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EXTERNAL CHALLENGES
Global competition
Rapid changes in Technology
Shifting attitudes of Government
Managerial Strategies and HRM Policies
Assertion of their Rights by the Community
and Consumers
UNIQUENESS about shipping industry
In shipping industry, the ship is the most important unit of production. It is the equivalent of a factoryin the manufacturing sector. The most significant difference when compared to land-based workplaces is that, for seafarers, the ship-board workplace is also their living space for a significant portion of the year.With the increasing globalization of the seafaring sector over the past four decades, the ship has become a highly multinational workplace, with workers often drawn from different regions and nationalities.The shipboard workplace is anisolated, mobile unit, mostly distant from shore-based union structures. That is, unlike in
a factory, where resident union representatives organize workers, there are generally no such on-site unionstructures at sea. Furthermore, the combination of increasingly voyage-based, temporary employmentcontracts and the multinational composition of the crew mean that no single union has any directinfluence at the workplace. Union representation is therefore rather remote.
The labor situation in the international shipping industry is not one of a simple reversal of labor supply dominance, from high-wage North to low-wage South. As such, it is not possible to conclude that what has been lost by unions in terms of members and financial resources in the North has been gained by unions in the South. By observing it closely, one could easily understand that the developments in the political economy of international shipping in the past three decades are simple but the implications for labor are extensive. Theadvent of massive ‘flagging out’in the 1970s and 80s not only allowed ship owners to circumvent stringent regulation by national flags and access cheaper crews overseas but also enabled them to effectively challenge the organizing influence of unions.
From a situation where the majority of seafarers were supplied by a handful of established (mainly European) maritime
nations, new (cheaper) suppliers such as the Philippines, Indonesia and India rapidly grew to a dominant position as sources of seafarers. As a result, within two decades (1980s and 1990s) the numbers of seafarers in developed maritime countries had dwindled considerably in global market terms. Thus, by the mid-2000s the OECD group of countries in total supplied only 25 percent of the total number of seafarers while Asia, including the Indian Sub-continent, supplied 44 percent.
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PARADIGM Nourishing the Intellect