INTERVIEW GUIDE (Ships crews)

* How old are you?

* Where were you born?
* What is your nationality/citizenship?
* What is your first language or dialect?
* Have you ever been to school? (what grade did you reach?)
* What is your marital status?
* Do you have any children?
(if yes) How many, their sex, age, education, marital status and occupation
* Where is your home now? Where does your family live?
* How many people live in your household?
Who are they?
* Apart from your earnings is there any other member of the household who
earns any money?
(if yes) who, what kind of work and how much does the person earn?
* As far back as you can remember, Can you tell me what kind of work you
have done before you started to work at sea?
* How old were you when you first started to work at sea?
* How long have you been working at sea?
* Have you ever dropped out of working at sea?
(If yes) Why did you drop out / why did you come back?
* Why did you come to work at sea? What circumstances led you to taking
up a career as a seafarer?
* How did you get your first work at sea?
* Did you have to pay a fee to a Manning Agent or person/organisation to get
work at sea?
*Can you please briefly describe your career from your first ship until today
(routes, trades, ship types, nationalities on board, languages he used in
different situations)?
*Which nationalities do you like better to work with? / Why?
* Which ship did you like best the best? / Why? F
* Which ship didnt you like? / Why?
to many people in your country want to work at sea? I Why?
*What sort of strategies do people use to have access to the seafaring labour
market?
* How do seafarers from your country manage to stay/survive in the labour
market?
* What is your position on board?
* Can you tell me about your typical day at work? (Description of your daily
work, working hours, workload etc - when the ship is in port and at sea)
* Can you tell me 3 things that you like about your job?
* What are 3 things that you dont like about your job?
* Can you tell me whether you are happy or not happy with your present job?
Why?
* Thinking about the last month: How many hours were there in your typical
working day (including over time)?
*What is the longest time you had to work without a break of at least half an
hour in the past month?
How often does this occur?
* Can you tell me how muth you earn? (basic, overtime, leave pay etc.)
* Are your wages usually paid to you?
Yes No Comment
Regularly as
agreed/required
Through manning
agent/other
organisation
At the same level as
others on board in a
similar job
Paid on board
Paid in your country
Paid part on board /
part in your country
Kept until the end of
the contract before full
payment
Are you owed wages
(against your will)

* Do you work permanently or on a contract?

(if contract) how long is your current contract?
* How easy is it for you to get your next contract?
* Can you tell me about the advantages and disadvantages of working with
mixed nationality crews.
* Can you comment on the quality of your social contact with other
nationalities on board. (eating together, socialising together etc.)
(If this is limited can you explain why)
* What sort of strategies do you follow to get on well with the different
nationalities on board?
Do they always work?
* When you come together with your workmates, at work or outside of work,
what are the main subjects you talk about? Can you tell me 3 of them in
order?
* Can you tell me 3 things that you are most likely to do, in your spare time,
after work?
* (if you work on a contract) What do you do in the months that you dont
work?
(if you do another paid job) How much do you earn?
* How much do you spend during your tour of duty / When you are at home
(monthly saving, spending etc.)?
* Who manages the household economy?
* Since you have been working at sea have any of these things happened to
you?
Not at all Sometimes Frequently Comments
Unfair treatment
because of my
race/nationality
Unfair treatment
because of my
religion
Physical abuse
from others
Mental abuse
from anyone

* Are you afraid of losing your job?

