Industrial Resilience on the Chesapeake Bay

The ill-fated M/V Dali is pierside at Norfolk International Terminal in the Hampton Roads area, having been towed south through the Chesapeake Bay last month from Baltimore. During the accidental blockade of Baltimore’s inner harbor as a result of the Key Bridge collapse, the additional maritime traffic sent to Hampton Roads exercised, but did not overstress, the capabilities of the local maritime industry. At a Maritime Day event in May, I casually surveyed various local maritime service providers. Among those who experienced a windfall of business were harbor pilots, tug boat operators, and longshoremen. Being on the roads, I noticed the increase of terminal truck drivers and trains carrying shipping containers and coal from April to June. Coal carriers and container ships made an increase of visits to Norfolk International Terminals, driving the increase in road and rail traffic. Several Ready Reserve Fleet ships were stranded in Baltimore; their counterparts in the Hampton Roads area picked up at least one cargo mission. Two classes of ships that appear to have diverted elsewhere are cable-laying ships and car carriers (or, roll-on, roll off). Baltimore’s inner harbor had special facilities for both. Also of note is one historic ship whose maintenance schedule was altered by the blockade. SS John Brown, a museum ship normally docked in Baltimore, is now in Colonna’s drydock undergoing a periodic maintenance and repair period. Different than the usual assortment of inland vessels and small offshore craft, this vessel is a decorated piece of World War Two history. The SS John Brown was a full-fledged break-bulk cargo ship, and was built to typical dimensions of the era. To arrive in Norfolk from Baltimore, she cruised the Chesapeake Bay on her own power.

SCOTUS adds to Maritime Law

I am not sure how Bright Enterprises, the New Jersey-based plaintiff in the recent US Supreme Court Case (Loper Bright Enterprises et al. vs Raimondo), arranges their shipboard workforces, but many American commercial fishermen are working shareholders whose workplace conditions are outside of the purview of labor laws. The New York Times recently painted a picture of the fishing industry, consisting of limited rest, frequent injuries, and abuse of stimulants (1). With this in mind, it was less surprising that a maritime company would be on the vanguard of small and mid-size businesses challenging the regulatory state. Overturned in this case was the Chevron Deference, established in the 1980s and named for a major corporation, seemed to put a cap on the excesses of corporate attorneys in the “greed is good” era- although deregulation of telecom and finance would continue through the next decade. Bright Enterprises is a sympathetic plaintiff, and their amici curiae (allies) even more so. At question was a $700 per day regulatory cost for ride-along marine fishery inspectors, which in 2016 sunk David Goethel’s small fishing business in New England cod and clams (2)(3). Another recent gem from the US Supreme Court came in SEC vs Jarkesy, which interested me since the liberal justices were against expanding the right to jury trials to defendants in civil cases currently decided by an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ). With the caveat that the decision does not address license suspension and revocation actions, the Supreme Court may have strengthened the position of mariners and aviators facing certain legal actions by the US Coast Guard or Federal Aviation Administration. Yet, in many cases, a mariner or aviator under charges would prefer to have their case reviewed by an ALJ than a randomly-selected jury. The ALJ would presumably be more informed about technical decisions and risk trade-offs within their sector of the transportation industry, whereas a jury might come to a premature conclusion when casualties occur to the environment or people at sea. (1) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/magazine/fentanyl-death-fishing.html (2) https://apnews.com/article/fc068b291ae54450be38530c512a09f6 (3) https://causeofaction.org/supreme-court-denies-petition-review-job-killing-fishery-rule/

