I admired the decision of a captain on a MSC ship I was on when he came aboard at about one in the morning while we were moored alongside in Manama. He found the OS on gangway watch sound asleep on his back with an empty vodka bottle by his side. The captain woke him up and told him in no uncertain terms he had one hour to pack up his gear and get off the ship. He assigned an AB and a mate to follow him to his room and keep eyes on him.
It must have been a long lonely night for the idiot, sitting on the pier waiting for sunup and transportation but it got a clear message across to any potential slackers.
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It has become far too difficult to fire people, even in the non-union environment. The bigger the company, the bigger the HR department, the harder it is.
At most small companies, all I have to do is say: “this is not the right boat for you; I’m Sending you home. Your not fired from the company, but your fired from this boat.” I don’t say that lightly. If a guy is likeable and a good shipmate, I’ll overlook other shortcomings. I don’t fire many people.
One problem is that the office is apt to hire a new guy who is much worse.
I worked at one mid-sized company (that thought it was big sophisticated company) that would not let me fire two crewmen that needed firing. Nor would they move them to other boats. In fairness, HR was not the problem; it was a bad port captain. So, I found a better job. A couple months later one of those guys got hurt and flunked his post-incident drug test. About a year later I heard the other one was in prison on a drug conviction.
A captain needs to be able to fire whenever he thinks it’s necessary.
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The worst are the big companies that have punishment ships.
Our ship was top of the fleet but after we were sent to India it became a dumping ground for misfits. HR couldn’t get rid of rhese guys so they just reassigned them to the worst location in the fleet and hoped they quit. Many did but enough trouble makers stayed put that the rest of us eventually quit and a big accident followed.
P.S. about 1 in 10 of these misfits turned out to be excellent at their job and got booted over to India because they refused to do anything half assed and were vocal about calling bullshit where they saw it. I loved these guys! At one point we had a string of incompetant managers and these guys ran each one off in record time.
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In the union environment it’s far easier to fire people. HR at the company is not involved except to forward the paperwork. Everything is done shipboard.
The letter of warning and DFC (Discharge for Cause) letter and supporting documentation (witness letter from an AB and smartphone photo of the chart with no DRs for example) is scanned and emailed to HR, they call the union and request a relief.
If the person being fired squawks when he gets back to the hall the union will request the documentation. HR forwards the required to the union. As long as everything is in order that’s the end of it.
The non-union company HR may want to avoid hiring more people or whatever but the union has no skin in the game if someone gets justly fired for cause.
Worse case scenario is running foreign the company prefers to wait till the ship is back in the states, running coastwise however that’s not an issue.
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As we are limited to the original supposition, that officers and unlicensed would be together in the same mega-union, we should remember the unlicensed would outnumber the officers.
Eventually the unlicensed would control the mega-union. Mean officers, undesirable masters/CHENGs and ‘unfair’ treatment would be curtailed. If the captains, CHENGs and officers wanted to keep their jobs in the only union available they would have to learn to be very nice to unlicensed.
This unintended consequence would be disastrous for some unaccustomed to taking orders from unlicensed.
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The AFL-CIO is a federation of unions.
Maybe instead of a mega union another layer between the AFL-CIO and unions but only maritime unions. Could be made up of existing maritime union officials.
Mariners at small companies should still be able to organize without having to join the single union.
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The Canadian Guild is an officer’s union.
Ok. Maybe two closely affiliated unions: a licensed Guild, and an unlicensed union.
I think the right way to manage the Guild, would be to use a corporate model: a board of directors composed of mariners and others limited to no more than 6 years in any 12 year period; and an executive management team composed of labor and transportation professionals to actually run the day to day affairs of the union. Compensation needs to be linked to performance. It needs to be set up so that it will be well managed, and so that a band of entrenched slugs and thugs cannot hijack the Union for their own enrichment.
There is some way to set up an effective union that is not overwhelmed by corruption.
That is, historicaly, the primary point of a guild… to set and maintain a high level of quality. The secondary point of a guild, historically, is to make it difficult for new members to join.
This combination of high quality and low competition is what drives prices for guild items up.
Yes, SIU Canada for unlicensed. I’m not sure whether there are any other unlicensed unions.
The main problem is the current union leaders underbidding each other in a race to the bottom to benefit themselves without a care about the membership. Anything that stops the underbidding would be a big improvement.