(if yes or no ) why
(if yes) how long have you had this fear?
* Can you tell me, since you have started to work at sea, What kind of
changes took place in your working and social life?
* How optimistic are you about your future? / Why?
* What do you feel are the good and the bad things about being a seafarer?
* When you are on your own what are you most recurrent thoughts?
(loneliness, isolation, sex, killing the captain)
* Being realistic about it, what would you like to be doing in 10 years time and
where do you think you will be living.
* Do you have any sense of excitement before arriving in a port?
* How do you feel when leaving a port? What did you do when you went
ashore?
* When you are at shore or the ship is in port do you buy any goods to
take/send home?
(If yes can you tell me what sort of things do you buy / have you bought up to
now?)
* Can you please comment on the quality of your social contact with the wider
community around the port of call (for example is it limited to shop keepers
etc.)
* As a seafarer you are living and working on board a ship, which is a place
where social relations cross geographic, cultural and political borders. Can
you comment on the effects of this environment on your
national/ethnic/cultural identity since you started to work at sea?
* Can you also comment on what the effects of living and working with
ethnically and culturally divers crews are on the quality of social life on board?
* Can you reflect on your thoughts about your family and community?
* Can you please tell me do you / have you ever support(ed) any of your
relatives or friends financially. (as a loan or a gift / for education, illness,
financial hardship etc.)?
* Do you have any savings or investments from your earnings at sea? (If yes,
what sort of investments - land, small business etc. and what are you planning
to do with your savings/ investments)
*Can you compare your economic and social position with non-seafarer
neighbours in your community? (Do they buy the same goods, do they eat
similar food etc.).
* Can you comment on the difference between seafarers from your own
country and those from advanced industrialised countries? (Do they get same
treatment, wages, working and living conditions on board, promotion etc)
(According to nationalities the question can be asked visa versa)
* You spend most of your life away from your family and community and
floating in a ship around the globe moving between different countries and
different cultures. You are one day here and an another day there, if I ask you
to where do you belong what would you say?
What is it that makes you feel you belong there?
* Are there some places where you identify with people more, because you
understand them better, or maybe their culture?
(If yes or no can you explain why?)
* How often do you communicate with your family and friends I How?
* Are there any similarities between your culture and that of people belonging
to the other nationalities on board? Do you have a similar life style ect.? (if yes
or no can you explain why?)
* How can you describe a seafarers life?
* I have asked you a lot of questions do you have anything youd like to ask
me?
 THE FORMATION AND MAINTENANCE OF
TRANSNATIONAL SEAFARER COMMUNITIES
(ESRC Award Ref No: L214252036)

Prof Tony Lane

Dr Erol Kahveci
Dr Helen Sampson

Seafarers International Research Centre

Cardiff University
PO Box 907
Cardiff CF10 3YP
Tel: +44 (0)29 2087 4620
Fax: +44 (0)29 2087 4619
Email: SIRC@Cardiff.ac.uk
www.sirc.cf.ac.uk
 2

BACKGROUND

The research for this study of the impacts of transnational processes on seafarers
communities was set in the context of recent structural changes in world
shipping and its labour markets. Ship ownership and management is today still
concentrated in OECD countries but offshore registration devices and defensive
responses by the governments of established maritime nations in the 1970s and
1980s resulted in the transformation of crewing practices. By the late 1990s,
OECD-owned ships, almost regardless of flag, were sailing with crews of
transnationals supplied by a highly organised global labour market. (Lane,
1996a, 1996b, 2000)

Seafarers are embedded in three types of transnational communities: the ship,

expatriate communities and homeland families. The ship itself has become a
community of transnationals but this is recent. The very few previous studies of
merchant seafarers were mainly conducted in a different conjuncture. The best
known of these involved Norwegian seafarers and was concerned with
explaining high rates of labour turnover. (Aubert & Arner, 1959) A decade later
a British study saw a statistical analysis of the same subject. (Hill, 1972) A more
recent study aboard a Norwegian ship was focused on industrial relations
(Schrank, 1983) while a collective biography of British merchant seafarers was a
thematic narrative of everyday life in the declining moment of UK
shipping(Lane, 1986). A sociological history of British seafarers in WWII
emphasises the analytical importance of occupational cultures. (Lane, 1990) The
research reported here draws on the theoretical insights of these previous studies,
especially those concerned with the structures and processes of the shipboard
social order.

Until recent decades expatriate seafarer communities were indissolubly linked

to local labour markets formed from the discharges and engagements of crews of
arriving and departing ships and the possibilities of casual, shore-based
employment. The populations, apart from handfuls of settled labour market
intermediaries, were not made up of internal and external immigrants who were
settled but periodically absent itinerants. (Hugill, 1967; Wong, 1989; Lane,
1997; Frost, 2000) Relatively expensive and cumbersome transnational
communications and travel entailed fragile, tenuous links between seafarers and
their countries of origin. There were some exceptions to this as in the case of
Yemeni seafarer communities in the UK, but only where recruitment methods in
the country of origin foreshadowed contemporary practices. (Lawless, 1995;
Lane, 1994) We have been unable to trace any recent studies of expatriate
working class itinerants apart from one excellent journalists account of Filipinos
in Yokohama (Ventura, 1992) although most of the issues are raised in Nigel
Harriss, The New Untouchables. (Harris, 1995)

Only in their backward linkages to their places of origin with their substantial
networks of family and familiars are seafarers conventionally transnational in the
sense that they recognisably connect with the themes of modern migration
 3

studies. (Portes, 1995; Basch et al, 1995; Kearney, 1999; Vertovec, 1999) These
recent explorations all suggest the possibilities for the modern migrant of being
at home both in the country of arrival and the country of departure. How far this
can apply to seafarers when the country of arrival, the ship, may be legally
attached to a nation state but in practice is a site of global space, is discussed in
this study.

