The cargo volume here is three times the level it was two years ago,
before the captain, Fu Cheng Qiu, was put in charge by his employer,
Cosco, a global shipping giant owned by the Chinese government.
In a 2010 deal that put 500 million euros ($647 million) into the
coffers of Greece’s cash-starved government, Cosco leased half of the
port of Piraeus and quickly converted a business that had languished as a
Greek state-run enterprise into a hotbed of productivity.
The other half of the port is still run by Greece. And the fact that its
business lags behind Cosco’s is emblematic of the entrenched labor
rules and relatively high wages — for those lucky enough to still have
jobs — that have stifled the country’s economic growth.
“Everyone here knows that you must be hard-working,” said Captain Fu,
under whose watch the Chinese-run side of the port has lured new
clients, high-volume traffic and bigger ships.
In many ways, the top-to-bottom overhaul that Cosco is imposing on
Piraeus is what Greece as a whole must aspire to if it is ever to
restore competitiveness to its recession-sapped economy, make a dent in
its 24 percent unemployment rate and avoid being dependent on its
European neighbors for years to come.
As the Greek government contemplates shedding state-owned assets to help
pay down staggering debts, it might be tempting to consider leasing or
even selling the rest of the port to China. But if the Cosco example is
representative, the trade-offs — mainly a sharp reduction in labor costs
and job protection rules — might be ones many Greeks would be loath to
accept.
“Unionized labor will push back to keep the protection it has enjoyed,”
said Vassilis Antoniades, the chief executive of Boston Consulting Group
in Greece. But the Cosco investment, he said, “shows that under private
management, Greek companies can be globally competitive.”
Captain Fu, for his part, says Greece has much to learn from companies like his.
“The Chinese want to make money with work,” he said. In his view, too
many Europeans have pursued a comfortable, protected existence since the
end of World War II.
“They wanted a good life, more holidays and less work,” he said. “And
they spent money before they had it. Now they have many debts.”
Greece’s troika of foreign lenders — the International Monetary Fund,
the European Central Bank and the European Commission — has made similar
arguments. Among other things, they are urging Prime Minister Antonis
Samaras to end blanket protections for workers and unions and to require
Greece itself to operate more like a productive modern business.
Besides the $647 million that put half of the port of Piraeus into
Chinese hands, the Greek government is receiving more income from taxes
as a result of the port’s pickup in business.
Other than a handful of Chinese managers, moreover, Cosco’s operation is
providing around 1,000 jobs to Greek workers — compared with the 800 or
so who work the dock that is still under Greek management.
On Cosco’s portion of the port, cargo traffic has more than doubled over
the last year, to 1.05 million containers. And while profit margins are
still razor thin — $6.47 million last year on sales of $94.2 million —
that is mainly because the Chinese company is putting a lot of its money
back into the port.
Cosco is spending more than $388 million to modernize its dock to handle
up to 3.7 million containers in the next year, which would make it one
of the world’s 10 largest ports. Beyond that, workers are also laying
the foundations for a second Cosco pier.
The Greek-run side of the port, which endured a series of debilitating
worker strikes in the three years before Cosco came to town, has been
forced by the Chinese competition to seek its own path to modernization.
Still, only about a third of its business consists of cargo handling;
the rest is made up of more lucrative passenger traffic.
For years, the container terminal was a profitable operation. But
Harilaos N. Psaraftis, a professor of maritime transport at the School
of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering in Athens, said it was
inefficient “because worker relations were very cumbersome.”
The salaries of some workers reached $181,000 a year with overtime;
Cosco is typically paying less than $23,300. On the Greek side of the
port, union rules required that nine people work a gantry crane; Cosco
uses a crew of four.
“It was just crazy,” recalled Mr. Psaraftis, who was the chief executive
of the port from 1996 to 2002. “I told them, ‘If you keep this up, this
thing will be privatized.’ But they didn’t listen.”
