Your Italian Ferry Has a Reason Not to Sail Today

The Unione Sindacale di Base has called a 24-hour national strike across Italy’s port sector for 28 September, running from one minute past midnight to midnight. The action covers port companies and port authorities nationwide, and participation has been reported at Genoa, Civitavecchia and Gioia Tauro among others. Because Italian strikes are called nationally but observed locally, the practical effect varies enormously between one port and the next, and the only reliable source for a specific sailing is the operator running it.

The union’s demands are about pensions and legislation rather than pay. USB wants port work formally recognised as arduous labour for pension purposes, which would lower the retirement age for dockworkers, and it wants a technical committee convened at the Ministry of Labour to settle the question. It is also opposing proposed changes to Italian port legislation and the growing use of temporary employment agencies for port operations, a practice unions across European ports have been fighting for several years.

For travellers, the exposure is ferries rather than flights. Civitavecchia is Rome’s cruise and ferry gateway; Genoa is a major departure point for Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica and Spain. A strike day can mean cancelled crossings, compressed departure windows either side of the stoppage, and terminal services running with skeleton staff. Cruise passengers scheduled to embark or disembark at an affected port should expect slower processing rather than a cancelled call, though tender operations and shoreside logistics are the first things to suffer.

Italy has had an unusually dense autumn of industrial action, with stoppages touching ferries, local public transport and air traffic control within the same few weeks. The pattern is worth internalising if you are travelling in Italy this season: check the transport operator’s website on the morning of travel, build slack into any same-day connection between a ferry and a flight, and remember that Italian law guarantees minimum service windows, so a strike day is rarely a complete shutdown even where participation is high.

Sources: WorldCargo News, Kuehne+Nagel