The empirical backcloth to the transnational case studies reported here is a

survey of the global labour market for seafarers as amplified by data from
interviews with crew managers from large and influential companies. At this
level, the research is unique. There has been no previous research of this kind,
either in the shipping industry or elsewhere. The literature on globalisation in
the last decade has become extensive but none of it has been able to draw on
industry-specific case studies of a global workforce. Labour issues have not
been neglected but have largely centred on debates on the weakened regulatory
powers of nation states. (Amin & Thrift,1994; Camilleri & Falk, 1992; Hirst &
Thompson, 1996; Peck, 1996) The Froebel et al study, The New International
Division of Labour, (1980) is still the only thick case study of the impact on
employment of a globalising industry.

OBJECTIVES

The initial aims were met, unmodified. The investigation of the social order
among crews of mixed nationalities entailed fieldwork voyages aboard ships
with various crew nationality compositions (see Table 1, below), a global survey
of crewing patterns (see Table 2 & Figure 1), and senior manager interviews to
identify employers crewing strategies and policies. Contributions to debates on
the dynamics of transnational communities as informed by our shipboard,
expatriate communities and seafarers families case studies have been made very
extensively in contributions to academic and shipping industry conferences,
seminars and presentations (see Activities & Impacts). Fieldwork in the
Netherlands and N Germany and then in the Philippines and India respectively,
saw studies of social networks and remittance chains among expatriate groups
and family social and organisational adjustments to absent fathers. The
evaluation of actors/subjects diaries as research instruments involved recruiting
diarists during fieldwork, providing guidance, tape recorders and tapes and
organising subsequent collection and analysis.

METHODS

The project had six evidence-gathering elements. The methods used in each
case are outlined below. Tape recorded, depth interviews were used extensively
and in all cases transcribed verbatim, translated as necessary and cut and
pasted into thematic files for collation and analysis. Diaries were processed
similarly.
 4

The global labour market survey was a random sample with a population of
1000 ships and of 20,000 persons, drawn from a non-random sample of
10,000 ships and 200,000 seafarers in the period, 1997-2000. Raw data came
from crew lists, mainly supplied by immigration and other state agencies and
trade unions in N America, Europe, Central America, Asia and Australasia.
The resultant database gave eight fields and was analysed using SPSS.

The research voyages were aboard ships ranging from a recently built,
sophisticated LPG tanker to two oil tankers subsequently sold for scrap and a
small bulk carrier which later sank after her cargo shifted. The basic
characteristics of ships and crews etc. is summarised in Table 1, below.
Research data consisted of observations recorded in fieldwork diaries (14)
and taped interviews with crew members of all ranks (242).

Table 1: Ships and Research Voyages

Ship Ship Type Ship Size Crew Number of Days Route
(dwt/TEU) Size Nationalities Spent
Onboard Onboard
1 Container 1400 17 3 17 Liverpool
TEU Mediterranean
Le Havre
2 Ro-Ro 11,000 36 4 34 West Africa
Rotterdam
Europe
3 Reefer 15,000 26 2 42 Latin America
Europe
4 Oil 250,000 37 3 30 Gulf
Tanker Philippines
5 Bulk 3,000 7 3 14 W Europe
Carrier
6 Gas 72,000 29 4 26 Gulf
Carrier S E Asia
7 Bulk 31,000 26 3 21 Santos
Carrier Sheerness
8 Car 26,000 26 3 12 W Europe
Carrier
9 Oil 99,000 25 6 21 Norway
Tanker Canada
10 Oil 25,000 34 5 14 Kuwait
Tanker India
11 Reefer 17,000 25 4 16 W Europe
S America
12 Bulk Carrier 2,500 7 6 12 W Europe
13 General 40,000 29 14 12 India
Cargo Egypt
14 Oil Tanker 32,000 26 5 18 N America
C America
Total - - 350 - 289 -

The survey of senior managers (using taped interviews) involved ten large
companies based in the USA, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Monaco, Hong
Kong and Singapore. These companies employed a total of 27,000 seafarers
in 1,200 ships.

The expatriate seafarers community studies carried out in the Netherlands

and N Germany produced 141 taped in-depth interviews - 50 Filipinos, 25
Cabo Verdeans, 30 Indonesians, 27 Ghanaians and nine other informants,
 5

mainly German. All interviews in the Netherlands were in English. In

Germany 40 per cent were in German.

The studies of seafarers families in the Philippines and India produced 131
taped, depth interviews with wives, ten with retired seafarers, five focus
group discussions with wives and children. Philippines access was arranged
through the Catholic churchs organisation, the Apostleship of the Sea, and
then through local priests and parishioner groups. Half of the Philippines
interviews were conducted in Tagalog or Cebuano with simultaneous
translation provided by three Filipina fieldwork assistants recruited locally.
In India (Mumbai and Goa) all interviews were in English. In both countries
proportionate numbers of ratings and officers family members participated.

