Seafarers pay

[Bill Morrison]

In this month's SEA BREEZES NEW UK LAW TO BOOST SEAFARERS PAY. Never seen it reported elsewhere!

The new law is designed to protect those working on vessels operating an international service from being paid less than the National Minimum Wage.

* act to boost the pay of seafarers with close ties to the UK receives Royal Assent, as government continues to crack down on unfair practices.

*part of a 9-point plan to change and improve working conditions following P&O Ferries, disgraceful sacking of nearly 800 staff last year.

*at the recent UK-France summit, both governments agreed to continue working together to improve conditions for seafarers.

Only time will tell!
Bill.

[happy daze john in oz]

Here in Oz there is a similar system.
Any Australian seaman taken on a foreign ship from an Australian port must be paid under Australian rates of pay.
That would include sick leave of at least 1 days a year, superannuation at 12.5% of pay, 4 weeks paid leave per year, 5 days compassionate leave, 10 days family violence days, payroll tax according to the state sailing from, and work cover.

Result, no company will take them on from Oz,
But will from any overseas port.

[john walker]

#1 Bill, the optimist in me thinks that is nice to know and the pessimist in me thinks we have heard it all before. When those guys on P&O ferries lost their jobs that was the third time to my knowledge that the company had carried out similar actions. Twice when the company was owned by P&O and this time when the company is owned by a Dubai business. The optomist in me hopes that it will not happen again. The pessimist thinks it most certainly will.

[Tony Taylor]

Hi
I remember, when working on a Scottish Ship Management ship in the far east the company decided to employ a junior engineer from Singapore in order to save the cost of flying an engineer out from the U.K.
Yam joined the ship with very little English but within a few weeks he had learned enough to have a conversation, he was a lovely young guy who got on well with the crew. After about six weeks the news came from our head office, Yam had a chief engineers ticket and must be paid as a chief engineer, it got worse, as the Singapore government paid for his education they also demanded payment equal to Yams wages. Yam was called into the captains office and advised that he would be paid off on our return to Singapore in two weeks time. For the next two weeks Yam went around the ship saying I like working on your ship, but you can't afford me. By the time we arrived in Singapore Yam had made friends with all the crew and we were sad to see him leave.
A very expensive experiment.

In 1972 I had two Singapore Chinese engineer apprentices; they were excellent lads, very hard working and conscientious. I am still in contact with them on a weekly basis. Both did well in their future careers, one owned his own business as a distributor for some big name marine equipment manufacturers and the other was commercial director for the Keppel group of shipyards.
I last saw them in 2015 while in Singapore on business both them thanked me for what they learned whilst on my vessel. They told me their next trip was on a Danish ship and it was ok, but the atmosphere on board was not the same and they found the food was not particularly to their liking, I do recall that trip was a particularly good feeder and socially a very good crowd, despite the ship being a right workhouse and arguably worst quality I have seen (18 months old Dutch built).