One or two unions would have a larger impact in negotiations or a strike, as well as cost efficiencies from economies of scale.
I’m not sure that’s a correct assumption, the leadership may be responding to the membership. The membership would benefit short-term from more jobs.
You mean that union mariners are stupid short term thinkers that would rather work for less and less instead of having a few less jobs that paid well. If they would have any less.
I can believe that. I wouldn’t care if they weren’t dragging non-union wages down too.
As someone that has been a member of 3 different Unions, I’ve found that getting a large group to agree on anything is next to impossible! Now please don’t think that I’m against this idea, I’m all for it.
Back when 333 had NYH sown up, all the companies worked under the same contract so for the most part labor costs were the same company to company. If you wanted more money, you stayed at one company and built up the vacation days which most took that pay at the end of the year. So, for this idea of Mega Union to work I think that having the SAME contract. The same contract company to company is the only way to make it work. A CE on a certain size Tanker would make the same no matter where they worked,
During the later part of my sailing career, I found that way to many only cared what was in their pay envelope! Hell, I watched guys complaining that it was not fair that guys with Families got the same pay but received more benefits due to having a Wife and Kids. The way they saw it the Unmarried guys should get more pay due to their benefits costing less.
To me having one Union for all Licensed and Non-Licensed Mariners would be a bad idea and I agree with what others have said. We need at the least, Two Defined Groups even if they are within the same Union so they can operate as separate entities when it comes to contracts and disputes.
Going back in time, look at what happened in NYH when 333 went on Strike, well actually it was a lockout. It did not take long before all the guys laid off in the GOM came running North for jobs. Hell, a lot of them signed up way before the 333 Membership even had a chance to vote on the contract! Until we can get a large enough group to decide that enough is enough this will never work and the old saying about herding Cats come to mind as it might be easier.
Spend some time on Social Media (Twitter, Facebook etc) and you will find that guys complain about a lot of the same things but (from what I’ve read) actually have decided on jobs on whether the company had “Better” Wifi than another. To some it seems as though better Wifi and Sat TV (with the proper channel lineup) is a major tipping point while job hunting.
Before the GOM dried up, we all saw Guys and Gals, giving up jobs that were both stable and decent paying to try and get the Big Bucks the GOM Companies were paying. I remember trying to explain to a good friend that while the money looked great it would be short term as the GOM is volatile and any big rise in pay is sooner than later met with pay cuts when the crash comes. Even some guys that have been through some of these crashes made the jump as the possibility of making that money was too much to pass up! A lot of them are still looking for work.
During my 30± years of sailing, I will not say that I never made a move for more daily money but for the most part, I looked at the Benefits first. To me the idea of having a Pension and a good Health Care was more important than a extra couple of dollars in my pocket.
Seeing this come to life would be a great thing but how to go about it escapes me.
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I certainly agree that all contracts should be the same and expire at the same time.
That’s why I said that the union should negotiate a master contract with a shipowners association, rather than separate contracts with individual companies. Isn’t that what the longshoremen do?
If there has to be a strike, it should be all member striking all the companies nationwide seeking the same things. That way, it would not be possible for the companies to do a lockout.
The trend in America is way from the traditional defined benefit pension plans to 401k style defined contribution plans. While a defined benefit plan is better upon retirement, they have become too expensive, unpredictable, and likelyto go bankrupt. I don’t think it’s practical to buck the trend. A 401k style plan for the new union going forward would make the pension issue much simpler.
Guys in the legacy union pension plans could make a choice to: switch to the new plan, stay with the old plan, or do a combination of both.
If unemployed workers were offered longshoreman jobs at 90% of union rates they’d be plenty of takers.
The choice isn’t between a high paying job and a low paying job. It’s a choice of a lower paying job and no job.
You mean: a choice between a real union job with good wages and benefits and a little longer wait in the union hall between jobs vs. phoney union jobs created by poaching jobs from other unions with underbidding in a race to the bottom, so that the wait at the hall between ships will be a little shorter?
Whatever the unions are doing it isn’t changing the number of ships, tugs, barges, etc. trading, or the number of union jobs on them.
As ships, ATBs,and barges become much larger and more technologically advanced, the total number for mariners decreases.
