Defining exceptional
Posted on | July 21, 2010 | 1 Comment
I am flexible. You are pragmatic. He is b…… unreasonable! Every picture, it has been said, (possibly by William Blake before he went mad) depends on the identity of the artist and where he is standing. It is really quite enlightening to read the various comments emerging from the participants at the IMO Diplomatic Conference on the STCW Convention and its various amendments held in Manila in June.
It was masterfully summed up in the Business Times of Singapore by its correspondent David Hughes, who noted the various reactions which ranged from that of the Anglo-Dutch officers union Nautilus, whose spokesman described the agreement on hours of work and rest as something of a sell-out, to the International Shipping Federation, which seemed to consider the same as a reasonable compromise.
David, who is a master mariner, also pointed out the fact that nobody seems yet willing to tackle the problem of utterly exhausted master/mate teams in hard worked European ships, despite the numbers of accidents that have occurred where people have fallen asleep at the critical moment.
It is difficult to establish a reasonable balance from these different poles of opinion, with a fairly difficult debate revolving around what constitutes a “reasonable exception” to hours of work and rest regulations.
Clearly, if the safety of the ship is going to be compromised if the crew won’t get out of their bunks, citing their excessive hours, such a refusal might be considered unreasonable. But if the crew is only just numerous enough to keep the hours of work/rest legal in the most favourable circumstances, then is not the employer pushing his luck to demand more from the hard pressed seafarers? If the “compromise” agreed in Manila is to work properly, then there is good faith required from all sides.
Curiously, the Manila conference could, in some respects, be regarded as a mite premature. Sure, there is much disquiet about the seafarer’s working week, and whether sufficient is being done to prevent fatigue-induced accidents, but equally there is important research being done which ought to throw a bit more light and science on the reality of fatigue and stress aboard hard worked ships in intensive operations, that ought to bear upon a more mature approach to manpower levels aboard ship.
Warsash and Chalmers Universities are wiring up officers on simulators for days on end to get some real facts about how people operate. Of course employers want to keep their costs down, just as employees would like to be paid more for less work. Human nature wants more beer in bigger glasses.
But there is a desperate need to address the realities of risk, with ships being manned to the absolute minimum, and no account taken of the human cost in terms of long-term health of excessively hard working individuals, such as senior officers. We may be a little short of this appalling phenomenon identified in Japan of people quite literally working themselves to death, but we really should not be heading in this direction. Some common sense in terms of providing adequate manpower for the work that needs to be done is long overdue.
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July 29th, 2010 @ 4:19 pm
Here’s another way of looking at the STCW amendments adopted in Manila:
http://marine-cafe.com/mcblog/?p=2296