As a new year comes upon us and correspondents shift from retrospectives to futurology with the passing of the old it is worth looking at some of the runes on manpower.
There are, for a start, signs of genuine concern about the reluctance of young people, all over the world, to seek a career afloat, and to keep them there for a reasonable time.
Senior management ashore is queueing up to emphasise, in every available medium, just how valuable their people (the term "human resources" is now regarded as demeaning) are to the flourishment of their companies. Others stress their undiminished concern for the well-being of those who serve afloat, their mental health and happiness, while underlining their efforts to further the careers of those who work for them.
There have even been those pointing out that a period afloat could be a preface to a fine job ashore in technical management or some other role, which did not necessitate getting up at midnight, in filthy weather.
It is easy to be a touch cynical about this sudden concern with the well-being of seafarers, but it is a measure of wider worries about the future and the difficulties of attracting and retaining competent people afloat. If you care about your industrial sector, there is clearly something wrong if the only people you can persuade to work for you are those who have no other choice.
You may suggest that we have always suffered from manpower crises, from the days when the press gang was phased out by the Royal Navy, to be succeeded in the commercial world by the crimps. In modern times, even with “international” manning, with the world being the shipowner’s oyster, the prospect of ships being unable to go to sea on account of a crew shortage weighed upon management minds.
The regular BIMCO-ICS surveys of manpower, the first to take a proper look at the realities of recruitment and retention based upon data, produced successive confirmation of a crisis just around the corner.
The advertised crises came and went, but somehow there has always been some pool of manpower that was plumbed to ensure that the worst never happened
There has always seemed to be something that unexpectedly came along to save the operators’ bacon and keep the ships sailing. In the late 1980s, it was the fall of the wall and the collapse of communism, which released onto the market large numbers of brilliantly trained, hardworking and cheap Eastern European officers, facilitating the release of large numbers of relatively expensive Western Europeans and the emergence of an international wage scale.
Then the arrival of Chinese and Southeast Asian crews ensured that the Indian and Philippine officers and the Eastern Europeans remained “affordable” in the great manpower bazaar.
The advertised crises came and went, but somehow there has always been some pool of manpower that was plumbed to ensure that the worst never happened – always somebody who will do the job cheaper and ensure that any really radical ways ships are operated does not become necessary.
And always, in a competitive industry predicated on derived demand, swinging between over-capacity and brief periods of boom, the compulsion to regard crew costs as a variable are constant. The best operators, who might like to pay more and recruit and retain the best people, are constrained by the lumpen cheap and cheerless who would steal their business. That’s the market for you.
Sadly, much of this is what we call 'optics' – tinkering around the edges and failing to change seafaring sufficiently to make it attractive.
But there are other factors at play today that combine to heighten the sense of impending crisis. As with those ashore, the connectivity of virtually everyone tends to keep seafarers better informed about life in general, and life afloat may seem singularly unattractive by comparison.
It does not help when there is endless chat about autonomy and the wonderful world of AI and all the jobs that will disappear or be diminished when this revolution gets going.
New generations of potential employees are less prepared than their predecessors to put up with the lives they lived. “Work-life balance” was not something people of earlier generations were even remotely concerned with, but it is front and centre of the young people of today. They do not suffer in silence, like their predecessors, but proclaim their discontent about tour lengths, lack of shore leave, bullying and harassment issues, pay, and conditions loudly and often.
So the next crisis might be rather harder to cope with, hence all the concern being expressed about the importance of welfare and well-being. But sadly, much of this is what we call “optics” – tinkering around the edges and failing to change seafaring sufficiently to make it attractive. It will need more than words.