Rotterdam Ship Handling Stops for Nearly Eight Hours on 4 September
A 24-hour national rail strike five days later threatens the same gateway's hinterland connections
Dutch port workers will halt vessel handling at the Port of Rotterdam for seven hours and 45 minutes on 4 September, and a separate 24-hour rail strike five days later threatens the same gateway's hinterland connections.
The port stoppage will run from 11:15 to 19:00 and will also involve workers in Amsterdam and Zeeland. No vessels will be handled during the strike, which covers loading and unloading, cargo securing, towage and cargo inspections. Workers have been instructed to leave operations in a safe condition before the stoppage begins and to resume work after 19:00, so the practical effect at a berth is a suspended operation rather than an abandoned one.
The disruption is expected to run wider than the official window. The German intermodal operator Contargo expects activity at Rotterdam terminals to be severely restricted or completely suspended from about 10:30 to 20:00. It anticipates no truck handling, no internal terminal transport and no loading or unloading of shuttle trains during that period, with train positioning and collection also restricted and some scheduled rail round trips liable to be cancelled.
That matters more than the length of the stoppage suggests, because a terminal that stops for eight hours does not restart at its normal rate. Boxes that were due to move onto trains during the window have to be found and reordered afterwards, and the shuttle services that connect Rotterdam to inland terminals in Germany and Belgium run to fixed paths that cannot simply be shifted by half a day.
A second disruption is scheduled for 9 September, when Dutch rail workers are due to stage a nationwide 24-hour strike. Employees of the Dutch rail infrastructure manager ProRail and of DB Cargo's Dutch operation are among those set to take part, raising the prospect of cancellations and delays to rail freight moving to and from the Netherlands. Services using the Betuweroute freight corridor and connections towards Germany could be particularly affected.
The union CNV has given a provisional strike window for DB Cargo Nederland of 04:00 on 9 September to 04:00 on 10 September, although the start and finish times are not yet final. Taken together, the two actions remove a working day of quayside capacity and a working day of rail capacity from the largest port in Europe inside a single week.
