How to improve your tug company?

I think it could be a boat by boat basis. If you’re on a boat and everyone loves that schedule, great keep it. If you get to a boat and everyone hates it, the crew should be allowed to change it to something that complies with work/rest hour regulations. The office doesn’t work 6/6, why the hell should I?

2 Likes

Even a dept by dept basis as I mentioned earlier. A chief & an assistant should be able to work whatever they want as long as the engine room is manned 24/7 & the Chief is on call when the assistant needs him. But for some folks in NY Harbor suggesting anything other than 6&6 is the equivalent to talking bad about Jesus or sleeping with their wife.

5 Likes

For some… Chief and what assistant?

2 Likes

What do you suggest if not 6x6? There isn’t enough crew mandated to do 4x8 and the oddball 5x7x7x5 are very irregular.

1 Like

I agree it isn’t feasible to add crewmembers but disagree with you about what is regular or irregular. I mentioned the QHSE lady, the New Zealand CIMS training & an assistant who wanted to try something else. That assistant was in bad health, had a heart attack & diabetes & was fighting to save his life with lifestyle changes. His cardiologist told him a 6&6 schedule for 21 days straight was the worst thing he ever heard. The Doc was surprised we all weren’t dead already. The QHSE lady had all types of information about different studies of what worked for different people. If I had to recruit new people to the tug industry or retain the ones I had I would let guys try different things to see what made them happy & healthy.

If you’re talking about a 5 man crew then let the 2 AB’s do 12 hours on 12 hours off with the understanding that if the make-up or workload requires both AB’s on deck at the same time then you get up no questions asked and then go back to the rack.

1 Like

I’m a little amused by this thread. The answers thus far given should fall under a whole different thread: What do you want from Santa Claus this year?

How to improve your tug company? The only thing that will improve any maritime company is more gross receipts. In short, more profit. With more profit, the Xmas list becomes more possible. With less money, you get what you got. So, a rational answer to the question, “How to improve your tug company?” becomes “Every crewmember needs to work more diligently and more intelligently to provide customer service in what is essentially a service industry job.”

Of course, everyone reading that answer is laughing their ass off.

So it’s back to the Xmas List, which is a legitimate question.

  1. Pay-From a lifetime of observation, the desideratum for an unlicensed mariner is matching the total average household income (as defined by the U.S. BLS) for the area the mariner lives in.

  2. Benefits: health insurance isn’t a problem for a mariner without dependents, but an expensive issue for those with wife/children (male spouses don’t command high premiums). High-deductible HSA plans are the only way to go for a single mariner, IMO, and at most companies they cost the mariner nothing in premiums.

Most young mariners don’t really care about 401K. When they do, having a matching plan (we match at 36% on the dollar) does get people’s attention.

  1. Scheduling and time off: Where I work we have guys who want to sail as little as 96-days a year and as many as 192. The closer a company can get to making all of them happy, the better retention is. Once our captains began working mostly 24-days on and 27-days off, with some getting as many as three months off back-to-back, you couldn’t get rid of them.

Salary agreements; Where I work nearly all the officers are on salary agreements. The agreement specifies how many days they will work in a year, and their annual salary. They get paid twice monthly in equal installments based on the annual. The salary system greatly increased officer retention.

Captains hiring and firing crews? Firing makes sense. Hiring: I’ve had captains involved in the hiring process. Everyone whose been through it has been amazed at how difficult it is to hire a good quality worker who has 50/50 chance of sticking around, and of being useful in the process. Doesn’t matter what year you’re talking about, every company in the USA --maritime or shoreside–is looking for the same worker you’re looking for. So what makes your company better than them?

Once the captains had a taste of the vetting process for hiring they wanted nothing to do with it again.

Holy Dooley! We’ve been doing here what everyone else tell us is crazy dangerous, for nigh on 40 years, and we’ve never lost anyone on a voyage. Don’t apologize for being a safety nazi.

1 Like

One last thing: Holiday pay.
Over the year I’ve bought it up to officers. Most say they don’t want it, once you explain the truth of the matter:
Any company decides how much they are going to pay their employees annually. Think of this pay as a pie. You can divide the pie into big slices called wages and little slivers called holiday pay. Or you can just make everyone’s normal wage-slice slightly bigger, and not pay holiday pay. But the pie itself isn’t getting any bigger. You’re just slicing it different ways.

The long term employees, who on average sail fewer holidays than other people, say no way is the new guy getting any portion of their otherwise bigger slice. Nor should pay be decided by a vagary of the calendar. So our officers have always voted simply for slightly bigger normal slices for everyone, and no holiday pay.

1 Like

Health insurance must be real or it’s not a benefit

High deductible health insurance is a time bomb with modest value. So is insurance with poor claims payment.

