Last I heard they were really hurting for RETs, but it’s been awhile. Basically you’ll get to watch movies in the radio room all day while bundled up in cold weather gear. I guess it’s decent pay for not doing anything, but the radio guys were also 6 months overdue last I saw, worse than any other billet. I would think you could do better with your qualifications and being a RET would be a special kind of hell, but I’m just speculating.
East Coast gets to go home every night half the year while still getting ship pay which is a good deal. The downside is everyone who lives in Norfolk wants those ships and will bust out the knee pads for the head office which is right down the street.
West Coast gets to sponsor green cards and have less office oversight.
Your best bet is to figure out whether you want to live in Norfolk or on a Pacific island. You won’t get much vacation so you’ll want to make a home where the ship is.
They have a bunch of ships and it’s a real roll of the dice for good, bad, or ugly.
SIU has plenty of jobs and decent pay, freedom to go home and take time off. But I feel like they don’t take care of their members as well as they should. I would use SIU to sail for a few years before getting a license and joining an officer’s union or going on to something else. The officer’s unions have good pay and good time off, you can make a good career with them.
That all makes sense, thanks. The more I think about RET, it sounds like it could be more of what I’m leaving, only on a Ship. RETs the only thing that is remotely close to my skills/certs/etc, though.
Thanks for the break down of East vs West differences, that was very helpful!
SIU is very interesting to me (damn you Joe Franta and Northwest Sailer ), but I worry about the very long time with essentially no pay, and likely no health insurance for me, or perhaps none just for my family (not sure). The Apprentice Program is very interesting, and seems like a really good deal if you can make it work.
I think you are greatly missing the difference in lifestyle/type of work between your current white collar desk job (at least it sounds that way) and working at sea, were even the officer position is basically blue collar and physical (at least for the first part of your career as an engineer)
Thanks for the information and insight. It sounds like they are not hurting for chief engineers, with such arduous requirements.
Is that still the case with pay? People still always say that east coast has a lower base and higher OT and west coast has higher base pay and lower OT. But when you look at the pay charts, west coast has higher base and much higher OT/penalty. Just confused if the charts are deceiving and not as they say?
@SymphonyOfDreams - Good advice. If you have a specialty you can exploit and you are single, you can find a niche and make decent money with little effort and keep your sanity. I worked my way into the job of ship’s carpenter cranking out dunnage on an ammo ship; a one-man department with a shop to which you have the only key and it’s a bosun mate billet.
I used to love the baffled look I would get when I told people unfamiliar with the business that I was a ship’s carpenter, a job that ceased to exist a couple of centuries ago.
@Lee_Shore Yes! If you can get a niche position in any industry, that is the ticket to relative happiness (or as happy as you can be at work). You just have to be careful it’s a niche you want, because I know–in tech anyway–some niches are empty because the task/job really really sucks.
