WELLINGTON: New Zealand’s Port of Auckland is taking a cautious approach to introducing automation after the issue sparked industrial actions at the ports of its northern neighbor, Australia.
Ports of Auckland CEO Tony Gibson said his terminal would introduce automated straddle carriers in 2019, but only between the container stack and the trucks. He said manual straddles still proved to be more productive at the quayside. “Automation is more complex in this area [ship to shore],” said Gibson. “While it has been done at two other ports [Brisbane and Sydney], it delivers lower productivity than Ports of Auckland currently achieves. Manual operation in this area is the best option for our customers.”
Auckland is also keen to avoid the bad blood between unions, labor and management that came with the introduction of automation in Australia. Management is sitting down with the unions and has agreed to a three-year term before flipping the switch to avoid compulsory redundancies or industrial disputes. “We shouldn’t fear automation,” Joe Fleetwood, secretary of Maritime Union New Zealand, said. “This will be a first for New Zealand ports, but it is based on what’s happening all around the world. We’ve had containerization, this is just another step in the evolution of the port industry. We are working with the company to negotiate the best outcome. Auckland is the first port and it’s important we are on top of it.”
Fleetwood said the agreed timeline is three years before the automation is rolled out, so workers retiring from the industry would mitigate any job losses. He called on members to put back retirement until the straddles are introduced. The union, he said, would be claiming any positions created out of the introduction of the new straddles.
Matt Ball, head of communications for Ports of Auckland, said the company had set the introduction of the auto straddles for 2019, so they are replacing people leaving the industry rather than creating redundancies. Retraining workers for other positions has also been announced. Ball said the company decided on the straddles because other automation was much more expensive for smaller ports. “We’ve building on what we’ve got rather than putting in a whole new system,” he said.
In a statement on Aug. 8, Gibson described the automated straddles as “a game changer.” “We need more container terminal capacity, but we can’t expand through reclamation, so we have to go up,” he said. The new automated straddle carriers can stack containers one higher than the existing manual straddles — two up on the original Kalmar AutoStrads in place in Australia.
“With changes to the terminal layout and completion of our current reclamation project, the new straddles will increase capacity by nearly 80%,” Gibson said. “This stage of automation will increase our terminal capacity from just over 900,000 TEU a year to 1.6 to 1.7 million TEU annually,” he said. “That is enough to support an Auckland population of around 2.7 million. In other words, this technology gives us an additional 30 to 40 years of capacity.”
