Train Our Own Mariners

Government shipping agencies; which include the Military Sealift Command, NOAA, and the US Army Corps of Engineers; have long benefitted from the skilled experience of military veterans and retirees. It is essentially a Service Life Extension, allowing these mariners to serve a second career at sea. In exchange for the US Navy's terms of enlistment (typically 4-6 years today), young adults finishing high school are offered a vocational training program with an in-service apprenticeship. Based on reports of those who attended both military and civilian training, these Navy "A" and "C" schools exceed the rigor of comparable private maritime training programs, whose students are often the paying customer. The US Navy is set up to be a training institution: even on highly-automated ships built from the 1990's onwards, crewing scales allow for extensive on-the-job training, or time served "under instruction". Chief Petty Officers are responisble for evaluating new recruits under Personal Qualification Standards (the PQS), and commissioned Training Officers ensure that these qualifications are completed in a timely fashion. Do we have anything comparable in the civilian world? The Military Sealift Command is giving it a try with civil service mariners. When I was first hired as an engineer in 2015, the youngest entry-level hire was 23 years of age; at the time, they could expect people to bring career skills- in warehousing, foodservice, or equipment maintenance- to the ship. In a different kind of employment market, the agency has been recruiting high school seniors with on-the-spot job offers for family-wage jobs. At least 300 offers have gone to young adults from the Hampton Roads region of Virginia in the past year as Steward Utilitymen, Wipers, and Ordinary Seamen. On paper, this is the right thing to do, in order to alleviate the skilled trades gap with homegrown talent. In reality, this new on-the-job training mission adds additional duties for those expected to provide the training: the officers and skilled ratings, who are often covering for a vacant billet themselves. To earn Merchant Mariner Credentialling as a skilled rating, new entrants must complete sea time, onboard skills assessments, and classroom training. The Wiper Advacement Program and Ordinary Seaman Advacement Program are now contractual commitments on the part of Military Sealift Command, to provider personnal training and two career promotions. Compared to intermittent training efforts made in previous years, the Military Sealift Command has assigned significant and continuing financial resources for vocational training at the private Mid Atlantic Maritime Academy. In my short time as a First Assistant Engineer, I have overseen three onboard promotions through this initiative. If there is a limitation, it is that the Military Sealift Command cannot guarantee prospective mariners a constant annual hiring quota. These on-the-job career advancement programs are a necessary solution for skills gap between young people and workforce demands. Once such a program is institutionalized and fully appreciated by an organization, it's unlikely to stop.

Book Review: The Greatest Beer Run Ever

I have read plenty of merchant mariners’ novels that collect dust on bookshelves at ship’s libraries and maritime museums. But there is one I read recently that has reached broad acclaim: The Greatest Beer Run Ever, written by John “Chick” Donohue. In the mid-1960’s, hundreds of American merchant ships were employed in the Vietnam war effort, to bring food, fuel, and ammunition from the United States to the front lines of conflict. Many of these ships were small-tonnage relics of the Second World War, and needed a large number of American mariners to crew them. In contrast, our war materiel buildup in the 2003 liberation of Iraq required a few dozen merchant vessels of large, modern tonnage. In the former era, carefree young men accepted the dangers of North Vietnamese enemy attack- which did happen too frequently, in exchange for twice the usual rate of pay. While Chickie’s true-blue membership in the National Maritime Union (NMU) facilitated this adventure to wartime Vietnam, the book is very approachable for landlubbers. We could say that our protagonist, Chickie, came from a different time when, in a transient and essential workforce, you could actually work a voyage onboard a freighter, without career consequences. Using the more-lenient rules of the pre-connectivity era, and his diplomatic tongue, he pulled a legendary shore leave feat to bring beer and morale to his fellow hometown soldiers in and around Saigon. While you’d likely be tossed by the union today for flagrantly violating shore leave policy, most mariners know a colleague who’s willing to venture beyond the pier, and official liberty restrictions, in Djibouti or Okinawa. Chickie’s spirit lives on.