Seventeen serving seafarers and ten wives agreed, on request, to keep tape-
recorded diaries. Tape recorders and tapes were provided in most cases,
communication routes were agreed and written guidelines discussed with
each subject. Seven seafarers and all wives completed diaries and returned
tapes.

RESULTS

The Labour Market and Crew Managers

The labour market survey results are significant in their own right. Apart from
providing essential profiling of seafarers nationalities and crew composition for
all aspects of the study, it was also the first ever survey of the crewing of the
world fleet able to report data in such detail and accuracy as to make it useful
and useable to shipping industry organisations and associations with crewing
interests.

The survey findings show the full extent of transnationalism in world shipping
and the identification of a distinct set of crewing patterns. These data provide the
first objective and extensive account of the composition of the global
labourforce (see Figure 1 & Table 2) and show the existence of a well-
organised labour market. These statistical findings were qualitatively amplified
through interviews with crew managers. A director of a company providing
crew management for a fleet of 600 ships told us about the previous years
checks on labour supply in different world regions:

We looked at Romania where we now have a contract in place and we

also have a contract in Bulgaria. In other words, we have the ability to
take people from there if we need them. We have looked at Ghana,
Senegal and Cote dIvoire. We have had another look at Indonesia and
we have recently set up a joint venture crewing agency in China . We
have looked at Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Cuba, Jamaica. So we are
always looking.
 6

All interviewed managers as well as those encountered through shipboard

research, attendance at conferences, seminars and presentations, were engaged
in similar monitoring practices.

Figure 1 Number of different nationalities (all shiptypes)

5+ nationalities
10.6%

4 nationalities
9.7% 1 nationality
34.2%

3 nationalities
17.0%

2 nationalities
28.5%

Table 2 Regional composition patterns by number of nationalities: open registers (all

shiptypes)
Number of
Nationalities Region Senior officers Junior officers Ratings %
1 single Far East Far East Far East 55.8
E Europe E Europe E Europe 33.8
S Asia / M East S Asia / M East S Asia / M East 7.2
L America / Africa L America / Africa L America / Africa 2
OECD OECD OECD 1.3
2 single Far East Far East Far East 40.3
E Europe E Europe E Europe 14.4
S Asia / M East S Asia / M East S Asia / M East 7.2
multiple OECD Far East Far East 14.9
OECD OECD Far East 4.3
E Europe Far East Far East 2.8
Far East Far East S Asia / M East 1.7
S Asia / M East S Asia / M East Far East 1.7
OECD S Asia / M East S Asia / M East 1.5
E Europe E Europe Far East 1.5
>=3 single Far East Far East Far East 15.6
E Europe E Europe E Europe 8.9
S Asia / M East S Asia / M East S Asia / M East 2.5
multiple OECD Far East Far East 18.2
E Europe Far East Far East 7.6
E Europe E Europe Far East 4.2
OECD OECD Far East 3.7
OECD S Asia / M East S Asia / M East 3.1
OECD E Europe Far East 2.9
E Europe E Europe S Asia / M East 2.5
 7

The survey reveals a strong preference among crew managers for senior officers
from OECD and E European countries and for junior officers and ratings from
the Far East and S Asia/M. East. This regional pattern of rank-nationality
preferences was experienced at first-hand during the shipboard studies where
eleven of fourteen ships had OECD senior officers and ratings from the Far East
and S Asia/M East and all junior officers from the Far East or S Asia/M East.

Crews of Transnationals

Crews of transnationals, we found, are very rarely assembled or dissolved

simultaneously. Crews consist of strangers-become-shipmates so that the social
relations of seafarers employments are experienced as a series of discontinuous
and discontinued encounters. This is indexed in the commonplace remark,
friendships end at the gangway. We found no routinised attempts made to
counter discontinuities through the organisation of team-building routines and
rituals. None of the companies formally or informally encountered during the
study had procedures for assessing crews team performances although
individual appraisal schemes for all ranks were widely used. No officers, senior
or junior, had ever received instruction in team-management during their
professional training and education. This was surprising considering that at least
50% of the worlds ships fly flags of convenience (FOC), none of which have
the administrative capacity to regulate the society of the ship. Seafarers may be
migrant workers but once aboard FOC ships are not in a national space but in a
global space. Here, where the state is both absent and effectively anonymous,
regulation takes the form of a modus vivendi negotiated between the ship master
who is legally the absent shipowners agent and crew who have only the modest
protection of their contracts of employment.