Since Cosco arrived, “competition has forced us to take initiatives to
find better ways of working,” said Stavros Hatzakos, the general
director of Piraeus Port Authority, which runs the Greek operation.
“Employees think twice about strikes and labor action now,” he said. And
the ones still on the job have taken salary reductions as part of the
across-the-board wage cuts of 20 percent or more that the government has
placed on public employees.
On the other side of the chain-link fence that separates the Chinese and
Greek operations, Captain Fu said he would love for Cosco to run all of
Piraeus if the government put it up for sale. That expansion would
cement Chinese dominance of one of the most strategic shipping gateways
to Southern Europe and the Balkans.
Such a move, though, might meet stiff opposition from Greek unions and
officials at the Piraeus Port Authority, who criticize Cosco’s approach
to labor.
“It’s like another country over there,” Thanassis Koinis, a deputy
director at the Piraeus Port Authority, said one recent morning as he
stared out the window of his dilapidated office at the cranes soaring
above Cosco’s docks.
Mr. Koinis and some other Greeks accuse Cosco of using employment
subcontractors that hire temporary, unskilled, nonunion workers
desperate for jobs and exploit them by paying low wages.
Babis Giakoymelos, a board member of the Dockworkers’ Union, contended
that Cosco was also saving money by cutting corners on worker safety.
“They are bringing third-world labor standards to Europe,” he said.
For Tasos Vamvakidis, Cosco’s commercial manager here, such complaints
amount to sour grapes. “It’s easy to say things against Cosco; but when
you come here, you see that everything works properly,” he said one
morning on the Cosco dock, raising his voice to be heard above the
machinery’s din. “We win business by showing that we work 24-7, 365 days
a year.”
Casting a glance at the Greek side, he added: “Maybe in other terminals,
people work less. In any case, if it’s so bad, thousands of people
would not be applying to work for Cosco.”
Dimitrios Batsoulis begs to differ. He was fired from his job as a Cosco
dockworker in February, after he tried to organize a workers’ committee
to raise concerns about safety violations that he said Cosco
subcontractors repeatedly ignored.
He said his bosses had blacklisted him several weeks earlier after he
left the steering compartment of a crane when the heater broke one snowy
morning, leaving his hands too cold and stiff to control the giant
machine from his post 49 feet above ground.
“I was jeopardizing my life and my colleagues’ lives,” Mr. Batsoulis
said. When he climbed down to warm himself, he said his manager and a
Cosco executive chastised him for slowing operations. He said he was not
called back to work for another week.
“If you are a worker for Cosco, then you know suddenly how it is to work
in the Chinese Republic,” said Mr. Batsoulis, who is now suing the
company for unlawful dismissal and unpaid overtime.
Cosco said it would not comment on the pending case. But Captain Fu
contended that disgruntled workers like Mr. Batsoulis were in a
minority.
Captain Fu said Cosco took pains to avoid seeming like an invader,
partly by hiring Greek companies to rebuild the pier and to oversee the
labor force in accordance with Greek law. He boasted repeatedly that
Cosco had only seven Chinese managers, who he said trained their Greek
work force up to the highest standards.
In the gleaming executive suites abutting Captain Fu’s expansive
offices, a recently completed $1.29 million renovation attested to the
efforts in Chinese-Greek corporate diplomacy. Pictures of sculptures of
Greek gods faced paintings of Chinese dragons, while blown-up photos of
President Hu Jintao standing shoulder to shoulder with Greek leaders
adorned a cavernous meeting room.
“At the beginning, the Greeks were worried that the Chinese would come
in here and take over,” Captain Fu said. “Instead, we showed the local
people that we want to help them develop; we don’t want to take work
from them and give it to the Chinese.”
As Greece struggles to overhaul its economy, he said, Cosco represents
an opportunity for Greek workers — and the country itself. “Cosco is
their future,” he said. “We are here to stay.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 10, 2012
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the value of the 2010 deal for Cosco for lease half of the Port of Piraeus. The value of the deal was €500 million, or $645 million, not €500 billion.
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