Geographic Dispersal

Union Halls, Mariner Clinics, Regional Exam Centers, and Merchant Marine Academies: you either live by one, or you don’t. Decades ago, deep-sea mariners were geographically concentrated in port towns. It made sense: you got a job at the union hall, and then took a subway or taxi ride to the ship. Today, maritime unions guarantee airline travel from any location in the US, to a ship assignment, and back. States without the income tax, such as Florida, New Hampshire, Texas, and Nevada, are popular residences for mariners; even if they are far inland. As for the physical institutions of the maritime industry, there is stickiness to old maritime ports, even if the reasons for their presence are no longer needed locally. There are likely more deep-sea mariners living in arid Las Vegas, Nevada than in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yet, for the tradition of having maritime institutions near the water, I doubt that the US Coast Guard will relocate its Regional Exam Center, or the Marine Engineer Beneficial Association its medical clinic, to where the mariners live today. Baltimore, some 12 hours inland of Norfolk, has not been a primary port-of-call since Bethlehem Steel shut down decades ago. Yet the city retains its maritime union halls, a US Coast Guard testing center, and two maritime conference and training centers in the region. Norfolk has a small union hall shared by two of the three officers’ unions, but no Regional Exam Center: the closest one is a 5-hour northbound drive in Baltimore; or an 8-hour drive south to Charleston, SC. Prior to COVID-19, I inquired to the Mid Atlantic Maritime Academy, a private trade school, about bringing the USCG’s travelling exam team to Norfolk several times a years, as they do for Maine Maritime Academy in rural Castine; and on Massachusetts Maritime Academy on Cape Cod. The idea may be worth another go-around.

What Happens at the end of Work from Home?

If you’ve noticed the paucity of communication coming from me, it’s because I am cruising through the northern part of the Pacific Ocean with no satellite service. Providers train their satellites towards near-shore areas, where the bulk of their clientele work and play on drill rigs and yachts. Outside the primary deep-sea trade routes, the satellite providers cut their losses. If you’re wondering, the Search and Rescue satellite system (GMDSS) does ping six times per day as they pass through their respective orbits. This summer brought a number of large-scale return-to-office experiences, from Wall Street, to Main Street Richmond, Virginia. In this case, telework-capable state government employees were given two-months’ notice to return to the office four days per week, or to request additional WFH days from their agency leadership. Records show that 58% of employees accepted four or five days per week; and 93% of employees accepted at least three days per week. The State Highway Department did lose 10 or so engineers over this ask (and a few more who took retirement over this decision), but in the whole, attrition over the issue was less than 1%. Most requests were to preserve the enhanced telework arrangements certain white-collar employees had prior to the Pandemic. As a right-to-work state, government employment in Virginia is more similar to private employment than in other state governments. Thus, private employers can allay fears of workplace exodus, when they chose to return to an in-office schedule. The one caveat is that Richmond, Virginia is home to more traditional industries like medicine, tobacco, and public utilities, where in-person work is a given expectation.

Monkeypox?

The spread of Monkeypox has not reached epidemic proportions, and hopefully never will. But what came to my attention was how it spread: close quarters and skin-to-skin contact. Monkeypox has spread around hot-to-trot nightclubs in urban centers, but has stayed out of locker rooms and mainstream environments...so far. In college, I worked on the waterfront with the offshore sailing team. They would come back from overnight trips, where they slept arm to arm and had the same bilge-water sloshing around their feet. Close proximity, without intimateness. I trust that nautical leaders will implement recommendations for awareness and prevention, so we can nip this virus in the bud.

