Text 1: The harbour that does not sleep, by Farah Linden

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

At two in the morning, the container terminal is lit as fiercely as a sports stadium, but there is nobody on the ground. Blue carriers slide between towers of containers, turning sharply at painted junctions and stopping within centimetres of one another. From the window above, they resemble patient beetles following invisible trails.

The people are here, only not where I expected them. In a control room overlooking the harbour, twelve operators sit before curved banks of screens. Leila Morgan used to spend ten-hour shifts in the cab of a crane, sixty metres above the quay. Now she works in a padded chair, moving containers by guiding a cursor with her right hand.

'My shoulders do not ache any more and I am not climbing down a ladder in a gale,' she says. 'But up there, you knew exactly where to look. In here, six screens might need you at once.'

Most containers travel from ship to stack without an operator touching the controls. Cameras read their numbers; sensors check their position; the carriers choose their own routes. Leila intervenes when the system hesitates. During my visit, a warning light flashes beside an image of a container hanging above the quay. A loose strap is moving in the wind. She halts the crane, enlarges the picture and calls the ground team. The whole terminal pauses around one red square on her screen.

'Fast is useful,' she tells me, 'but noticing something small is what keeps people alive.' Ten years ago, her shift included forty crane drivers and carrier drivers. Today there are fourteen operators and six engineers. Nobody has been dismissed recently, but when older workers retire, their jobs are rarely filled.

Leila misses the voices on the radio and the sight of other drivers waving from their cabs. She does not miss the fog, the height or the moment when a container began to swing beneath her. 'The machines are never tired or impatient,' she says. Then she smiles. 'They are never proud of a difficult lift either.'

As dawn reaches the water, Leila lowers a final container into place with one slight movement of her finger. Far below, the ship answers with a blast of its horn.

Text 2: A morning upon the wharf, by A Visiting Reporter

An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper feature, written in 1884, a reporter visits a crowded commercial dock.

Before the sun had risen, several hundred labourers were gathered outside the dock gate, waiting to learn which of them would be employed that day. When the foreman appeared, hands rose from every part of the crowd. He pointed to one man and then another until enough had been chosen. Those who remained turned silently towards home.

Within the dock, there was no silence at all. Carts rattled over the stones, sailors called from the ships and chains struck against iron. At one berth, a steamer was surrendering a cargo of tea chests. A steam crane lifted twelve chests together and swung them over the wharf, its long beam reaching above us like an enormous arm.

The crane spared the men the heaviest lifting, but it did not lessen their haste. As soon as each load touched the ground, gangs of labourers separated the chests, carried them to the warehouse and returned at a run. The foreman urged them on, for another vessel was waiting to take the berth.

I followed a man named Thomas Vale, who had worked at the docks since boyhood. He carried a chest upon his back with a strap across his forehead and walked bent almost double. When I asked how many journeys he made in a day, he laughed. 'Enough to make the road seem longer every time,' he replied.

Shortly afterwards, a barrel slipped from a cart and rolled towards two boys stacking timber. Thomas dropped his load and pulled them aside. The barrel struck a post with such force that the wood split. Work stopped for no more than a moment. Thomas received a nod from the foreman, shouldered his chest again and disappeared into the warehouse.

There is remarkable fellowship among these men. They share water, exchange jokes and quietly assist anyone whose strength is failing. Yet their employment is uncertain and their labour leaves its mark upon them. By midday, shirts were dark with sweat and even the youngest walked stiffly.

When the hooter announced the dinner hour, the men sat together upon coils of rope, eating bread from their pockets. Behind them the steam crane continued to turn, tireless and indifferent, above a wharf crowded with exhausted human beings.

Both of these texts are about workers moving cargo at ports.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the work and the workers
• how the writers present the relationship between the workers and the equipment they use

You must use the text to support your comments and make it clear which text you are referring to.