Sustainable Maritime Workforce: History
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Livingstone Divine Caesar

The maritime industry is regarded as the fulcrum of the global economy. It contributes significantly in diverse ways to the movement of goods. To effectively deliver on its mandate, maritime transportation needs to be sustainable.

  • maritime workforce
  • sustainable
  • maritime industry

1. Introduction

As a truly globalized activity, maritime transportation serves the needs of the world’s economy [1][2]. In volume terms, 90% of global trade is transported via ocean using different ship types [3][4][5]. To put it in proper perspective, more than 11 billion tons of international cargo trade in 2022 was moved using the maritime transport mode [3]. Also, the rapid continuous rise in automation of shipboard and terminal operations [6], the introduction of mega-ships (predominantly in the containerized cargo and liquid bulk trades) and competitive freight rates are attractive propositions to potential shippers [7]. A 2.1% increase in maritime trade is thus forecasted by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) for 2023–2027. This highlights the huge potential of maritime transportation and clearly positions it as the most cost-efficient means available for the movement of cargo from areas of low utility to major consumption hubs around the world. It is thus a critical component of the global economic architecture.
However, all is not rosy for global maritime transportation. A collection of world events is directly impacting the sector, frequently creating severe disruptions and upending established trade customs on a large scale [8]. Typical among these are the recent global COVID-19 pandemic [9], geopolitical issues (which are reshaping trading relations between the West and BRICS countries) [10][11][12], technological advancements [13] and increasing pressure from environmental groups and other stakeholders on the need for global maritime transport to be sustainable and environmentally friendly [11]. The last one concerns environmental imperatives and essentially entails the meeting of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) requirements using interventions capable of reducing the global carbon footprints of shipping activities [5][14]. The convergence of these exogenous and endogenous factors is placing financial pressure on maritime transport industry operators (especially shipping companies) and changing their modus operandi even as they dig deep to remain competitive [7].
A major outcome of the ongoing changes happening within the global maritime transportation sector is the shortage of highly skilled workers [15]. For instance, with their limited operational budgets, and many competing interests [11], shipping companies are compelled to take cost-cutting measures to remain competitive. Given that interests such as climate change imperatives (for example meeting IMO’s 3.5% m/m to 0.5% m/m sulphur-level reduction requirements) [11], capital investments in shipboard technologies, etc., cannot be sacrificed, cutting down on crewing costs is often the most pursued strategy. Such a strategy results in poor crewing practices among shipping companies and other third parties connected to the employment of seafarers [16][17]. Meanwhile, cutting down on crewing costs does not come without consequences. It results in low manning levels on ships, poor onboard working conditions and undermines safe navigation [18]. Perhaps the most devasting effect of the crew cost cutting strategy and other poor human resource practices of shipping industry employers is the negative cascading effect on the attraction and retention of skilled workforce for the maritime transport sector. Caesar [19] explains that when shipping companies cut crewing costs by reducing manning levels to stay competitive, the resultant increase in fatigue levels and workload onboard creates a high turnover situation among cadets and senior officers onboard. It equally makes the shipping industry unattractive to prospective young people looking to build a career in seafaring. This situation is a direct threat to sustainable maritime transportation since it leads to the loss of highly skilled labour which is critical to the survival of global shipping. Hence, ongoing changes and practices within and outside the larger maritime transportation sector appear to have direct implications for future manpower needs.
The skill shortage that threatens the sustainability of the global maritime transportation sector is twofold. First, there is the numerical global shortage of skilled labour that has been projected for the global shipping industry; with a 10% increase in demand for every half decade [15][19]. Additionally, 89, 510 ship officers will have to be added by 2026 to avoid acute shortage [20]. This skilled labour shortage is being fuelled largely by a multiplicity of factors ranging from poor human resource practices, the idiosyncratic nature of working onboard ships and other industry peculiarities. Caesar [19] classifies the compendium of causal factors underpinning the numerical shortage of skilled labour as personal, organizational and industrial. Second, there is another kind of skill shortage threatening the future sustainability of maritime transportation at the functional level. This latter category has its roots in the rapid metamorphosis of technological advancements [21]. Automation of maritime operations is on the rise, and this has led to the emergence of new skill demands both onboard and at shore. The new job roles arising from industrial automation of the sector and industry 4.0 developments will have to be filled immediately to keep the wheels of global maritime transportation moving [22]. However, the unique and highly technical analytical competencies required to fill such roles have not yet been fully developed and transferred to people currently working in the sector. The inability of the industry to fill the new roles springing up from technological innovations is a real threat to the future sustainability of global maritime transportation. Another subtle threat to sustainable labour supply is the ageing of the maritime workforce which is touted to contribute more to labour shortages for maritime transportation (at the port and seaside) [19][23]. In developed maritime nations such as the United States, for instance, 86% of the maritime workforce is placed in the getting old bracket.
An intricate understanding of the growing changes happening on the global stage and how they impact the maritime transportation sector is needed. Such understanding will empower the design of workable strategies for the continual supply of the right mix and number of skilled workers to man operations at both the landside (ports, terminals, inland depots, harbours) and waterside (onboard ships and oil platforms) of the global maritime transportation sector. This research highlights the severity of the skill shortage problem within the larger maritime transportation sector. It specifically explains the mechanism via which poor industry employment practices and other ongoing changes are impacting labour market dynamics. It then charts a new path in proposing that certain things will need to change if maritime transportation is to remain sustainable. The paper advocates the need for a paradigm shift in the training, recruitment and retention of the maritime workforce. For instance, training content for the maritime workforce will need a paradigm shift to concentrate on the transfer of digital and critical thinking competencies [24][25]. Also, training and other industry practices need to be designed in ways that attract the younger generation to careers in the maritime sector. Thus, the foregoing discussion highlights the nature and severity of changes within and outside the global maritime transportation sector and the envisaged impact on the availability and employability of the maritime workforce. Using a mixed methods research design, this research offers empirical evidence of the perception of maritime industry workers regarding the plethora of employment practices and their respective impact on turnover decisions. The viewpoint of both employees and employers is captured and then discussed alongside the recent happenings within the larger maritime transportation sector.