A lot of jobs have been lost for another simple reason. The number of mariners is no longer large enough, the jobs no longer pay well, and the union representation is so fragmented and ineffective that Congress can no longer justify maintains the big corporate welfare programs for US flag shipping.
The unions are not organizing non-union companies, at least not on any scale. I suspect that the total number of union berths is going down fairly quickly. A lot of non-union mariners are making more than union wages with more job security, no wasted time waiting around in union halls with a bunch of drunks, and no interference in their jobs from union thugs and slugs who actually represent the employers. No one wants their company organized by the type of scumbag bottom feeding unions we have now. If the unions stay the way the are now, the number of union jobs should go to zero.
The number of ships is determined by the amount of Jones Act cargo, the amount of cargo available under cargo preferences, and the size of government welfare programs for shipping companies to supposedly “create good paying jobs.” Nothing the existing unions are doing creates any more jobs. It’s a zero sum game, the existing unions just steal jobs from each other at ever lower wages.
The unions use to create leverage that brought non-union wages up. Now the unions work far too cheap and drive non-union wages down.
Either fix the unions so that they raise wages and create union jobs by organizing more companies, or get rid of the unions before they do anymore harm.
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By and large seniority only comes into play at the union hall. The union halls were set up to prevent discrimination, favoritism, and patronage in the form of payoffs to hiring agents. The officers unions promoted the hiring hall under the concept of professionalism i.e. that a person holding a valid merchant mariners license exhibited a base line standard of competency. The qualified person who had been waiting the longest for a job, got the job. To my knowledge the actual maritime officers unions (MEBA / MM&P) all have some version of right of selection for officers at the management level (the only proviso being that union members in good standing have preference over persons off the street.) This is the case with the MEBA, the MM&P used to have company specific, company approved preferential hiring lists for senior officers. In the MEBA having the permanent job prevents you from being transferred to another company ship without your agreement. It always made me laugh when I worked at companies without union representation and when layoffs would loom shipboard personnel would talk about how they would be the last person to be laid off because they had seniority. The company did what ever they wanted and kept their favorites and sent the others down the gangway. Seniority is one of those things that works against you for a while in your career and then for you the rest of your career. As a hawsepiper, I couldn’t get a job with the MEBA companies in the mid-80s until they started requiring the companies to use the hiring hall for deck officers. And when I got a job, I kept the job unlike a number of the company hires who were academy graduates.
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If a union offered to work a port for 90% of current longshoremen wage there would be no reason that the union that held the jobs would underbid. How does that make sense?
More likely if they felt threatened they would offer to reduce future cost of living wages or similar.
That’s the truth. When I was sailing third and second mate nobody at the union gave a shit about what I thought. Now when I sit at the big boy table as a active master they treat every word I say as gospel.
Of course I’m still talking the same old bs, just with little more wear and tear.
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For example, my understand is that AMOs entire business model is to underbid MMP and MEBA to take contracts, ships, and jobs away from MMP and MEBA.
Would anyone say that AMO has “created” jobs for mariners, or improved wages?
I have watched one tugboat company play MMP Inland, IBU, SIU and Local 5000 against each other for years to keep wages low. They have also at times converted some of the captains and mates into non-union “management.”
The maritime unions have simply cannibalized each other.
I don’t understand the point you were trying to make about some union underbidding the Longshoremen. With the exception of a handful of IBU Longshoremen (who are affliliated with the Longshoremen Union) that load barges on the Duwamish River, and the IBU guys on the Delta Western fuel dock in Dutch (they wanted to be organize by the longshoremen, not IBU), the Longshoremen have no competition. Well there are a few non-union stevedores employed directly by private docks in a few places, but that’s not too significant.
If any new union tried to take jobs from the Longshoremen, they would shut down the entire port, if not the entire coast.
As I understand it, the ILWU has the entire West Coast and the ILA has the entire East Coast. They don’t bid against each other for more jobs for the membership. I believe that the Longshoremen negotiate master contracts with the same wages and benefits at all employers and all ports on a coast. It’s the same deal and a level playing field for everyone. For the Longshoremen it’s been a race to excessive wages and the retention of a lot of unnecessary jobs.
One could argue that none of the unions are creating jobs for mariners since none of the mariner unions are in the shipbuilding business. AMO did provide initial crewing for a slew of recent new builds for Crowley and Pasha and reflags for Crowley and ARC.