Union branch and national president Garry Parsloe said his members remained ready to lift their notice of next month's strikes if the company showed ''good faith'' by allowing them to operate two cargo shuttle carriers which were replaced last year by trucks driven by employees subsidiary firm.
He said the union was prepared to consider allowing the trucks to supplement carrier operations as an interim measure, as long as the company would agree to a timetable to work out a more permanent arrangement.
"We will remove any industrial action while we negotiate going forward - if he [Mr Gibson] can't grab that there's something wrong with the bloke.''
But Mr Gibson accused him of being "disingenuous'' in repeating an unacceptable demand while refusing to respond to the company's latest offer, of a 10 per cent rise on hourly pay rates and up to 20 per cent on bonuses in return for a radical new rostering system.
"It's absolutely preposterous - we're talking about a modern world where we need to get productivity up,'' he
said of the shuttle carrier proposal.
It would require independent operators of trucks entering the port to leave their cabs while unionists drove the vehicles between container terminals.
Mr Parsloe said the new rostering proposal risked turning his members into casual workers "waiting on the end of a phone all their lives on a call from the company.''
He said the company's complaints about poor productivity were belied by an written invitation before the dispute to its workers to a barbecue to celebrate a record rate of container handling for September, of an average of 28.33 an hour.
But Mr Gibson said productivity was more than about turnaround times, as existing rostering rules allowed a labour utilisation rate in Auckland of only about 65 per cent compared with almost 90 per cent at the rival Port of Tauranga.
He denied trying to casualise his workforce, saying the new rostering system would give the dockers better control of their lives by allowing them to choose a month in advance whether to work shifts of between 5 hours and 12 hours a day.
This weekend's strike will delay four ships, which have been unable to be diverted to Tauranga because of capacity limits there and a holiday-period shutdown of Auckland's rail system to allow electrification work.
That would mean any containers bound for Auckland would have to be sent by truck from Tauranga, if ships were diverted there.
Mr Gibson said the latest strike would push the Auckland Council-owned port's revenue
losses from the dispute to about $3 million as well as further undermining fragile business confidence.
