I agree with you. But the laws of economics argues against us. Housing like everything else goes to the highest bidder. Seattle, in a pandemic, a city which has been portrayed (ludicrously) in certain media as “burning” in 2020 from civil unrest, still grew 1.8%, not far off the average of 2.5% of the last ten years. House prices jumped 13.8%. People keep flooding in, unfortunately.
There’s another thing I’ve noticed about young seamen. They’re of a better quality overall than we used to get twenty years ago, but they want to sail less. When I started going to sea, we worked about 216 days a year. Now the average guy wants to work more like 144 days/year.
We offer more work, but they don’t want it. I’m not complaining. Burnout was another problem in the old days. Part of the difference may be that the pay scale is much greater now than in the old days. But it may be too that these young people just have more going on ashore.
There is optimism in the wind industry, there will be lots of new jobs world wide on Crew Transfer Vessels, but I think some of the smaller ones only have about 3 crew members, some of the bigger ones have more.
Agree that there will be opportunity, but any big petroleum transportation company is simply going to replace whatever lost revenue from oil with wind service/installation…you already see it happening. Oil from start to finish is simply a much more labor intensive industry than renewables and a lot of the maritime industry’s prospects have relied on oil as a major revenue source for a long time. Problem is wind, like a lot of renewables doesn’t create a lot of long term jobs other than maintenance. My company has never done much with petroleum but they are in the process of upgrading/buying boats in the hopes that they can be more appealing to major wind players…
The oil patch created to many easy licenses and too many licensed mariners. When the oil patch collapsed that flooded the rest of the country with far too many desperate mariners.
Licensed mariners are a dime a dozen, but guys that actually have the specialized skills and experience for some trades are in short supply.
Last week I was talking about mariners wages versus inflation. I didn’t have the national BLS data then but I have the book now. Not making a point about anything. I just love reviewing hard data.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics gets the data from sending questionnaires to payroll departments of companies. The job classifications are the ones used by BLS. They don’t break things down by licenses, etc,
National Numbers
Captains, Mates, Pilots
Year # people employed / Mean hourly wage / mean annual wage
2016 36,270 / $39.19 / $81,520
2006 29,170 / $27.43 / $57,060
Change between 2010 and 2106= +64.9%
Ship Engineers
Year # people employed / Mean hourly wage / mean annual wage
2016 9,750 / $35.64 / $74,120
2006 14,190 / $28.53 / $59,340
Change between 2000 and 2016= +54.1%
Sailors and Marine Oilers
Year # people employed / Mean hourly wage / mean annual wage
2016 32,530 / $22.20 / $46,170
2006 31,690 / $15.73 / $32,710
Change between 2000 and 2016= +59.2%
National Rate of Inflation, 2000 to 2016:
Overall 43%
Housing 44% (This particular number does not come directly from BLS, but from a website that says it uses BLS data).
