I still cant believe there are people on this thread advocating for mariners to make LESS money…
There are only so many dollars available for wages in marine transportation. Far far too many of those dollars are misapplied to paying illiterate lazy longshoremen an average of $140,000 per year. The are also a lot of fat-asses sitting around collecting over inflated pay checks in most offices.
I’d like to see Mariners make a very good living with pay proportionate to license level, skills, responsibility, and their contribution to profit.
We were talking about the cost cutting necessary to keep deep water drilling economically feasible so that there will be mariner jobs supporting it. I suspect that mariner wages are such a tiny portion of the total cost of deep water drilling, that it’s hardly worth mentioning from an oil company perspective.
Whatever slice of the pie goes to boat companies and Mariners, it ought to be allocated in a sensible value driven way. Paying mudboat ABs the same wage as a crew boat captain is absurd. Hell, a lot of the inland tugboat captains in the Gulf only make about $450.
If a green mudboat mate is worth $750 a day, that sure as hell tells me that an experienced offshore tugboat captain ought to be worth a lot more.
There was (is) a lot of irrational exuberance in mudboat salaries.
Of course the mudboats would not have to pay anywhere near as much if they got rid of the Dr. Duet types rejecting half of their mostvexperienced applicants.
So more of the vessels profit should have went to the owners??
[QUOTE=coldduck;174687]So more of the vessels profit should have went to the owners??[/QUOTE]
No, the vessel day rate should have been lower. The whole point of this discussion is about making the exploration process more economically viable, not making boat companies more money. Part of the reason vessel day rates were so high was because crew costs were so high. The clients had to green light the raises.
He was comparing mud boat personnel versus standard tug wages. Tugs at the time weren’t making the extremely high day rates that the mud boats were. Dayrates for the boats also came up before our pay did.
I’m sure some disagreement can be found on why day rates were so high and if crew wages had anything to do with it.
[QUOTE=coldduck;174708]Dayrates for the boats also came up before our pay did.[/QUOTE]
The crew wages are a part of the vessel day rates…
The point of being in business is to charge what the market will bare - everything else is socialism.
If some company or sector of an industry feels it must raise its pay to attract workers when the need for workers is high then good! Market force in action. When the need for workers tanks and wages drop then good! Market force again. This is how we send zombie corporations and losers to the dustbin.
Companies were overspending on crews, new ships and God knows what else. Crewmen were equally buying McMansions, jacked out trucks and good times. If a company or crewman lived within their means they would be doing well and living in security.
Are you all saying we need Big Brother to protect us from ourselves? This silly talk about about limiting wages of the few for the good of the many is a page out of some little red book.
Thank you!! Buncha geniuses rationalizing why mariner pay needs to be lowered. No! Just no.
Just saying the mariner job market needs to be more rational so the oil majors continue to fund more deep water projects and hire more boats which creates more jobs for mariner’s at reasonable salary levels. Let market forces work. No government mandates or price fixing by the companies.
yea, maybe attract quality Mariners for a good wage, job security, ridiculous entry requirements, and a good job as opposed to just a huge wage. All they did was throw money at the subject. I know what you mean.
They increased their crew costs by at least 20 percent with all those ridiculous physicals.
If they advertised their jobs, bothered to review resumes, and invited strong candidates for interviews, they could get better people and cut their crew costs significantly. Instead they promise big money and run a lottery. Come and take your chances. Walk in our door. Maybe you’ll be in the right place at the right time.
This is why their “managers” are worth a lot less than their mariners.
Waiting for Josh Reid to pop in here at any moment and unleash a rant against “river trash hater’s” or some such.
So if these illiterate coon-ass ABs were getting paid $200/day and not $450/day then the global petroleum exploration industry would still be a job producing behemoth? That, and crewing with a few extra hands on a bunch of coon-ass dinghies, is the main driver of global petroleum exploration collapse?
Gosh! I never knew how GOM manning and AB pay raised contract costs which made exploration uneconomical which resulted in a global glut of oil and a collapse of oil prices with the loss of trillions (with a ‘T’) of dollars of wealth.
