The National Port Administration indicated that waiting times are “normal” despite the fact that only guards work during Tourism Week.
The Inter-Union of Professional Land Cargo Transport of Uruguay (ITPC) warned of delays in the removal of containers in the Port of MontevideoHowever, since National Ports Administration (ANP) dismissed the union’s claim, maintaining that the waiting times are “normal” despite the fact that during the Tourism Week only work is done by guards.
In a statement, the ITPC He criticized “the duration of the operations carried out” in the country’s main port terminal recently, and accused the ANP of “lack of foresight” to avoid this problem.
The transport union assures that, currently, “it can take up to nine hours to remove a container”, when this operation should be carried out in a maximum of an hour and a half.
Along the same lines, they maintain that “the bottleneck of this chain usually varies according to different circumstances”, but that, currently, “as happens in each week of Carnival either Tourism Weekit is the ANP scale service that causes the aforementioned delays.”
As reported by El Observador, the ANP itself reported that these delays are normal even though during these weeks they work with fewer staff and denied that the scales are the cause of the delays. On the contrary, the decentralized State service took aim directly at the transporters, stating that delays are often due to “documentary controls” and lack of permits.
“There is a huge cost that the carrier must assume”
For its part, the ITPC explained that the number of scales provided by the ANP is lower than usual, and that some accesses to the port remain closed.
Workers in the cargo sector expressed that there is “an enormous cost in personnel hours that the carrier will have to assume” and that “it will also harm importers and exporters,” since “they could be forced to pay for additional days of storage or late arrival at port”.
Source: Ambito
