Linesmen, EU-wide agreement on safety

Genova - A minimum common safety standard to be applied at all European ports. A normative tool to safeguard the job’s integrity, and one that, while acknowledging the business-side of the equation for a port’s success, doesn’t ignore best safety practices.

This is the proposal that came out yesterday at the international congress of linesmen, held in Genoa, and jointly organized by the Italian sector associations (Angopi), the EU-level association (EBA), as well as the international association (IBLA, grouping members from countries ranging from Iran to the United States), a trio headed entirely by Italians, whose presidents are respectively Cesare Guidi, Alessandro Serra and Marco Mandirola, the latter two hailing both from Genoa.

The proposal aimed at safety is rooted in new EU Regulation (2017/352) on port services, which sets out in Article 14 the requirement that boatmen and linesmen provide employees with essential knowledge of the profession, in particular regarding health and safety: “The culmination of legislation began 15 years ago with the De Palacio directives,” explained Serra; but which has seen a complete reversal in scope: from suspicions that it constituted a sort of cartel, with attending requests for the profession to be completely unregulated, to the recognition of it serving a public use, connected with the safe transit of ships in port. Bolstered by analysis from consultancy firm PriceWaterCoopers showing that cost of mooring is practically the last item a shipowner takes into account when determining the commercial appeal of a port, and which shows that the organizational model in Europe must maintain its diversity stemming from its port’s structural and geographic differences, the 2,500-strong EU-based linesmen are currently promoting the need to standardize basic training requirements across the EU.

The goal, explained Serra, is a professional certification, as already is the case for boatmen, through the establishment of the International Standard for Maritime Mooring Organizations (ISMO). The guidelines for this standardization were issued last year by the International Maritime Organization (IMO, the UN’s maritime division), but achieving the goal cannot be taken for granted; in each EU country linesmen operate differently.

In Italy, explained Serra, hands-on training is accompanied by the need to obtain seafarers’ certificates; the situation is different for instance in the Netherlands, where no certificates are required, but a 4-year training period plus a final examination are necessary to enter the profession. The mechanism used in the current standardization-drive is the one known as social dialogue, the EU’s social policy component that enshrines the promotion of dialogue between management and labour.

However, as pointed out Giuliano Galluccio, head of Uiltrasporti union and member of ETF (European trade union), the fact that such organizational differences exist in the sector, throughout the EU (from rules for forming Co-ops to VAT), may make having linesmen sitting at the negotiation table not a foregone conclusion.