2. Human Resource (HR) Practices among Employers

As pertains to other sectors of the global economy, organizations in the maritime transportation sector also engage in human resource practices such as hiring (recruitment), training and retention strategies among others [15][16][19][26]. Collectively, it is expected that HR activities must be designed to promote the identification, grooming and retention of a highly skilled workforce to deliver on the targets of industry stakeholders. In practice, however, this has not been the experience as many industry employers deploy unorthodox HR activities that do not inure to the benefit of the sector. Caesar, et al. [15] identify some of these practices to include poaching, inequalities regarding employment contracts, reduced crew complement on ships and structural lapses in HR policies that hinder access to leadership positions for the female gender and certain ethnicities onboard ships and at the portside. Meanwhile, empirical evidence [16][26] demonstrates that these poor HR practices undermine efforts aimed at retaining highly skilled talents for the sector. The industry is losing highly skilled ship officers, especially within the liquid bulk trades to the power and chemical industries on the landside due to unequal wages (largely due to ethnicity), opaque promotion criteria, etc. It appears that preference is given to seafarers from developed nations compared to their counterparts from elsewhere. This directly militates against sustainable maritime transportation given the negative effect on the attraction of young talents and retention efforts.
Many of the poor HR practices are now entrenched and almost considered the norm. With this, not all members of the workforce have equal access to opportunities. For instance, junior officers onboard the ship hope to rise into senior roles through a meritorious scheme. In the absence of that, the natural decision is to resign and move to landside jobs. This leads to the loss of critical talent to the existing workforce of the maritime transportation sector and the unavailability of equal advancement opportunities serves as a great disincentive to affected workers [15][26]. Caesar, et al. [15] note that it is some of these unfair HR practices that have made high officer turnover a growing problem, positioning it as the number one reason for the global shortage of ship officers. Other practices within the maritime transportation landscape that work against the sustainable supply of skilled talents for the workforce are accumulation/late payment of wages, abandonment of mariners, limited access to shore leave, erratic contact with family and tedious working schedules in ports and onboard ships. Caesar, et al. [15] argue that to improve the retention of highly skilled staff within the workforce, the multiplicity of issues must be meticulously distilled and thoroughly addressed using a multipronged strategy.
Besides the scourge of poor HR practices, issues such as generational gap disparities and sector-specific idiosyncrasies complicate the attraction and retention of a highly skilled workforce [27]. Differences in the expectations of the different worker generation categories (X, Y and Z) present a challenging web of employee demands that industry employers will need to dexterously navigate to continually attract and retain talent. Understanding the differences in these expectations is key to successful manpower supply for the global maritime transportation sector. For instance, whereas the older generation sees seafaring as a lifetime career, the later generations share a different view [15]. Work in the maritime sector is carried out under some unique circumstances that at times hurt the development of fresh talents to succeed in the retiring generation. Seafarers for example experience long separation from family working at sea [2][16]. Such long periods of working in isolation affect the psyche of seafarers, demotivate them and trigger their eventual movement to the landside to pursue other career options where their skills may be in high demand. Stress, fatigue, burnout and poor working conditions exacerbate the situation and increase the probability of turnover among the workforce as well. Failure to address or ameliorate the effect of these industry idiosyncrasies results in unmet expectations, a breaking of the psychological contract among workers and their eventual exit from the sector. This certainly does not bode well for the sustainability of the maritime transport sector as it represents a threat to the continuous supply of a highly trained workforce.
Therefore, shipping industry policies must target the issues discussed so far and also explore measures to the effect of piracy, criminalization of seafarers, poor cadet mentorship and other industry regulations that do not serve the interests of the maritime transportation sector. There is thus a complex web of sector issues at hand and their negative effect on the sustainable supply of a highly skilled, trained and adaptive workforce should not be overlooked. Thus, the complexity of the environment in which the maritime sector workforce must be retained to ensure sustainability is increasingly growing complex.

