I am an occasional visitor to the gCaptain Forum, which is a site visited mainly by American mariners with a whole variety of questions, and sometimes with answers. The title of this piece was a question raised recently.
I’m going to start with a bit of discussion about the Bibby Stockholm, which is an accommodation barge tied up in Portland (UK) currently inhabited by about 500 illegal immigrants costing the British Government, according to the British newspaper the Guardian, £91 per day per inhabitant.
The recreation space on the Bibby Stockholm.
The illegals are accommodated in two berth cabins and, according to the Bibby website, the facility is provided with a restaurant, a bar, internet in every cabin and exercise facilities. There are photographs which also tell us that all the cabins have large windows to let the Portland light in. However there is a whole raft of people in UK who think the conditions in which these illegal immigrants are living is inhuman, causing some to consider suicide, and others to be worried that the barge is going to be towed away to Ruanda. This facility has been used before, mainly for housing soldiers out in the Falklands, and there are other barges engaged in the similar activities elsewhere in the world.
So, moving on, the question raised on the gCaptain forum was that the conditions under which some people are required to serve on American OSVs are totally unsuitable, and there follows a list of the conditions which people may have to accept when they go to work for one of them. And at this point I have to say that my website has been hacked twice, once when I said something about ECO, and once when I included a description of an event in which President Putin was involved. Of course it might all have been co-incidental so, hoping for the best, here we go:
If you work for some GOM OSV companies you have to accept, according to a writer on the forum:
1. 1/2 day pay on signing on and off.
2. “Travel pay” that is taxed and covers only a fraction of the cost to get to and from work.
3. No shore leave.
4. No internet
5. No company provided weather reporting programs…
6. Many boats without electronic charts or ECDIS
7. No cooks unless 3rd party on board.
8. Under par food budgets (lucky if you even get food when the boat is off charter)
9. A lot of shotty, broken equipment that is hidden from the customer on a regular basis.
To this I would have to add that some American offshore ships do not have any portholes, and also that many are provided with the most limited accommodation. Typically there are ships with two two berth cabins and two four berth cabins, providing accommodation for 12 people. I have seen a description of another which suggested that the possible 22 personnel would be housed in 6 cabins.
If we chose to equate the conditions under which American seafarers are being required to serve with the condition on the Bibby Stockholm it is obvious that they are virtually inhuman, so how the hell have they got into this state?
Just as an observation, it is in part due the complexity of American marine qualifications, which mostly relate in some way to gross tonnage. There used to be a lot of enthusiasm for American OSVs to be classified as being under 200 grt, and others to be under 500 grt. Now we seem to have added 1600 grt. These are magic figures, and I don’t claim to understand absolutely what is involved apart from the fact that these numbers allow seafarers with limited qualifications to take up senior positions on board. For instance a Chief Mate of Unlimited Tonnage can become Master of a vessel of less than 500 grt without endorsement or examination. The lower the required level of qualification the bigger the pool of potential employees, and the more likely it is that they will accept inappropriate conditions for an acceptable level of pay.
Back in the 1990s I was employed for some months as master of a Halter 180 footer (Originally Petromar Norseman), which was 199 grt. This was achieved by having enormous plates on the inner bulkheads of the cabins. The plates were removed when the tonnage measurement was carried out and then bolted on. As it happened two of the cabins on the upper deck were single berth, mine and the chief’s and two were two berth, the mate occupied one and that left one for any temporary residents such as rig movers. The half a dozen Filipino crew occupied a collective space in the hull. Our flights to and from Saudi were paid by the company. Once a every couple of weeks a truck would arrive with our supplies, which were absolutely adequate, and it was accepted that any company ship in port would take on the supplies for the ones at sea, and we would transfer the stores when we met up. Although the pay was fairly crap, compared with the conditions in the US Gulf, our situation was quite luxurious. The only serious downside was that I was the only person allowed ashore, purely to let me visit the charterer’s offices, but who would have wanted to go ashore in the desert anyway.
Now we have to look at the list of deficiencies under which the guys in the Gulf are expected to serve. It seems that they accept that they might not have portholes, and although it is not mentioned, it also seems possible that the day rate which they are paid is also expected to cover their periods of leave.
I am horrified to learn that they might not have a cook unless there are client’s people on board, and that they might not be provided with food if the ship is off hire. Looking at a cook’s employment criteria from a gulf company website, no formal cooking qualification is required. Here we might bear in mind that the cook on an OSV may be the whole catering department, so hiring one without qualification may be a risk. How will that person fare in the marine environment? But worse, what if your ship is off hire so you don’t have a cook, you aren’t be provided with food and you aren’t allowed ashore! Can all this be true? I have gone on a lot in the past about seafarers in America not being allowed off the ship; typically American marine employers don’t seem to trust their guys. If the other complaints are valid, all of these problems would be solved if it was more difficult for the OSV companies to crew their ships, or the unthinkable, if their employees were unionised. They could also be solved if the charterers took an interest in the well being of the crews on the ships they hire.
But surely we have in the end to return to fundamentals, the responsibility that an employer has for his or her employees, and the key phrase here might be the American word for salary which is “compensation”. Are the employees on American OSVs compensated for being treated like scum, or as they sometimes call themselves “boat trash”.
As others have suggested on the gCaptain website, the ships are the homes for the crew for all their time on board, so they should look after them, and in the best circumstances have a pride in the vessel. Although this becomes more difficult if the captain is a complete bastard who does not himself appear to have the best interests of his or her crew at heart. I admit that as a young man after a particularly unpleasant round the world voyage, with a master whose intent seemed to be to reduce his crew to nervous wrecks, I determined that I would never sail on a deep sea voyage again and I never did.
So where are we going with this. It all devolves finally on the owners of the ship, even if they employ managers to operate it. They are supposed to be the smart people who want their investment to be returned, and like it or not their captains are their representatives and they choose them. Everyone in the management should wish their employees to be well looked after starting off with the accommodation, the facilities and the food, and as a result the ship will be run efficiently, safely and economically. Is this an impossible concept? But back to the original question “when will OSV companies get with the times?” the answer according to the gCaptain forum is NEVER.