Trump Came to Town

Virginia Beach and Chesapeake went all out for President Trump upon his arrival, completely shutting down 15 miles of busy suburban freeway so that his entourage had a completely private thoroughfare from the airport to a berry farm near the North Carolina line. Such accommodations inconvenienced some of his followers, who had to work on a Friday and did not have the luxury of spending the day perusing merchandise and food stands at the berry farm. A caravan thus formed on the backroads, arriving at the duck fields to find that there was no more room to hear the once-disgraced president speak. Cars lined the side of the road, new cars, no beaters. Their occupants had nice clothes, good hair, and smooth hands, untaxed by grueling work or hard living. Nearest to the berry farm were mansions with many cars in their front yards. One must wonder how much each automobilist paid for the privilege. Chesapeake used to vote for the Democratic Party, between the family farm Dixiecrats and the urban industrial neighborhoods of South Norfolk. But Chesapeake is now a suburban wonderland filled with economically secure members of the military industrial complex. Donald Trump was welcome here. A cul de sac served as promontory for those who could not enter the venue. For ninety minutes, Trump’s voice rehashed talking points soothing to the audience’s ears. From here, you could not see Trump, but his voice boomed invisibly over the fields like a FDR fireside chat, or how God talks to people in movies. Studies show that Trump’s biggest fans are unchurched. Trumpism is their religion. I’m no stranger to political speeches, which seasoned politicians always keep to 10 minutes or less. Trump’s hour and a half oratory was different. One woman told me that Trump “could speak so long, because he knows so much”. After Trump left the stage, cars started to fill up the Wawa fuel station. There were Teslas and big pickup trucks, and a few MAGA hats, t-shirts, and #FJB stickers. But it was remarkable how these hardcore Trump supporters blended in as the regular American citizens you would see at the strip mall or county park. Experts will say that Virginia is fool’s gold for the Republican Party, having gone 20 years voting for the Democrats. But Trump’s handlers knew what they were doing. Many of the cars came from rural North Carolina , the quintessential swing state audience, and the Chesapeake suburbanites added visual reinforcement to the rally, so important to Trump’s image as the American hero.

A Fine Cut of the Jib

Until this year, the Newport- Bermuda sailing race was not on my radar. It is sailed every 2 years from Rhode Island, and my Alma mater usually sends a boat crewed by midshipmen. This was not enough to pique my interest in the past, yet Somehow, it came to a special place of prominence in my mind. One factor is that Orsted, a major Danish renewable energy company, has become a major sponsor of this race. Offshore wind has been creating many good career opportunities for American mariners, and the proximity to the coastline allows for better work-life balance than traditional deep sea shipping. Another key factor: Friends and their family have been boosting the hype on social media. The parents are old enough to have time to sail, and the kids old enough to have knowledge gained through experience on the water. According to race announcers, this year brings quite a few novices to the race. Relative youth is an advantage: As the starting line emcee put it on Friday. Don’t be older than the length of your boat. That is, older folks should ride in the relative comfort of a larger sailboat. See the contenders' current positions here at: https://cf.yb.tl/nb2024 PS, I'm following Assarain IV.

Reconsidering the Maritime Academy: California's Case

Sometimes, I feel that I am repeating blog posts, but with new information comes new angles for reporting. In this case, California State University's (CSU) Maritime college will be merging with a larger polytechnic program by 2026. That maritime college in Vallejo seemingly re-invented itself in the 1990s, but what has worked for two generations no longer works so well. Since 2018, enrollment has fallen by a third, and new capital investment is required to maintain dormitories and other facilities. As a professional school, there is a requirement to wear uniforms to class, stand "watch" as an on-campus job, and to abstain from marijuana (due to the use of a federally-subsidized training ship). Optimistically, CSU intends to retain the maritime licensing program. Yet, these afflictions seem strange due to the fact that CSU operates the only four-year maritime program on the West Coast; five such programs operate in the Eastern time zone, plus Texas A&M in the Gulf Coast (recently blogged about their new tuition policy). The 1990's were a transformational time for maritime colleges in the United States. The labor-intesive American ships built during World War Two were finally retired from service, leaving a smaller fleet of ships for newly-graduated merchant officers to sail. With the Cold War over, Navy veterans downsized from military service provided skilled manpower with little need for new education, under laws and conventions of the era. To this end, the Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association (MEBA) apprentice program in Easton, MD was closed in favor of continuing education for existing mariners. Then-Vice President Al Gore slated the US Merchant Marine Academy for closure- it is still open. Each state maritime academy began offering new majors, often without the uniform and military-style training requirements. Such new degrees tended to be adjacent to the maritime field, with offerings in logistics, international business, security, and facilities management. Organizationally, only two of the six state schools left the 1990's as autonomous institutions; the transformation of California Maritime Academy into a CSU campus was so complete that it earned the name of "casual maritime academy" due to the students' increase in rights and priveleges. There was certainly dissent about the "dilution" of regimental culture at the time. One alumnus filed a lawsuit against the Maritime College of New York, stating that use of the waterfront Fort Schuyler campus in the Bronx was restricted by the US government to training licensed maritime officers. Such an forestalling effort failed. Despite the maritime orientation of these colleges, oceanography and marine biology are often taught elsewhere. Out of the six state maritime academies, only Texas A&M is a designated Sea Grant University with focus on ocean research. Scholarly research seemed at odds with hands-on, employment focused learning. In the end, restructuring allowed these maritime colleges to exist for Gen X and Millenials. Peak college enrollment of the year 2010 came and went. Maritime colleges, offering graduates high starting salaries, continued to ride high. To this end, CSU Maritime appears to be unique it its troubles caused by a confluence of factors. First is the freshman attrition rate, where many students decide that college, and especially a maritime program, is not for them. Second is the general decreased interest in a college degree: Many of the students in adjacent degrees were not focused on a maritime career, but attended college as low-propensity, general ed students. Third, due to crew shortages, many would-be maritime students are going straight to work, collecting a paycheck instead of paying tuition, and collecting promotions based on work experience rather than classroom time. Unless they happen to have GI Bill Benefits, or a funded college savings account, it is unlikely they will return to a maritime college once they are working in the industry. It appears that, unlike the 1990's, CSU Maritime will be going through its next transformation alone. The unspoken truth is that most college-educated mariners leave shipboard work within 5-10 years of graduation. Thus, going to sea is no longer the way of life, but part of it. Incorporation of a maritime program into a college with other operationally-focused majors will provide strengthening synergies to both the student and the institution.