Work Hard, Play Hard, Retire Well: The Skilled Labor Shortage Explained

At the beginning of the 21st century, highly-skilled transportation professionals had in their hands a golden bargain that the Greatest Generation fought for and won. In exchange for long periods away from home- weeks or months- ship's officers could retire at the age of 50, with a fully-funded pension. Airline pilots had the same pension by the age 60. These comparatively short career durations, less than 30 years, predictably allowed younger professionals to move into frontline leadership roles, as First Officers and Captains during their family-building years. Ceremoniously, officers of the Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association would turn over their Merchant Mariner's License- their meal ticket- when applying for pension payments. There was no legal authority to take away the pensioner's license to work; only a moral one, in that one should not compete against family men and women for work, while collecting a pension. There was a surreptitious feeling among retirees who requested replacement credentials from the US Coast Guard for various retirement pursuits, such as operating their own tour boats. Over two decades, the mandatory retirement age for airline pilots increased to 65; and the American Maritime Officers' (AMO) pension fund was frozen, in exchange for a 401(k) plan. Notably, the AMO continued to allow recipients of pension buyouts to continue bidding on jobs. In comparison to blue-collar work, sitting in the pilot's seat or at the shipboard watch desk was not physically arduous, although work physicals were required. But early retirement was something for family members of airline pilots and ship's officers to look forward to, after decades of missed family celebrations and shift-work schedules: "I know I'm missing Christmas again, but it's only 3 more years to go". These unique jobs were nevertheless wrapped into the greater cultural zeitgeist of "never retiring" among senior workers, and the careerism of middle-class millenials. Retirement-eligible ship's officers continued to hold jobs at the top of each career ladder into their sixties. These jobs remained economically lucrative, even as payscales for new entrants stagnated: "Suck it up, young buttercup, just wait your turn for the big bucks". The COVID-19 pandemic shook up the zeitgeist. Perhaps retirement wasn't so bad, after all. Some of the job perks in the air or at sea, like going ashore in foreign countries, vanished. The ship master's reponsibility for controlling the spread infectious disease, thought to be a vestigial relic of the smallpox and polio era, came to the forefront. Who will fill these senior-level jobs that have suddenly come open? Having gone years with limited prospect of upward mobility, younger officers with transferrable knowledge and skills may have become disenchanted with employment in global transportation, and moved into other careers. What is the price for bringing back the workforce? At the Military Sealift Command, a 50% salary incentive is bending the curve in recruiting Chief Mates back from their shoreside employment. Flagship airlines are coming to accept this price as well, signing collective bargaining agreements that offer double-time pay for weekend work.

Systems Engineering by Bus

You may remember the park-and-ride blog post I wrote several years ago. I have to admit, I like to draft bus maps and schedules, and have done so well before pursing my master’s degree in systems engineering. In my coursework, I got credit for doing what I love: making bus schedules. In the era of work-from-home, it seems a bit untimely to be thinking about the topic. But COVID-19 had pummeled transit agencies and private bus companies to the ground, so the only trendline is upward. Tools used: -Google Maps, whose driving times between destinations are overly optimistic -Local transit schedules for major cities, which have included traffic conditions that vary on time-of-day -Driving the route itself. - Transit maps from the early 1970s, as these maps show the dense neighborhoods where transit was economically viable prior to federal subsidies. -Excel Spreadsheets, Got to have them. Throw in real-world constraints: -People don’t like to sit on buses that take them on a circuitous ride. Put straight lines on the map, preferably on freeways with exclusive transit lanes, and try to get people to work in 30 minutes or less. -Choice riders (aka, the middle class) will not tolerate unreliable or infrequent service. Buffer time must be included to improve schedule adherence. -The most efficient use of buses is to serve a prosperous central business district with high parking costs. Focus on routes to big cities. -Subsidy of commuter passes, as required for employers in Los Angeles and Washington, DC; are effective at increasing ridership. Focus on routes to big, environmentally progressive cities. - Equipment Cost of Ownership, Fuel, Union-Level Wages. Cost Per Operating Hour, or about $110 per hour for private operators, is a good metric. Consult the experts: -Randall O’Toole of the libertarian Cato Institute had put public transit in his crosshairs. But to know his enemy, he did extensive research on alternatives, such as Uber and immigrant-run jitney services in New York. -Studies performed by the US Department of Transportation, and states such as New Jersey and Virginia, during the transition to industry deregulation in the 1980s. Titles include “Private Sector Options for Commuter Transportation, 1984” and “Financing Public Transportation in Virginia, 1979”. Put it all together, and you get short and sweet routes through dense, but low-traffic neighborhoods. A real-world example of this model is the eponymous Short Line in New York; or DeCamp in New Jersey. Both pea-shoot passengers through the Hudson River’s Lincoln Tunnel, use exclusive transit lanes, and quickly arrive in walkable suburban neighborhoods.