Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Exploring Employment Condition Dilemmas: An Interview Study with Seafarers

2007; Globeedu Group; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2277-5846

Jiunn-Liang Guo, Kung-Don Ye, Gin‐Shuh Liang,

Marine and Coastal Research

This research explores the dilemmas of seafarers concerning employment conditions. To gain a thorough understanding, one of the authors boarded a Taiwanese container vessel to sail with a mixed national crew for twenty days. The author investigated the perceptions and reflections of Taiwanese seafarers toward their current employment conditions through 30 semi-structured interviews with 12 crew-members, supplemented by personal observations. Results revealed that the recruitment of Taiwanese seafarers has been affected seriously by the global competition of the shipping industry and certain domestic circumstantial factors. This study also identified two main factors, the diminishing recruitment opportunity and the low incentive to enter seafaring, contributing to the deterioration of Taiwanese seafarers' employment conditions. In addition, we found that most Taiwanese seafarers were eager for a seafaring policy to protect their employment security as well as to improve their well-beings. Introduction In the early 1970s, there was a severe shortage of seafarers in the traditional maritime nations and the owners recruited seafarers from the Far East (Moreby, 2004). Several Taiwanese seafarers have also joined the international shipping industry. According to the study of Chen (1998), more than thirty thousands Taiwanese seafarers worked aboard merchant vessels in 1978. However, following the Taiwanese economic developments and the interactions of international seafaring markets, the recruitment opportunities of Taiwanese seafarers decreased gradually. Until the beginning of 2004, only 3,770 national seafarers served in the major Taiwan shipping companies (Chen, 2004). Obviously, the change in seafaring profession was considerably larger for Taiwanese seafarers. Alderton and Winchester (2002) showed that seafarers are at the center of a complex assemblage of interests which situates ship owners and seafarers in the fluid and, sometimes, volatile legal, political, and social circumstances. Kitchen (1980) also argued that seafaring men of all sections of the community have been the most ignored and the worst treated. How about the conditions of Taiwanese seafarers? How is the inside process of the seafaring profession affected by the interactions of international seafaring markets and the economic developments in Taiwan? The maritime manpower survey jointly commissioned by the Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO) and the International Shipping Federation (ISF) revealed that Taiwan was one of the largest employers of foreign seamen in 1995 (Li & Wonham, 1999). The result of Chen's survey (2004), shown as Table 1, further revealed that nearly half of the employment opportunities of Taiwanese ship officers were taken over by foreign seafarers. Comparatively, ship officers on Greek and Greek-owned ships, i.e. Flags of Convenience (FOC) ships2, mainly consist of Greek seafarers: 95.3% and 80.7% respectively in 1996 (Sambracos & Tsiaparikou, 2001). Similarly, 95.7% and 66.0% of all ship officers employed were UK officers on board UK fleet and UK owned nonUK fleet, respectively, in 1995 (McConville & Glen, 1997). Clearly, the employment opportunities for Taiwanese citizens as ship officers are less than those in traditional maritime nations. Furthermore, the employment conditions of Taiwanese ratings, having been thoroughly neglected, are now nearly hopeless. For instance, Hsu (1997) argued that ship ratings'jobs, being labor intensive, have failed to correspond with the need of economic development in Taiwan. In addition, according to the study of Guo et al. (2004), there has been an ageing trend among Taiwanese ship officers. Lin et al. (2001 ) considered that it is because, in general, graduates from Taiwan marine college prefer not to enter into the seafaring profession. And that directly affects the supply of ship officers and indirectly affects the supply of masters and chief officers. …