It is ten past two in the morning, and the loudest thing on the container terminal is the wind. Normally at this hour the quay hums: straddle carriers whine between the stacks, spreaders clang onto steel, and forty-metre gantry cranes swing boxes off a ship the length of four football pitches. Tonight the cranes stand frozen above a half-unloaded vessel, their booms raised like drawbridges.
Hamburg’s dockers have walked out. After the employers’ latest pay offer was rejected as “an insult dressed as a compromise”, warning strikes spread across the city’s biggest terminals within hours. By dawn, the port that handles a large share of Germany’s overseas trade had slowed to something close to a standstill, and out on the Elbe a line of vessels was waiting at anchor.
Keep reading. What happens when the cranes stop?
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