ANOTHER 42 dock workers are to be axed as port bosses struggle with the collapse in business triggered by the global recession.

The losses, at ABP, are equivalent to ten per cent of the workforce, will come from across all sectors and will include senior managers, the Daily Echo understands.

Trade in key areas has “dropped like a stone”, with containers down more than ten per cent and the car handling business plummeting by 50 per cent – equivalent to 330,000 cars a year. The jobs blow comes hard on the heels of a succession of bad news for hard-hit dockworkers and just days after Prime Minsiter Gordon Brown hailed the port as “one of the most important parts of the economy”.

Yesterday, container port bosses at DP World, grappling with “some of the worst market conditions the container terminal industry has seen” announced 60 staff are to go. Just a week earlier a further 22 contract staff had been axed from the terminal, the UK’s second biggest.

Last year, port owner ABP announced 45 workers were to go and a total of nearly 170 from across the docks and the container port have been given their P45s to date. Port director Doug Morrison said: “There is no doubt that a port like Southampton is a barometer of what’s going on out there in the economy.

“Two of our principal trades here, cars and containers, have been hardest hit since the recession began.

“Container volumes have dropped to levels last seen in 2004. Car volumes are down 50 per cent on last year due to market conditions deteriorating. When we took the decision to reduce numbers last year we had no idea things would deteriorate so much further.”