The research ships were all communities of transnationals in the sense of being
territories occupied by people of different nationalities. We found contractual
engagement and occupational culture to be the key to understanding the
shipboard social order. Regardless of crew nationality composition, ships do not
house organic communities marked by population and social network
continuities. They are held together by universally familiar integrative social
mechanisms. The fixity and limited number of shipboard roles, the boundaries
of permissible variation in role performance, the simplicity of the formal and
normative rules patterning conduct provide sufficient conditions for the easy
transferability of persons between ships. These conditions are then filled out by
the resilience of an occupational culture that makes national identities aboard
ship redundant for all everyday life purposes. Conflicts on other grounds may of
course reactivate national identities but we found no evidence on any of our
ships for the salience of nationality and a good deal of evidence to the contrary.
Eighty per cent of our seafarer interviewees expressed a preference for mixed
nationality crews.

Living aboard similar ships, doing similar work, visiting similar places and a
regular stream of encounters with strangers who are nevertheless people just
 8

like us all encourage the regular maintenance and upkeep of a dense

occupational culture. The manifestations taken in themselves can seem
insubstantial - but powerful when taken together. We observed story telling
aboard ship to be especially important. The stories were not elaborate nor long
in the recounting and typically told in snatched moments of sociability. Short
accounts of bars visited, girls met, favourite ports, sad shipmates, weather
encountered, good captains bad captains, evil crewing agents . These story
tellings are, as it were, set up to encourage inclusion. They are not elaborate
narratives designed for an audience but snapshots of moments that everyone else
has experienced regardless of who they are and where they are from. These
stories have powerfully solidifying effects both in the telling and in the re-
enactments of shipboard life. We found no evidence of the development of
hybrid identities and indeed became sceptical of the concept the greater our
familiarity with crews of transnationals. What we found was the irrelevance of
national identities in the everyday, face-to-face lives of ensembles of
transnationals.

Ships have formal hierarchical structures where officers form 40 per and
ratings 60 per cent of total complements. Accommodation and messing
arrangements reflect the layering. There are some exceptional ships where
officers and ratings eat in the same space - and we sailed on one of them but
separation is normal and off-duty social interaction between ranks is
discouraged. One of our unexpected findings was that social distance between
officers and ratings seemed to be conducive to fluent social relations by
fostering good working relationships within each group which, in turn, fostered
similarly good relations between the groups. But we also noticed a different
pattern in ships with two nationalities and where officers and ratings each form
nationally homogeneous groups. In these cases transnational solidarities are
weak and may even have a colonial character where officers are from OECD
countries and ratings from developing nations in Africa or Asia. Our shipboard
research strongly suggests that mixed nationality crews work best when both
officer and rating complements are made up of three or more nationalities and
where no single nationality is capable of producing a viable group. Seafarers
seem to have reached similar conclusions. A common response to questioning
on the advantages and disadvantages of single nationality crews came from a
Filipino cook:

It is more dangerous to work with one nationality. There would be

groups, a few groups and a few groups there. But here, with
multinational, there is nothing like that. No violence. Single nationalities,
they are throwing knives and things and I have never seen that here.

Transnational Expatriate Communities

The community studies in the Netherlands and N Germany show that the
classic community, substantially formed from transient seafarers, is virtually
extinct but that newer and sometimes well-organised forms have emerged. On
 9

the one hand the development of whole-crew hiring through agencies in

seafarers home countries, and the progressive tightening of border-crossing
controls in such hub ports as Hamburg and Rotterdam, have substantially
undermined the organisational and legal bases that once sustained itinerant
expatriate communities. On the other hand our fieldwork in Germany and the
Netherlands shows that at the margins, border regulation can be flexible where
there is some local demand for expatriate seafarers.

In Hamburg-Bremen and Rotterdam there are still opportunities for seafarers to

be engaged individually. Employment on small intra-regionally trading ships
frequently depends on traditional local labour markets. It was noteworthy that
only the small, European trade ships in our shipboard study used local markets
and recruited Cabo Verdean, Indonesian and African crew members giving
Rotterdam home addresses. Other shipboard employment depends on the much
more unpredictable needs of long-distance traders needing short-notice
substitutes. Given these conditions, we concluded that viable expatriate seafarer
communities depend upon either strong labour market connections or casual
employment ashore between ships. The evidence for this was strong. The
gatekeepers to seafaring employment in Rotterdam were Cabo Verdean ex-
seafarers who favoured their countrymen but acted for all comers. Most job
negotiations take place in the Rotterdam Seamens House bar where there are
always Ghanaian and Indonesian seafarers (but never Filipinos) passing time in
hope of a ship. This brokered route to employment reinforces seafarer-centred
network dependencies.

