Question about salary

[John Arton]

Re#29
The Hamilton referred to is Hamilton, Bermuda. Nearly every ship I sailed on as cadet to chief officer for Canadian Pacific were registered in Hamilton Bermuda and even after C.P withdrew from the British shipping federation, our pay and conditions were superior to that of BSF vessels. The regulations covering surveys, v
Hull and machinery and safety equipment were strictly observed with annual surveys etc being carried out by Lloyd's classification appointed surveyors. C.P also had some ships registered in Hong Kong that meant they were no different to any of the other registered ships in the fleet. Throughout my seagoing life I sailed on ships registered in the isle of man, Georgetown, (Cayman islands), Haugesund, Cardiff but fortunately having only worked for two different companies, both of whom looked after their ships and staff very well.
Rgds
J.A

[j.sabourn]

#26 not particularly your post but someone was asking about salary’s on Foreign flagged vessels. My experience on foreign owned vessels the Universal maritime union which some quote I never came across . The owners of mostly Far Eastern vessels would pay you by your nationality and what they thought as compatable to what you would earn on your own countries vessels. However they were open to discussion on this.the chief engineer on a Malaysian owned vessel was on 2500 US dollars a month, well above Russian wages ,a polish 2 engineer on a sister ship was on 4000 US a month one was paid according to nationality. Others will tell you different as were with this invisible to me universal union. JS

[Bill McRobb]

I joined my first (Australian) ship in 1968. As a fitter I earned $67 per week. My wages as 5th Eng, (not salary) was $52 per week plus overtime. There was a huge form that we filled in each week to claim overtime, which included gear turns, curtailed meals etc. A big setback for cerificates was the split between Sea Days and Port Days. Only Sea Days counted towards cerificate time. Home port days you may get off but it reduced leave time. This all changed in early 1970 when we changed to salaries. Film star wages were a long way off. Of course Vestey was running Blue Star ships to Oz, famously known for their aggressive tax avoidence strategies. The common market also smashed this trade from Tasmanian apples to NZ lamb. I don't know how many UK ships are still running but we have about, down from 160, this included continual crew reductions, we don't even have an oil tanker. The main work is offshore. Early 70's the container run to Japan was split between 2 Japanese, 2 E&A (P&O Oz) and 1 ANL, (Australian National Line). Now everthing is all OS ships even iron ore to China out of W.A.