We’ve been prodding ourselves all year round to believe that 2010 is the Year of the Seafarer. Didn’t the International Maritime Organization (IMO) say so? But we give up. On a recent trip to a mall in Manila, we saw a lad in cadet uniform carrying a large box of pizza. They’re everywhere: would-be ship officers who serve as flunkeys (unpaid office help) in manning companies, running errands for the managers and staff. The exploitation of seafarers in the world’s crewing capital begins even before they board their first vessel.
The flunkeys, however, would be the last to see the system as exploitative. They’re like sheep. In light of the scarcity of shipboard apprentice and entry-level slots, these college-educated young men would do anything to go to sea. The manning agents and maritime unions explain away the practice by saying it builds positive work attitudes and instills discipline in aspiring seafarers. Maybe so, but we’re hard put to understand how making them serve coffee to visitors and clean the toilets will help transform them into fine ship officers.
As we watched the flunkey with the pizza box, the words of IMO Secretary-General Efthimios Mitropoulos echoed in our mind: In selecting the “Year of the Seafarer” theme, our intention was also to use it as an excellent opportunity to reassure those who labour at the “sharp end” of the industry – the seafarers themselves – that those of us who work in other areas of the maritime community, and yet whose actions have a direct bearing on seafarers’ everyday lives, understand the extreme pressures they face and approach our tasks with genuine interest and concern for them and their families.
Hollow words, if you ask our opinion. Yet, the ITF and the Church-based seafarers’ welfare organisations all went along and joined the global chorus that sang praises to the seafarer. They even threw a party in June for the lads and their families at Manila’s Luneta Park – that veritable marketplace where crewing agents solicit for officers and ratings to export them like so many heads of sheep. ~Barista Uno
You would not see such treatment in the aviation industry. You no longer see such treatment in military navies. Professionals are treated as professionals. Yet, as you state, the YOTS was mostly about empty praise. It is doubtful whether the general public was aware that 2010 was YOTS! Year of the Pirate, maybe.
The “Year of the Seafarer” (my arse) as envisioned by IMO, I feel, reflects the modernizing change in the “Seaman” of old. That change institutionalized “flunkies” – thanks to the many screwing, sorry I mean crewing, companies mostly run by our so-called brothers in the profession themselves.
In the days when seamen were seamen, they were lovers of the sea. They worked with their hands because to them labor at sea brought about satisfaction in their lives.
I recall my own days in the now defunct Southern Lines of apprenticeship, which is how we called them in those days. We took the four-hour watches with the licensed officers, but we did not serve them coffee. We were made to wear uniforms when on watchkeeping duties but we wore working clothes when we performed day work duties to teach us hands on what a seaman should learn. We had licensed officers who acted as big brothers to us. They meticulously coached us in the day’s work. We sat at the officer’s mess with them and were treated as “apprentice officers”.
All of these are gone. “Those were the days” as an old song runs. We now call them “seafarers”! Graduates of maritime institutions are “the bachelors”, “Cadets” in spick and span uniforms, but are made to serve coffee, clean toilets and clean the office, wash and wax the cars. Some are even made to serve at the homes of the officers of the company.
“FLUNKIES” but can you blame these boys?
Blame the system that brought this about on the officers of the screwing, oh sorry again, crewing companies, the ship owners, and even the IMO which promulgates the rules and regulations governing seafaring!
That is why when this “flunkeys” become officers themselves they don’t have a sense of loyalty to the company. How could you expect them to be loyal after experiencing this kind of treatment.