Seafarers in troubled waters E-Book

Fenna Klebert

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 101

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Living and working on board of cargo ships no longer has anything to do with the romantic notion of seafaring, as still believed by most consumers. Digitalization and globalization of logistics and supply chains have massively changed the maritime working environment. Seafarers currently find themselves in an extreme situation and suffer disproportionately on an increasing basis, from psychological stress - with severe consequences for the individual and also the diverse crew on board. The psychological stresses on board can be a challenge, leading to reduced work performance and, in the worst case, result in fatalities. Thus, mental health is becoming a relevant business factor as well as risk factor for shipping companies. Personnel policies need to be evaluated and measures must be taken. This book encourages a rethink. Team dynamics and leadership on seagoing vessels must be discussed resolutely. A paradigm shift is required in dealing with such a diverse group of international workers on board. Consistent support for crews, from personnel management can prevent individual tragedies and therefore safeguard important know-how in the maritime industry in the long term. The aim of this book is to illustrate the conditions and organizational structures on board, with the hope of triggering the much needed paradigm shift.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

PREFACE

MAYDAY MAYDAY, CAN YOU HEAR US?

State of Research

Stakeholder

Organisation on Board

SITUATION ON BOARD

Mental Health

Healthcare on Board

Factor Loneliness

Factors Leader ship and Group

Inter im Conclusion: The Human Factor

BUSINESS MANAGEMENT APPROACHES

Diversity Management

Team

Leadership Approaches

Transformational Leader ship

Shared Leader ship and Hierarchy

Feel Good Management

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR HR MANAGEMENT

Onboarding

Staff Appraisal

Introductory and Final Discussion

Appraisal Interview

WHO WILL ANSWER THE CALL?

PREFACE

The present work is late in every respect. And yet it is as topical as ever. Inspired by the author's personal experience in active seafaring, the next pages should inspire and empower many people.

All people who participate in global world trade as soon as they enter a supermarket or an electronics store, yet know little of the most important transportation system that keeps everything moving, maritime shipping.

All personnel managers, whether in maritime crewing or in other industries which demand more from employees than what the already overstrained working environment requires. Sometimes it is the smaller things that can change an entire organisation for the better (or for the worse).

All decision-makers ashore in the maritime industry who manage the fate of the shipping companies and thus the ships which sail the seas, thereby indirectly and directly determining the lives of the people on board every single day.

And not to forget, the most important group of stakeholders, all seafarers who are confronted with physical and technical challenges day after day. Who deal with their challenges in a highly professional manner. May this book give them the inspiration to understand their environment as a social challenge and to treat it accordingly.

This book can only be the beginning of something. It does not offer a complete solution, nor can it reform the entire human resources policy of the maritime industry. It is a discursive contribution to a change of mindset that is very slowly taking hold of this industry and putting people at the center; initially from a technical perspective, to be sure, but increasingly from a social one as well. From this point, we must continue to think, act, revise and improve. This applies to science as well as to practice.

I would therefore like to thank all the people who accompanied me especially in the early years of my professional career and who (for better or worse) have had a lasting impact on my understanding of teamwork, leadership, and togetherness. May the central idea of human-centered, dignified shipping inspire your growth.

Without a doubt, professions in the maritime industry are among the most exciting you can imagine. A real paradigm shift could convince more people of this.

"SOS an Heiligabend"1

Mayday Mayday, can you hear us?

"SOS on Christmas Eve" was the headline of the German news magazine SPIEGEL ONLINE on Christmas Eve 2020, recalling the hundreds of thousands of seafarers who were cut off from their homes in the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic. A much overdue article, in which the author Stefan Kruecken himself states that the majority of goods are transported by sea freight, but that awareness of the working conditions on board merchant ships among consumers is close to zero.2 However, the author disregards two points. Firstly, seafarers in what is known as "christliche Seefahrt" (English: Christian Seafaring) in German speaking countries, is by no means exclusively affiliated with the churches, so that Christmas stands out as a special event in the year for all of them. And secondly, even more seriously, the events at the end of 2020 reveal a system in which there is little space and hardly any resonance for the people at sea - 365 days a year.

Global maritime shipping is an incomparable industry. Although some of the many maritime stakeholders will be identified in the course of this work, the focus will be on the entity ship as the smallest possible organisational unit. The crew within their living and working environment represents the most elementary part of maritime shipping, as it is the key factor in the successful functioning of the ship as an entity and therefore the industry as a whole: "[...] a ship is a complex human-machine system, an interwoven set of sociotechnical systems, and human interaction is a crucial factor for the safe and efficient operation of the ship."3 A complex, interlocking system that is susceptible to failure precisely because of the indispensable human factor - human error is identified as the cause of a large proportion of all more or less serious shipping accidents. In addition, the maritime shipping industry has a higher mortality rate than comparative groups due to accidents, illnesses and suicides, as this publication will show.4 From a business perspective, the consequences are not only loss of material or disruptions to the voyage. With every extraordinary loss of staff, know-how is lost and at least costs are incurred through return transport and the replacement of the workforce at short notice. It therefore seems advisable to focus more consistently on the individual physical and psychological needs of the members of the ship's crew in order to create respectful conditions for them.

