part of port workers, the risk that in the end self-production, or rather total and definitive liberalisation of the port labour system, risks arrive very early."

"All the subjects, so-called stakeholders - Specified USB Ports - They are playing their own game under the radar and without the start of a strong union mobilization It is not difficult to think that, sooner or later, we will reach a compromise agreement, perhaps even through regulatory changes of the government, leaving the workers with the match in their hands. A government, in this case in the guise of the Ministry of Transport, which has not received the trade unions for months and denies any comparison. On the other hand, Italy is one of the few European countries that have fully and enthusiastically accepted the Community directives on "market opening". A system that on the one hand: "does not tolerate the existence of dominant positions or exclusive rights for transactions but on the other hand it has delivered into the hands of 6/7 shipping companies almost all the traffic to world's level".

"We are convinced - concluded the union organization - that we must, in the immediate future, continue in the timely denunciation of any attempt at unauthorized self-production as it is has been made, for example in Salerno with a complaint directly to the Public Prosecutor's Office. It will then be necessary to put pressure on the PSA, so that any request for authorization actually meets the requirements; these, at the moment, remain the same as always, namely the absence, within the individual port, port companies or cooperatives art 17 paragraph 2 or paragraph 5 that can carry out port operations and the strict compliance with Law 585 in Article 8, i.e. that the shipping companies use personnel exclusively assigned to port operations. But, more generally, we need a awareness on the part of port workers with respect to the enormous risks that will materialize in the coming months and years. We are the ones who must return to being protagonists".