Harrison Butker’s Thoughts

Like Harrison Butker, the embattled kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, I was once a brash 28-year old, working in an industry that supports sole breadwinners, and attending a Catholic parish that adhered to the Missal of 1962- the Traditional Latin Mass. Nostalgia for Catholic Integralism of mid-century Spain, Italy, and big-city America; and Christian Democracy of France and Germany, ran strong. Yes, I was 28 when I lauded the Dobbs decision as a harbinger of a New Deal for families. (For the one-year anniversary of the decision, I issued a Mea Culpa on this blog, as I did not then realize the lack of compassion of many so-called “pro-life” legislators in the South). What is so appealing about fighting the “diabolical lie”, which to Butker is concept that career comes before family? For many middle-class families- especially those without a four-year degree, the single income family is still an ideal. For those with masters and doctorate degrees, this concept is an anathema. Thinking as a neoliberal, one must be a reactionary- a neanderthal- to be willing to shrink the GDP. Would such a focus on the family be “turning back the clock”? In the United States, dual income households had been on the rise since 1940, despite some retrenchment at the end of World War Two. With this option came an increase of living standards, followed by an ever-consuming increase of living costs. In Promised Land, an economics book I recently read, David Stebenne explains that this switch between freedom and necessity of a second income happened around the 1958 recession, earlier than the peak era of second-wave feminism. During the 1950's, investment in business development had lagged, in favor of high wages for the working class. It was not sustainable. The single wage earner never completely disappeared, at least for the part of the middle class that obtained special skills and education at reasonable cost. In fact, such a concept proves to be an unbreachable wage floor during labor negotiations. The appeal for motherhood and domesticity; in contrast to harsh, male-dominated industrial environments, provides the rallying cry for better contracts. Maybe in the future, emotional appeals will be gender-blind, but for now, Butker’s ideas buttress the middle class way of life.

Unreported News on the Non-Compete

Non-compete clauses got out of hand. Once a reign on executives and professional employees, many lower-wage employers have been telling their employees that they can't leave their job for another in the same field. Nursing assistants, fast food workers, and janitors are some of the employees who have recently found themselves sigining such agreements. However, these are not common in the shipboard side of the maritime sector. Since the Seaman's Act of 1915, as lobbied for by Andrew Furuseth, the American seafarer was permitted to "break articles" in any US Port. While I have not found an explicit requirement to allow seafarers to choose a different employer, it is certainly implicit in the culture surrounding seafaring, where employee's ties to a company are weak, and ties to a union and job hall being strong. To be fair, the system of impressement that existed prior to 1915 (and that still exists globally) was replaced eventually by strong unions and a "closed shop" hiring system for ocean-going, unionized ships. Within this system, there is mobility between different companies and different types of ship (one could be on a car carrier one voyage, and on a grain ship the next). However, as written by John Konrad from GCaptain, maritime wages have stagnated under the closed shop system, where unions would compete against each other to sign a contract favorable to the employer. A new generation of union leaders, who labored under these conditions, agreed to allow some healthy competition through a mechanism known as a passthrough agreement. This would incentivize shipping companies to sign more generous contracts, as poorly-paying ships would be unable to find crewmembers. Reducing the barriers to personal economic competitiveness is working in the maritime sector. How about the rest of the nation? California became a leader in tech and other innovation due to its longstanding, strong prohibition on non-compete clauses. Predominately in the near-South and the West, state legislatures and courts have invalidated many classes of non-compete clauses, and to do so through nationally through the Federal Trade Commission would follow a winning trend.