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Maersk Line

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 7:00 am
by TxMarEng
Seems Maersk is about to replace about 200 Chief Stewards and ratings with third world crew. One of the benefits of sailing on a Scandinavian flag vessel has always been the excellent food. I don't think this will set well with Maersk European officers. They could go to US as US seaman are now coming close to being thrid world workers.

Had it coming

Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2008 10:02 pm
by The Dieselduck
Not surprising, Maersk has been complaining that they haven't been competitive enough, bla bla bla, same old stuff with same old results, Usually office jockeys cutting / subbing on board crew. Its kind of funny (demonic sort of laugh) to see how small and overworked a ship's crew can get and what risks "people" are willing to accept. Seems with 140,000 hp and 11,000 containers representing perhaps billions of dollars in trade, certainly that is a tremendous amount of responsibility for 13 persons, what are they going to cut next?

Its pretty sad overall, but really the only surprise I find is that I had no idea that they still had Europeans in rating positions. How cynical of me.

On a side note, these forward thinking "captains of industry" are usually the same ones complaining about lack of crew. Well, taking away yet another opportunity for the young and eager to work on a ship at sea, is probably another obstacle to easing this "crisis". I have heard of more than one story of Master Mariner starting out as "galley boy" - which of course explains allot from my "bottom of the boat" perspective but thats a whole other post.

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2008 5:18 am
by JK
It is along the lines of CG building new patrol boats, but limiting the horsepower for certification of the engineers.

Now if you are going to spend all that money on the new ship, why are you quibbling about the manpower to run it.

Really in the scheme of things-over a 20 year lifespan of a ship, what is 2-3 positions worth?

Let's be mid range and assume 70k Cdn/person.
3 positions is about 210k/year.
Over 20 years 4,200 k.

Now at a generous $8/day food cost, less if you plan to feed rice, more if you serve wine on Christmas Day (1 glass mind you), over 20 years a cost of $175.2 k

Costs of about 4,375.2 K

Throw in a 15% error on my assumptions and we have the grand total of
$5,031.5 k

So around about 5 million over the 20 year lifespan of a ship to pay and feed 3 crew members.

The cost of an accident?
5 million would be the low end. But hey, insurance will cover that.

Rise the salary for 3 people to $120 k and you are looking around $8.5 million over 20 years.

Bah humbug.
Anyone can grind numbers, but what it comes down to, is how much risk is a company willing to take.
After all, when there is an accident, is the company held accountable for their manning levels?
Not likely. It is the Captain and Chief Engineer held accountable, even though they have not been given the means to do the work in a reasonable fashion.