Logistics & Shanghai Harbor

The next morning a lot of containers are on the way to the harbor on trucks Among them the red container of household appliances He is lining up so as to be loaded on the Fidelio cargo Among 9400 other boxes The manager of the Fidelio is him Ludovic Rozan With his Chinese colleague Gordon Guo He comes to check if the loading is going well The company from Marseille in France who owns the Fidelio is the third shipping company in the world However the European harbors are not the best on the international scale now Shanghai represents 25 millions of containers while the harbor of Le Havre in France sends a little more than 1 million of containers So the difference is huge The biggest European harbor is Rotterdam and even this one is very far behind the one of Shanghai I think that last year Rotterdam was in charge of about 7 millions of containers so Shanghai is slightly over three times more important than the biggest europeen harbor This is the Chinese dream. Everybody is talking about it well as you can see we realized this dream This is Astonishing Here there is approximately 5000 workers They are working 24 hours a day with no break This is very good for our customers And no strikes! [Laughing] Here is the dockers army who is never on strike These dockers are now loading the red container of household appliances The hardest thing is to put the box on the right place in order to not damage its precious content Loading a container takes us less than one minute The worker locks mechanisms which are tying the containers between them. Like legos... No, here it's not good, it must be tied by pair. It would be better As it is hard to speak mandarin so nothing easier than a small drawing ! On the ship there is the equivalent of 20 floors of a building with containers only Containers with dangerous products are on the backside The heaviest underneath and the lighter on the top Put this one on the top to replace that one I checked that all the boxes are tied in the right place As the ship is subjected to rolling it avoids the containers to move on the boat The romanian security manager is concentrated as a military on his map because the company has recently lost in the sea a whole container of TV set Cheng Zhang Lang is a truck driver Everyday for 12 hours he loads and unloads boxes Lang work on the harbor, but as his coworkers he also live in the harbor in a dormitory here is where we live i live on the 2nd floor, come I will show you. here is room 205, it's a room with bunk beds we are 7 sharing this room harbor authorities had forbidden us of filming those dormitory we had to come in surreptitiously Lang and his coworkers are migrants, they come from the poor agricultural provinces of middle of China where there is no work each one of us has a small basin, i'll show you bathroom no intimity, no heating in winter, but migrants accept those conditions without flinching anyway, labor unions are prohibited we have hot water to wash our face and teeth but we don't have showers, because showers are on decks of the harbor. and here look it's all our working clothes, us the drivers are all dressed in red here we wash our clothes, and we make them dry as Lang, all those men left wife and children in their village, they almost never have holidays. i go back in my familly only once per 6 months and i stay about 1 week mais la famille elle ne vous manque pas ? yes, of course i miss my familly then why do you stay here ? because we need to earn money ! days of work are very long, and you can feel exhaustion among workers. sometimes we go to the sea, but we don't have much leisure activity anyway. we play cards, we watch to the TV, or we take bus to go to the Shopping Mall. but Lang and other drivers earn 4500rmb per month, which is twice the local average salary but you know, there are people that earn even more than us, the crane operators yes, crane operators, they earn a lot of money, arround 20.000 Rmb per months after a last inspection, Cargo Fidelio can leave Shanghai Harbor on this boat, equivalent of 2.000 Trucks of "Made in China" goods it will required 30 days to go to Le Havre in the time of Christhoper Columbus, the same travel took 14 Months and the Shanghai terminal is Active day and night everyday without work makes the cargo loose 50.000€ so here in Shanghai Harbor, Ships stay immobilized three time less than in other harbors. and when you imagine that under Mao, Shanghai was not event in the 20 biggest harbor of the world. nowaday, the megalopolis displays décor of Science Fiction and a harbor worth of it's ambitions build in record time Such a big construction can only be seen entirely on a model Gordon the manager of CMA CGM in Shanghai shows us that that this harbor was built in the middle of the ocean On an island very far from the coast Look at that , we started to build a 32 kilometers and it is the second longest bridge of the world It links the mainland to the harbor Chinese people are comparing this huge bridge to the Great Wall or even to the forbidden city A highway with 6 ways on pilotis which is 13 times longer than the Millau viaduct But this was built in 5 times less long This work has planned from the communist party At the end of the bridge we should change a fisherman island into a huge concret slab