As long as companies are on a level playing field when bidding on customer work, it doesn’t matter how much they have to pay for wages and benefits

Most of the tug and barge business does not have any competition from other sectors.

Other operating costs have become so high that wages are not as much of an expense as they use to be.

That might be what they are telling you or what one person is telling you on behalf of the crew but I never heard any mariner say they didn’t want a token of appreciate with holiday pay for working on Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Years. Every Union contract at sea or on land that I’ve been a part of had a stipulation about holiday pay. Like your statistic that less than 2% of your employees had Covid19, I’m baffled with the claim that most of your officers don’t want an extra something for being away from their families on holidays. I could possiblely understand if you started by having 4 holiday double days (Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Years) but cut them out & gave all your employees a 1.1% raise instead. But to never have them to start with then persuade most of your employees 1.1% of their pay is actually holiday pay is farfetched to me.

It’s easy for guys that don’t work on Holidays to give up holiday pay.

Who cares all that much about Presidents Day, or Memorial Dsy or Labor Day?

I’m probably not going to work over Thanksgiving or Christmas no matter what, but if I was going to, I sure as hell wouldn’t do it for less than several extra days of pay.

1 Like

Would had have loved 401k matching, Even at 36%. Hollidays were extra, and appreciated that. whoopdee doo. Made my own way. Did not buy an F250 every couple of years. Ran my vehicles into the ground before a new purchase.

Nobody. But I liked the increase in my check!

I was working 8/4/4/8 before I left tugging, it worked in the harbor docking ships and on the tow wire offshore.

It can be. Depends on how high the deductible is. Our HSA plan works out well. I’m on it out of choice.

My “high deductible" is $1800 annually. But even as an old man I’ve seldom if ever paid that much annually. Meanwhile, the HSA component of the plan actually means I make money on my health insurance. I don’t pay for premiums, and the money I put in the HSA every paycheck is non-taxable, reducing my taxable income at year’s end. At the same time, the money is invested, like a 401k/IRA, so I’m making a percentage on it every year.

When I do go to the doctor, and there is in inevitable charge that health insurance doesn’t pay, I just use my HSA card. Yet the account keeps growing, so so far it’s a good deal.

A young person can easily save $1800 in their HSA in a year. Two, if they’re spendthrifts. Observing our young mariners, the only time they need to got the doctor is on the job, and the company pays for that. God forbid they do get into a car wreck ashore without a top-upped HSA, $1800 isn’t going to bankrupt them. The main thing is to keep putting money into the HSA, reducing tax liability and creating wealth. It’s just another retirement account, as far as I’m concerned. The other great thing abut the HSA is you can use it to pay for anything medical, for you or your family members. OTC medicine, heating pads, whatever/whenever.

All I can speak to is the company I work at. I don’t know about other companies. Where I work wages and fuel are the two biggest costs, and they are about equal.

2 Likes

I’m baffled when mariners don’t understand that a company isn’t going to allocate one more cent to wages than they have planned. There’s no free lunch. There is only the pie, and most mariners don’t understand the pie.

If you like holiday pay, have at it. The companies you work for probably like it too, because it makes it seem they are paying you more. When in reality, you are making slightly less on all other days, to make up for the holiday pay you may or may not get, based on the calendar and luck. If that makes you happy, and your company happy, then go to sleep content.

It reminds me of how big supermarket chains started asking customers to “join" the store, and use a membership number for each purchase. The real purpose was to track your buying history, for a number of data purposes. You can buy without using the membership number, but you pay more. So everyone signed up and uses the number.

But the thing is, the “lower” price you pay is just the price you paid before the whole thing started. The non-membership price is an inflated price to make it seem you are actually getting a deal, when in fact you are simply paying the original price. Such is marketing, and holiday pay is marketing.

As of now, in a company of 110 people, split equally between shoreside and mariner components, there have been 3 reported infections. All mariners on their time off. Is that a lot or a little? Don’t know. We are at 95% vaccinated for the whole company. A lot or little? Don’t know.

That’s one sure way to a decent retirement. Hard to drum into young fellas heads though. A new F250 has got a helluva allure.

Agree sir. All that new stuff is alluring, buy it after made your bed.

Went from tugs to ships and this right here is the best part of not being on tugs. I worked on an ATB where the old man did 12s and it was great. I could not personally handle 6 on/off. Shame is that I like tugs, I could see myself having a career on tugs were it not for that. The 4 on 8 off I do out here is soooooooooooo much nicer. It is much nicer feeling actually rested when I get up for watch and having some personal recreation time as opposed to some asshat, power tripping tug captain telling me to get to work during my off hours.

3 Likes

Sounds like too many tug companies. Were I to guess, they were recently sold to SaltChuck on the west coast.