- French port workers strike so often in England that the British government has had to launch a truck parking scheme called “Operation Stack.”
- Operation Stack sees lorries queued on British motorways before crossing the Channel to France
- Brexit will likely intensify the need for Operation Stack as lines will stretch even longer to enter or exit the European Union.
- A new procedure, devised to address the post-Brexit world, has been christened “Operation Brock.”
The UK economy took a hit of £250 million ($328 million) a day for about 24 days one summer in 2015. British coastguards were sent out in droves with bottles of water and emergency meals. One official called the situation “absolute mayhem.”
The cause: a massive traffic jam in the south-east of England. Trucks carrying goods to continental Europe couldn’t cross over the English Channel to the French port city of Calais, which receives truck-loaded ferries coming from Dover in Kent, England.
Up to 9,000 trucks— or lorries, as the Brits call them — were parked on England’s M20 motorway for 24 days in the summer of 2015.
While the summer of 2015 was a particularly bad back-up in England, strikes that shut down Calais (and thus, the rest of Europe) to England are common. France as a whole has an incredibly robust”strike culture.” Each year, 171 days of work are missed per 1,000 employees in France, the second biggest in Europe. (In Germany, just 12 days per year are missed.)
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