Yes, yes! It’s all their faults for accepting wages that was offered to them. After all it wasn’t Big Brother Government directing their pay increases. It wasn’t Big Bad Union Boss extorting higher wages. Death to overpaid coon-ass ABs!
no. The point is that because wages got so high, they have been identified as out of line when they had to re-evaluate costs in the downturn in the market. Oil company man sees this and says why pay an illiterate AB that much, one of the many costs they cut in the overall scheme.
Were they out of line? The employer didn’t think so, the employee didn’t either. Government and union never got involved. So how can anyone assert that, at the time, the wages were out of line?
Was it a bubble, like housing, dot-com or tulips? Sure it was. Bubbles form and burst all the time. But let’s not blame the effect on the cause.
The cause of the bubble was global. It formed in Riyadh, London and New York. It was from corporate board rooms and at hedge fund retreats. Oil was the new black. Everyone was getting rich.
A teeny-tiny fleck of a speck of a mote of this vast new ocean of wealth trickled down to a bunch of guys who go to sea for a living. These are the folks that a few on these boards are blaming for the collapse of the bubble.
It’s blaming the butterfly for the typhoon. Maybe in chaos theory the AB wage did cause global financial collapse but let’s be real.
I’m not blaming overpaid Mariners.
[QUOTE=DeckApe;174744]Gosh! I never knew how GOM manning and AB pay raised contract costs which made exploration uneconomical which resulted in a global glut of oil and a collapse of oil prices with the loss of trillions (with a ‘T’) of dollars of wealth.[/QUOTE]
You never realized that crew day rates raised contract costs???
The high contact costs didn’t result in the glut of oil, even someone as oblivious as you knows that. But lower day rates would mean boats and rigs would still be working with the reduced price of oil.
When oil prices went stupidly high the oil companies were throwing money at drilling operations. That allowed the service companies to charge insane rates for equipment, rates that were known a while ago to be unsustainable, even at high oil prices.
C.captain started this thread with an article about the need for deepwater projects to reduce costs in order to be viable, and the premise that this going to be difficult for the oil majors to do.
Saltine pointed out that at his OSV company, crew accounts for half the cost of operation.
Presumably, OSV costs are significant enough for the oil companies to become a worthwhile target for cost cutting. Anything that is half of an OSV company’s operating costs, is a huge target for cost cutting. Therefore, it seems that both the oil companies and the OSV companies will make a serious effort to cut crew costs.
Compared to the rest of the maritime industry, OSV mariner salaries grew too much too fast and got out of hand — compared to other mariner salaries.
For example, there is no way that an OSV AB who probably holds an MMC with AB-OSV or AB Limited and is apt to be a high school drop out is worth $100,000 per year, when that is close to what a tugboat mate, that is apt to be an academy grad and holds a license as second mate and master of towing is making. Either the AB is overpaid or the mate is underpaid, or a combination of both.
The OSV companies have already cut crew costs, reducing extra crew, and salaries.
If the news articles are right, and lower oil prices are going to be the new normal, and deepwater projects must have reduced costs in order to attract investment, it logically follows that typical oil patch mariner wages are going to be lower than in the past. That’s not to say that the most experienced and talented mariner’s, who have scarce skills, or make the biggest contributions to profit, will not continue to enjoy higher than average salaries. Certainly they should.
I agree on the ABs and port captains, the mangers making less than captains has always been an issue in the GOM; it creates animosity and hurts recruiting and retaining management with strong seagoing experience that are also qualified to mangage the business side.
As far as extra people, a lot of it is client driven; you need 2 DPOs on watch any time you’re next to the facility (most companies) and it’s a 24 hour operation, so there is 4, many require 3 on deck rigging, so there is 6… And so forth. The COI might work to take the boat for a transit (and be sufficient) but no work is going to get done. Companies also drank their own cool aid, and had extra people on hand to prepare for all the new construction on order.
QUOTE=tugsailor;174606]The best way to reduce crew costs would be to cut back crew sizes, especially all those “training mates”, to not too much more than the COI requires. Also, cut back on some of the extra credentials that companies ask for beyond what the USCG requires. A lot of companies excess personnel costs are self inflicted or oil company inflicted.
Those $425 a day high school drop out ABs need to be more like $225.
A captain should be paid a lot more than a port captain that goes home every night.
Sure, the Ops Manager and senior managers should make more.
It will be interesting to see how much extra personnel and training the oil companies demand next time. They have to make up their minds how many sets of suspenders and belts they want to wear.[/QUOTE]