“Permission to come aboard, Sir?” When was this polite inquiry last heard at the top of a gangway, acknowledging the absolute authority of the master to grand admission to “his” ship ? I would suggest that it is very rarely heard, as the accommodation ladder resounds with the heavy tread of those who march aboard in port to throw their weight around.

And if you think about it for a minute, there can be no practical reason to suppose that the modern shipmaster is actually “in charge” of a ship, when so  many extraneous persons take upon themselves the authority to tell him what to do.

Goodness, when the poor chap takes a decision off his own bat there will be some acne-infested clerk in a charterer’s office who will be firing off an angry email of disapproval. Imagine the scene if the Master, who had been up all night battling through storms, told the officials shouldering their way into his office to come back in eight hours time after he and his crew had been properly rested.

But why should not the master have the authority to behave appropriately to his grave and weighty responsibilities? What stage in our maritime evolution saw the present emasculated status of a person reduced to its present level of cringing obsequiousness? Was it gradual, or was there some important legislative change?

I suppose it could be argued that in legal terms, the diminution of the master’s authority was given a hefty swipe when port state control effectively reduced the important symbolism of the ensign flown by the ship, which conferred a certain sovereignty.

You might suggest that it has been all downhill from here, although customs and immigration had long been ruling the roost, when a ship arrived in port, in most parts of the world.

We are never going to get back to a state where proper respect is given to the master of a ship; too many empires have been created for that, but a little politeness might go a long way. “Permission to come aboard, Sir?” Let’s hear it sometimes.

This small but significant quest could really help change the morale of crew who would then be able to Skype, tweet or facebook with their loved ones thousands of miles away.

So lets help her in this erstwhile goal, Magsaysay are compiling data on ports that currently offer this service and can be contacted directly but also please send me your thoughts on whether this is both practical and viable.

In my opinion, anything that can lift spirits and ease the unhappiness caused by separation is a step in the right direction and could reduce the effect of our looming crewing crisis.

“Seafarers the scum of the earth, says judge”. He was, if I recall, dealing with the aftermath of what appeared to me a low-level riot in Southampton, with a Cunarder’s crew celebrating in an unrestrained fashion, in the course of which part of the city was wrecked.

Well, that was more than a half century ago, but it often seems that in a world even more dependent upon shipping for its food, fuel and fashionable consumer goods, the seafarers does not appear to have greatly advanced up the social scale.

Nobody knows any seafarers, so ships might be manned by Martians for all they believe. If they did, or if they had some inkling of their dependence upon them, they might appreciate seafarers more.

There is a first class barrage of good sense about the need to lobby on behalf of seafarers available in the latest issue of Alert!, the International Maritime Human Element Bulletin.

Written by Lloyd’s Register CEO Richard Sadler, this is on the issue of all the stakeholders in shipping recognising their shared responsibilities.

But he rapidly focuses on the need to empower seafarers and stop the erosion of their social status. He suggests that the Marine Labour Convention will help in their social conditions, living conditions, working conditions and rewards. But it is the attitude of others to seafarers which he says need to be changed, and this Year of the Seafarer is not a bad time to implement this attitudinal shift.

The seafarer (Sadler describes them as “the bedrock of the industry”) are still woefully treated. Why, he asks, are they treated by immigration officials with such comparative discourtesy to aircrew, who even have their own dedicated channels when they arrive at airports.

You do not, he says, see aircrew forced to remain aboard their aircraft, and have their shore leave denied.

“Are seafarers such a security risk and so unwelcome that they cannot be offered the same courtesy? – he asks – was the brave pilot of the aircraft which landed in the Hudson River arrested and held under bail?

“You cannot” he points out “have a safe, sustainable or responsible business without sound technology that is suitably managed and operated by suitable people in a suitable culture and environment”.

And that perhaps is the operative word – culture. If we have a downright oppressive culture in ports, with officials swaggering aboard ship throwing their weight about, we will not retain the good people we need to operate our ships safely.

Somebody has to grasp this nettle, rein in the jobsworths stamping up the gangways, and teach them some plain, honest manners.

They need to recognise that they are in somebody else’s home, they need to realise they are dealing with important people whose job is every bit as essential as theirs.

That way, we might lever up the social status of seafarers just a few notches.

See www.he-alert.org Issue 23, May 2010

“They are not on board ship for recreation”, he shouted, “they should be out on deck and down the engineroom – working!”