The following pages will therefore begin with a scientific classification and a systematic and problem-oriented presentation of the situation on board. The aim of this is to establish the human being as the subject of the following considerations. In the second part, organisational approaches will be used; both diversity management and leadership concepts will be taken into account in order to approach job satisfaction as an objective of personnel policy-making decisions. This is followed by the concretisation in the form of two design recommendations that could significantly shape cooperation on board. Finally, this transfer to the maritime world of work should encourage the industry to rethink outdated structures and labour policy measures that have only managed to persist in maritime shipping.

State of Research

At the beginning of the research, it became clear that the academic disciplines primarily concerned in the German-speaking world (namely nautical science and shipping management) have surprisingly little research interest in the problematic management of human labour on board. The book "Suizid und Männlichkeit. Selbsttötungen von Männern auf See, in der Wehrmacht und im zivilen Bereich, 1893- ca. 1986" about suicide aboard by the humanities scholar Nicole Schweig will not have much influence on the content, but it is a good example of how this obviously explosive topic is mostly tackled by authors from outside the original maritime sciences. Therefore, publications from various disciplines form the basis, whereby the particularly promising works mostly come from anglophone academia. Last but not least, the sources are confirmed or supplemented in some places by personal experiences that both the author of this book herself, as a former ship mechanic at sea, and members of the profession on board merchant ships interviewed by her were able to gather.

A number of studies will also be noted as a much-appreciated basis for all further strands of thought. Two of these have been commissioned by the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF, based in London): The 2016 report on seafarers' mental health5 was followed in 2019 by a comprehensive study6 by US medical experts Rafael Lefkowitz and Martin Slade. The book edited by psychologist Malcolm MacLachlan, which also involved some captains,7 will also provide insights and perspectives on mental health care on board. In addition, it is important to refer to the publication "Human Factors in the Maritime Domain" by the Australian Michelle R. Grech et al. which, although more than fifteen years old, refers very precisely and critically to the way cost-fixated shipping deals with its employees.8 More recently, Jürgen Neff (ed.) deals with the human (safety) factor in maritime shipping.9 This book will also find its way into the present work, with some exceptions, as it relates exclusively to the crew of bridges.

In addition to the "human factor", the topic of "decent work" is also introduced. In this context, the contribution by the economist Heide Gerstenberger in the anthology by Guido Becke et al.10 “The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Team Working and Collaborative Processes” by Eduardo Salas et al. also contains a promising contribution on group performance in extreme situations, which can be transferred well to the ship situation.11 A multi-faceted approach to the "International Dimensions of Organisational Behaviour" is provided in the book by the US economist Nancy J. Adler.12

The onboarding process, which is presented as one of the proposals for action at the end of the book, is a young and therefore not yet widely discussed approach. It is for this reason that the author relies mainly on the publications of economist Doris Brenner13 on the one hand and the economists around Klaus Moser14 on the other. The various manifestations of employee interviews are introduced with the help of the business economists around Wolfgang Mentzel15 and the economic and organisational psychologist Oswald Neuberger.

Stakeholder

As already indicated at the beginning, the maritime business operates as an extremely complex and global system in which the seafarers themselves are only granted a rather passive role. Contacting individual stakeholders proved to be difficult not only in the course of this study, but also for other researchers; other studies also complain that the willingness of shipping companies or insurers to provide data was limited.16 However, in order to provide as detailed a picture as possible of the environment in which the ship moves as an organisational unit, some of the maritime industry's interest groups will be presented.

First and foremost are the seafarers. Worldwide, around 1.6 million men and women work on seagoing vessels (as of 2017);17 on German merchant ships with a total of around 8200 employees, just over 500 are female and mainly work in the service sector.18 This is by no means a homogeneous group, neither in its entirety nor in the ship as a place to live and work. As Annika Schellbach also suggests,19 crews must be regarded as a highly diversified group, especially in terms of age structure, religious and cultural identity and (despite a low proportion of women) gender and sexual orientation. Transport language on board is mostly English, which can be a barrier to the health care discussed below. In addition, very different employment conditions and changing workplaces (classic regular occupations are a rare phenomenon, at least in global merchant shipping) make networking or even the establishment of workers' representations difficult.

This in turn affects the work of the trade unions. In Germany, the trade union ver.di represents the interests of German employees in the maritime and port industries. However, the mandate is not a particularly large one, given a traditionally rather sceptical attitude of German seafarers towards trade unions; only a few shipping companies have a trade union friendly climate, mostly in ferry companies. This is why the focus will be on the internationally active (not only, but also) seafarers' union ITF, which has commissioned the above-mentioned comprehensive studies. It has also been at the forefront of the fight against the archaic working conditions in the maritime shipping industry, especially since the start of the pandemic in 2020. ITF is also represented as an NGO in the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a specialised agency within the UN, where it primarily campaigns for safety and labour rights issues.20

Unfortunately, more often than not, the shipping companies, as well as – partly in-house – crewing agencies (which provide and place seafaring personnel worldwide), act as a contrary force in relation to a positive work environment on board. By outsourcing crew acquisition and management as well as deployment planning to these crewing agencies, the link between the maritime personnel and the shipping companies they ultimately work for is missing. Classical shipping companies, as Gerstenberger points out, no longer exist, as ownership and operation of a ship is now often the responsibility of different companies. Rather, costfixed chartering is the main factor determining the day-to-day business and the company's policies, so that, for example, possible safety concerns on board are relegated to the background when decisions are made about the itinerary.21