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.