In the Netherlands we found Filipino, Indonesian and Ghanaian seafarers all able
to find some casual work between ships - flower-picking, house/office cleaning
and construction work were all mentioned. Filipinos, however, usually had
wider and better-paid opportunities working in ship-repair and the offshore oil
and gas industry. Access to these jobs was the result of the wider networks
available to Filipinos and these in turn were the outcome of the arrival and
subsequent settlement of Filipina nurses. Recruited in several cohorts for Dutch
hospitals in the 1970s, these nurses unwittingly became pioneer migrant
settlers in the same way that Syhleti seafarers prepared the ground for Bengali
migrants in Britain in the 1950s and 60s. (Adams, 1987; Lane, 1995;Gardner,
1995)

Despite the fact that the Indonesian and Ghanaian communities in the
Netherlands are of longer standing than the Filipino, seafarers from these
national groups are thinly connected with the shore-based communities of their
fellow nationals. The same applies to Ghanaians and Cabo Verdeans in
Germany. Seafarers from these groups live either in seafarers hostels or rent
houses where up to ten people share costs and those longest out of work
subsidise the others. These circumstances showed a marked contrast with the
well-organised Rotterdam Filipinos.
 10

In the early 1980s resident Filipino seafarers formed the Filipino Seafarers
Assistance Programme (PSAP) from the Rotterdam Seafarers House. Originally
established to help visiting Filipino seafarers find employment and residence, it
set up the ancillary Philippine Association of Sea-based Workers for Savings,
Loans and Initiatives in the Netherlands in the 1990s. This organisation,
simultaneously a friendly society and a credit union, was organising monthly
remittances worth Nfl 500,000 by 2001 and arranged door to door cash
deliveries to the Metro Manila and Cebu City areas. Remittances by Ghanaians,
Indonesians and Cabo Verdeans were from privately held savings and often sent
as cash, carried by countryman making periodic home visits.

Further study is needed to explain fully the different situations of the national
groups and the differences between Germany and the Netherlands. While we are
confident that Filipino success in Rotterdam is probably a chance outcome of an
established female migrant settler group, we think it possible that social security
administrative measures in Germany are unintentionally responsible for the
isolation of Cabo Verdeans and Ghanaians. Almost all of these seafarers have
been employed aboard German-flagged ships and through their obligatory social
security contributions, have become eligible for unemployment benefits.
Receipt of these benefits keeps them out of the casual labour market for fear of
jeopardising their guestworker status and the subsequent threat to homeward
remittances. This suggests that the economic and political circumstances of
transnationals may be significantly affected by social security regulations in
host countries.

SEAFARERS FAMILIES

As once in Europe, so now in the Philippines recruitment to seafaring is

concentrated in town and city districts with strong maritime associations. And in
these districts we found the influence of seafarers to be a matter of public
display. The distinctive bus-taxis of the Philippines, jeepneys, usually run as
family businesses, constitute an investment much favoured by seafarers. Those
owned by seafarers families are sometimes unmistakable. The jeepney
illustrated here bears the motto In God We Trust, ambiguously combining
religious belief and dependency on the US dollar, the contractual currency for
global seafarers. There is also a decorative anchor motif and a ship identified by
name and port of registry An informant said this signified that the ship depicted
had paid high levels of overtime and visited ports offering a good run ashore'.
 11

The Philippines Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) values seafarers annual

remittances at approximately $0.8bn. Our estimates, based on our labour market
survey and shipboard and family interviews, suggest the figure is substantially
higher. We estimate each seafarer remits an average of $12,000 per annum,
yielding a national total of $3.0bn. This discrepancy can be explained by the
fact that official statistics are based on the mandatory remittance of 80 per cent
of basic wages. Total earnings, including overtime and leave pay, add some 60
per cent to basic pay most of which is remitted. In India there is no systematic
regulation of overseas workers at local or federal state levels and therefore no
foreign-earnings data for seafarers. Federal states - and Goa is a good example
given the extensiveness of its peoples transnational associations - may benefit
from the multiplier effect of remittances but goes unrecognised. Tax discounts
on overseas workers imported goods and public acknowledgement of the
importance of overseas earnings as seen in the Philippines celebratory
overseas workers days, have no parallel in India.

