Mariners Don't Work from Home

 

I am employed in the civil service, with two days of work-from-home per week. This is unusual in the maritime industry overall, where our contractors can be found at their offices, or in the field, any working day of the week.

The maritime industry; like investment banking, medicine, and top law; is not just a job, but a lifestyle. Due to the intense hours and high skills necessary, these occupations traditionally pay a single-breadwinner wage that supports a professional lifestyle. It is implied that there is someone at home, either a spouse or an au-pair, who takes care of the little things at home, to set up the high-earning professional for success. In the return-to-office debate, it was often revealed by anecdote that the “back to work” types had a system for domestic support. In the maritime industry, this is not just weekday help on the homefront, but one that can go for weeks or months, in the case of deep-sea voyages.

In contrast to acute events such as hurricanes and terrorist attacks, the cyclical nature of COVID-19 has blurred the distinction between a contingency mode of work (OK for employees to use work time to take care of life necessities, including childcare) to standard operations (Employer gets full attention during the work day). Switching to a lower tempo is somewhat disadvantageous in a high-performance industry, where the workforce is acculturated to giving all to their profession.

One of the more significant issues surrounding work-from-home is the security of clients’ information, whether it is the proprietary trade information of a private business, or classified information for military vessels. For the private sector, profit comes from incremental improvement and advantage in an otherwise commoditized market. We wouldn’t take annual training on countermeasures if espionage didn’t happen.

Shoresiders are seen as sissies, already. At sea, a lot happens between 5pm on Friday and 8am on Monday. The shoreside 5-day-per-week work schedule contrasts to the 7-day-a-week lifestyle of a sailing mariner. Depending on the time zone difference between the ship and the office, it could be a 72-hour delay in communication because of the weekend. Already, ship’s officers have epithets for shore-side office people over this perceived lack of support; the relationship would be more strained in a permanent work-from-home environment, where impromptu meetings are more difficult to arrange. Ships are tangible items. During COVID-19 lockdowns, crewmembers had their workload increase when shore-siders were unable to visit ships in-person. Photographs and summary reports now had to be undertaken by the crew in order to support shore-siders’ work-from-home plans.

In the work-from-home model, new maritime employees recruited from non-traditional sources (such as polytechnic colleges and shoreside industry) will lose the opportunity to develop social skills relevant to the maritime industry- the unwritten rules of work. Granted, some of these old-fashioned norms needed to disappear, as witnessed by the #womenbelongatsea movement.

Could it Work? Profit Share on Vessels

Two hundred years ago, it was common for mariners to be paid not in salary, but in share of revenue from the ship’s voyage. Depending on the trade, a captain might collect a long draw of 1/8^th, and an ordinary seaman perhaps 1/200^th of the ship’s earnings on a voyage.

Looking back to the 1920’s, this practice had become obsolete for the most part. In the whaling trade, this practice continued. Many vessels used in the whaling trade were purchased secondhand. Most trade routes had shifted from sail to steam between 1890 and 1910, leaving many sailing vessels available for reuse in longer-haul trades. Thus, the cost of labor was significant compared to the cost of capital equipment, such as the vessel, sails, and whaling gear. The mariners were an integral part of the value chain, as they sailed the ship and refined whale oil onboard, during their long voyage. In contrast to the cargo trade, where sailing routes were fixed, and cargos assigned by agents ashore; the nature of whaling incentivized captains to engage in the profit-seeking motive of finding the whales, even if it took them far from homeport.

It is still common in the fishing industry to practice profit-sharing, whether it is the San Diego fishing fleet or the Alaskan trade. A small crew works long hours to produce seafood.  

Today, crew costs for a large cargo vessel represents perhaps just 10 percent of vessel operating costs. On foreign vessels, labor accounts for perhaps $1 million for $10 million in costs, not including mortgage payments on the vessel.  Yet labor cost is the realm in which international shipowners try to pare down costs. Fuel costs, on the other hand, can represent 50% of a vessel’s operating expense, and is highly variable. It therefore is impractical to assign the profitability “risk” to crewmembers, when other factors affecting vessel profitability are much more variable than a fixed salary.  

How else can mariners profit from voyages beyond their salary? In sailing ship days, ship’s masters often owned their own vessels; and this owner-operator culture still exists on rivers and bays. Many deep-sea ships are incorporated as their own Limited Liability Company under a shipping firm’s umbrella. Bondholders and bank lenders on ship’s equipment will prefer a fixed return, but preferred shares of stocks in a particular vessel, with dividends paid on voyage earnings, could offer a more entrepreneurial investment for knowledgeable mariners. Currently, this format is not practiced for large ships, although inland boats may be paid for through this “crowdfunded” method.