That, if it was ever true, was some years ago, and the old fiend long dead, but a recent survey among members of the Anglo-Dutch officers’ union Nautilus pointed to the “poor social life” aboard ship today. We should worry about this, because it affects morale, which affectsefficiency, even safety, and feeds into poor retention and recruitment figures for the industry, at a time when we are attempting to persuade people how fine a career is to be had at sea.

And there is clearly a problem if we treat seafarers as mere drudges, put aboard ship to work for their tour of duty, with little thought given to their job satisfaction and the “inner man and woman”.

Shore side people need sometimes to contemplate whether they would like perpetual shift work, much of which was accomplished alone, with few opportunities to talk to anyone else throughout the 24 hours, even at mealtimes. It has been argued for years that the complements of modern ships are far too small for the necessary social interaction that maintains mental health, and this is no exaggeration. Seafarers should not have to be “reintroduced back into society” at the conclusion of their tour of duty, as has been suggested by one distinguished social scientists.

And if there are barely enough seafarers aboard a ship to do the work, let alone any social interaction, is the atmosphere, helped, or hindered by the fact that there are six nationalities, all speaking different languages, aboard a ship with a total complement of 14? Maybe there isn’t a recreation room, but it would be nice if you could chat about the football results with your mates, or engage in conversations that weren’tnecessarily about the job in hand.

And if owners cannot contemplate the expense of additional crew members in a more generously manned complement, they ought perhaps to talk to some of the seafarers’ welfare organisations about the social isolation of their employees, and how best this can be addressed. Because it matters. When you see a placard in the ship’s office declaring that “You have to be mad to work here”, it is not meant to be taken literally.

Sir Robert Coleman, who once ran the transport directorate in Brussels and now monitors the EU for BIMCO, is to head up a taskforce to find solutions to the regional crisis facing maritime recruitment. It is one of those problems which sounds a lot easier to solve than it really is, once the full scale of the problem is revealed.

Europe is a high cost region, and just like Japan, or the United States, or Australia, domestic seafarers have been priced out of their shipping industries.

Deep sea, a declining number of officers are found on ships which are controlled in these high-cost places – otherwise shipowners are happy to shop at the global maritime manpower bazaar, where there are any number of bargains to be found.

It suits the shipowners’ customers too, because they would rather have cheap shipping, rather than pay a little more and get shipping that employs locals.

Politicians have tended to go along with this, to the chagrin of European and other high cost seafarers and their unions, who have seen their job opportunities shrink, and their terms, if indeed they can find employment, deteriorate.

Does any of this matter? Well, yes it does, because there is a very great deal of European seafaring, and hands-on maritime expertise and indeed sea-trained and marine related jobs within the maritime infrastructure that have depended on expertise generated and educated within the region. The jobs won’t go away, so do we really wish to see them filled by expatriates, because there is no locally recruited talent?

When he worked for the European Commission, Sir Robert once proposed that intra-European shipping, such as ferries, should be manned by Europeans, something that was denounced as protectionist by European shipowners who wished to retain their new freedoms to hire anyone from anywhere in the world on their ships. I didn’t think it was a bad idea at all, arguing that just as we probably would find it politically hard to hire cheap foreign bus drivers on our buses, while there were locals available, European waters could legitimately be treated as a domestic “pond”, reserved for domestic employment.

Such a view did not commend itself to shipowners, who suggested that they were unable to find sufficient locals to do the jobs that were available, as “Europeans no longer wanted to go to sea”. The arguments continue, and doubtless will resurface with Sir Robert’s working party, once it starts asking questions.

There are not many choices available, it would seem. The EU could be prescriptive and centralist, but would risk making shipping less competitive, at a time when it ought to be growing faster than other modes of transport, for the environmental benefits it brings. But already, ferry owners have warned that there are so many environmental costs being heaped upon them, that they can see their customers opting to send their goods by truck.

It could perhaps be interventionist, making it worthwhile owners staffing their ships with Europeans, perhaps doing more in terms of taxation or the fiscal regime, or helping with the increasingly expensive business of training ships’ officers in particular.

Or it could merely exhort, which has been tried in the past, without much success, or put a bit of extra resource into awareness, education and recruitment. It might look at what works reasonably well, and what doesn’t. But just as we probably won’t have a European Coastguard, we probably don’t want a European Merchant Navy.

It might be argued that shipping companies really have the greatest responsibility for educating and training the employees they need. If Sir Robert’s eventual report might propose some solutions that provide some institutional support and a formula for financial encouragement to shipping company training initiatives – for Europeans, naturally – , it might do European shipping a great service in the future, and even give some tips to the Japanese, Americans et al.