Conspicuous displays of largesse typical of the sojourners return - UK seafarers

wryly described themselves as one-day millionaires - and similarly ritualised in
the Philippines, were not found in India. We have already referred to seafarers
skills as global consumers. In the case of Filipinos, largesse takes the form of
the gift box (balikbayan). These boxes are recognisably sailor-style parcels in
neatly knotted cordage containing clothing, toys, perfumes, computers, video
cameras, stereo systems, kitchen utensils, CDs, TVs etc. The electrical goods in
particular having additional economic functions. When the seafarers leave pay
has run out but he is not ready to return to sea, these goods may be pawned.
And when unredeemed pass into the wider community at discounted prices.
Indian seafarers return with curios of their travels but not with portable
 12

cornucopias of consumer goods, claiming that they can buy cheaply the same
goods at home. The same could also be said for many goods in the Philippines
but that would imply an uncomplicated utilitarian explanation for Filipinos
consumption. That Indian seafarers return with curio goods and Filipinos with
domestic consumption goods suggests that MacDonaldisation theories of
globalisation might usefully be explored through grounded studies of
transnationals consumption preferences.

Where remittances are concerned, chain organisation in both countries is

uncomplicated and usually free of gratuities to third parties and the sums
involved are large enough to ensure that seafarers families receive substantial
benefits. In the Philippines and India equally, extended and nuclear family
members are beneficiaries and, as expected, this confirms findings from other
studies of transnationals remittances. Businesses capitalised by remittances are
run by brothers, sisters, brother in-laws, and uncles. Loans are made to relatives
and trusted community members. Hospital, funeral, wedding and education bills
of close relatives and friends are met fully or in part. Charitable donations are
made to religious organisations but also to needy people within the local
community.

Seafarers in both countries typically own their own houses, land, small
businesses and even property. Property ownership as a form of investment is
popular in Goa, especially among senior officers who could go to sea
infrequently and still live comfortably on their investment incomes. We also
found ratings who on the basis of secure employment had built large houses but
accumulated little in the way of savings or investments.

In the Philippines remittances are much more likely to provide working capital
for domestic production. A 2nd officers wife living in a remote village without
mains electricity had turned one of her rooms into cinema, running shows every
evening and reporting regular audiences of around 100 people. The generator
that powered the house and all its equipment had been brought home by her
husband. Most of the tapes and discs were cheap pirate copies bought in the
worlds ports. This was one of the more ambitious enterprises we discovered -
but it was a rare household where wives, with the assistance of their children, did
not run a small business of some kind. It might be a small shop or an ice cream
kiosk run from a kitchen window - and always initially capitalised from a
husbands remittance. We found no examples of Indian wives involvement in
small businesses

By way of contrast we found Indian seafarers without qualifications and/or an

Indian seamens book contributing very little to the local economy except by
servicing loans to local creditors. These people, at the margin of legality in terms
of their labour market credentials for employment, were frequently indebted to
family members or moneylenders, borrowing heavily to buy labour market
access through middle men, only to find work on sub-standard ships at low rates
 13

of pay. These seafarers live precariously and some of those interviewed were
effectively in debt bondage.

It was repeatedly drawn to our attention that seafarers families live two lives
which are out of balance in terms of time and emotional affect. Filipino
seafarers, and it varies little with rank, are away aboard ship for not less than
nine months and rarely home for longer than two to three months. In their
absence every aspect of domestic family management is the sole responsibility
of their partners. Seafarers do maintain contact mostly by telephone when in
port but dockside telephones are not always easily found and opportunities do
not always coincide with mutually convenient time zones. And then anyway the
costs are too great to allow more than exchanges of news. Accordingly, many
wives and children spoke of the difficulties adjusting to the repetitive cycle or
return and departure. Many wives and children said their lives were more
normal when their husbands/fathers were at sea but that absence could also be a
cause for anxiety. We found that wives were well informed on the availability
of prostitutes in the worlds ports and were always concerned when their
husbands ships were trading to Latin America, S E Asia or Africa where longer
port stays are normal.

Family life is undoubtedly disrupted by the seafarers return. Disputes

frequently arise over economic management and child discipline and by the
husbands immediate attempts to assume the head-of-household role. Especially
noticeable among Filipino seafarers were attempts to reproduce the
organisation of the ship in the home, both in terms of hierarchy and the division
of labour. Attempts at introducing strict seniority by age and relationship,
timetabling the day to reflect the shipboard routine and allocating clearly
defined duties to all members. We found, for example, a number of written
timetables and duties posted on walls. Since these inevitably cut across
embedded but informal systems of organisation, they were intensely resented.

We found no parallels to these practices in India where at least among officers

the away period rarely exceeds six months. Ratings tours are similar if not
longer than for Filipinos. We found no cases of husbands/fathers taking their
ships home with them. On the other hand the strength of culturally sanctioned
definitions of spheres of interest and authority as between marriage partners and
parents and children, coupled with the negotiating skills learned in adjusting to
arranged marriages found return periods less disruptive.

