As part of completing its 25th year of existence, workers in the USA Pool in Kochi Port have drawn up elaborate plans to celebrate the event on Saturday.
Started on February 21, 1983, with a pool of 333 workers, it now has only a strength of 117 workers and 11 administrative staff. Initially, it was a stevedores' pool though workers employed by shipping agencies also worked in the Pool.
With the gradual decrease of jobs performed by stevedores, consequent to adoption of new methods of cargo handling, the interests of stevedores in running the pool waned.
Currently, the pool is administered by shipping agencies. Though the name of the pool did not change, the acronym USA now stands for United Steamer Agents.
It was United Stevedores Association when the Pool began, a statement issued here said.
Significantly, the structure of jobs also changed. Most operations performed are now controlled or performed ashore. When the labour intensive content of onboard jobs changed there is hardly any role left for supervisory category of workers, who's number in the pool now marginally exceed single digit.
Most prominent in the Pool are the GPM (General Purpose Mazdoors) whose role in ships increased.
Now, the only job performed manually in modern shipping is securing of containers on board the ships, so that the containers do not get displaced while the ship roll, pitch, heave, yaw, sway, and surge during voyage.
The GPM's do the work of securing of containers on board the ship by means of a process known as lashing, which rely on a variety of systems consisting of stacking cones, twist locks, lashing bars, bridge fittings and turnbuckles (bottle screws). Good lashing resists movements of ship and attempts to keep containers onboard.
In this age of automation where there exists even driverless cranes for movement and stacking of containers at modern yards, lashing continue to be in the realm of manual job notwithstanding that it is risky and prone to accident, the statement said.
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