DIARIES

The return rate for seafarers diaries was a little under fifty per cent. This was
disappointing but given the pattern of seafarers movements, perhaps not so
surprising. Efforts were made to recover diaries by visits to ships but this was
impracticable in too many cases. There was evidence that some respondents did
begin to record diaries diligently they either subsequently lost interest or found it
 14

difficult to return tapes. Despite these drawbacks we did conclude that diaries
could provide rich and detailed data not fully revealed in standard interviewing
and observational techniques. One diarist, a Ghanaian engineroom rating
provided an excellent account of the pace of work aboard a ship trading in
Europe and another, a British shipmaster, kept diaries over a two-year period and
regularly returned them. These and other contributions provided the light and
shade not easily captured by methods and we will confidently use them again
but with realistic expectations of return to sender.

ACTIVITIES

Throughout the study period the research team was in frequent contact with
organisations and associations forming the nucleii of those shipping industrys
infrastructural networks which informally constitute the constituencies of the
emergent political system of global shipping. We have given papers and
presentations to employers, trade unions and welfare agencies. These include a
one-day seminar in Singapore (2001) for an invited audience of senior managers
and trade union officers, and plenary addresses on the theme of the global
seafarer to the International Christian Maritime Associations world congress in
South Africa (1999) and the European meeting of the Pontifical Council for the
Welfare of Migrant and Itinerant Workers (Marseilles, 2000). In this industry
and for historical reasons, the main welfare providers are church based. The
Church of England through the Missions to Seafarers and the Catholic church
through Stella Maris, have worldwide networks of chaplains and port centres.
The team also attended academic conferences dealing with global/transnational
issues and delivered papers in China and Singapore (2000), Germany (2001),
France (2000) and to the Work, Employment and Society and Global Studies
Association conferences in the UK in 2001. Three papers have been given to the
Transnational Communities Seminar Series in Oxford Universitys School of
Geography.

OUTPUTS

The global labour market survey, Crewing the Worlds International

Merchant Fleet, has been published by Lloyds Register-Fairplay, the
worlds sole publisher of world fleet statistics.

Two papers have been accepted for publication in refereed journals

(Sampson, Transnational Drifters or Hyperspace Dwellers?: an exploration
of the lives of Filipino seafarers aboard ship and ashore, Racial & Ethnic
Studies; Sampson, World Englishes)

A wholly unplanned output of the shipboard study is a photographic archive

of 3000+ prints and negatives, all featuring seafarers of various ranks and
nationalities.. The collection is currently being indexed on advice from the
 15

National Photographic Museum and reproductions will be made available to

the public on a non-profit making basis.

IMPACTS

The labour market survey is being commercially published in a partnership

between Lloyds Register-Fairplay and SIRC where revenues are equally
divided. The annual survey, based in future on a significantly wider global
network of data providers including the worlds two largest ports, is priced at
a level (465) which should cover costs and leave a margin for development
of a global survey of pay and conditions of employment.

During the shipboard research the chief inspector of the UK Marine Accident
Investigation Branch(MAIB) asked the team for advice on an accident
involving the stranding of a large merchant ship on the UKs south coast.
Specifically, MAIB wanted our opinion on whether the ships mixed
nationality crew may have contributed to the grounding. Our response was to
organise a one-day seminar for the entire MAIB staff in November 2000 on
our-then findings after seven voyages. We advised against easy negative
assumptions on the inferiority of mixed nationality crews. Our relationship
with MAIB has subsequently developed and SIRC staff will now be
organising an annual briefing seminar for MAIB staff on ongoing research.

FUTURE RESEARCH PRIORITIES

The research experience highlighted the need for research in a number of areas
of policy and theoretical relevance:

1. A further development of the shipboard transnational study reported above

should be undertaken to identify the social dynamics characteristic of single,
double and multiple nationality crew compositions. Studies of this sort have
great potential promise for understanding the factors at work in face-to-face
multicultural encounters.

2. Incidentally to the study we found that ILO and IMO conventions on safety
training certification and the charging of labour agency fees are flouted in
some world regions. A comparative study of these practices would be of
great interest to the relevant UN agencies and contribute to a fuller
understanding of the mechanisms of global labour markets for low paid
workers.

3. Considering the growing prevalence of mixed nationality crews, a study of

current training provision and expertise levels among ships officers and
company crew managers could usefully contribute to developing education
and training programmes for crew managers and key ships personnel.
 16

4. Social isolation is an inevitable accompaniment to current crewing and

commercial practices. Small crews, rapid port turnarounds and lengthy
contracts for seafarers from Asia and E Europe lock seafarers into a narrow
world of minimal human contact. A study aimed at clarifying the concept of
social isolation and its contributory factors should enlarge our understanding
of isolated communities and indicate ameliorative policies.

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 17

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