3. Industry Automation and Labour Implications

For many years, the maritime transportation industry has led the way in the automation of work processes. It has often relied on a careful blend of operational technologies and a highly skilled workforce to deliver on its mandate. Despite the huge initial capital investment, these technologies (both at the port and seaside) improve the productivity of the workforce [28][29] and empower operators to deliver goods to areas of high utility in an efficient manner at relatively reduced costs. Although some research argues that the emergency of technologies such as automated ships (smart vessels) might result in the loss of jobs to seafarers [8], the consensus remains that shipboard automation and similar Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies (Industry 4.0) springing up globally [30] and within the maritime transportation sector portend a positive outlook for both shoreside and shipboard efficiency [13][24]. Also, one can counterintuitively argue that rather than focusing on the supposed downsides of automation, a more constructive outlook is that it should rather instigate a rethink of existing training materials used by the Maritime Education Training Institutes (METIs) and other establishments primarily engaged in educating the industry’s workforce. These developments must rather inspire a switch to transferring analytical and technical competencies to give mariners and other maritime transportation industry workers a defined and sustainable career pathway.
The increasing growth in both shipboard and portside technologies come with an effect on industry labour. The potential to reduce operational costs to as high as 20% for instance underpins the heightened interest in smart ships [8]. Since crewing costs represent the largest item on a shipping company’s expenditure list, technologies capable of reducing the crew complement of a ship are naturally welcome news. Besides reduced crewing costs, the burgeoning of smart ship-related technologies hinges on fuel economy and improved safety [8][31]. Therefore, as technologies connected to maritime operations grew, a corresponding implication for the quality and quantity of labour needed was revealed [28]. Given that smart ship technologies are still in the developmental phase, the extent of their exact impact on skill requirements for the maritime transportation sector is not crystal clear. What is however clear remains the new technical, cyber and AI-related competencies that must be developed in time [6][25]. These unfolding training requirements will have to be inculcated into the pedagogies of seaside and portside worker training institutions. On the one hand, the crew complement of ships will reduce for smart ships but the general outlook for the maritime transportation industry is the multiplicity of new skill requirements and the attendant roles that will emerge but need to be filled.
The majority of predictions from the extant literature regarding the impact of automation within the global maritime transportation sector is that low-skill jobs onboard ships and at seaports will fade out but usher in new highly technical roles [8][29][32]. To adequately prepare the maritime transport industry workforce to seamlessly step into the new roles envisaged to emerge from the industry automation deluge, Koh, et al. [33] propose that knowledge transfer should focus on five competencies. In order of importance and ranking, the areas are digitalization skills, maritime business knowledge, social skills, sustainability competence and supply chain management skills. This is understandable when one considers that the influx of these technologies which are fundamentally rooted in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) naturally positions digitalization skills at the apex of the pyramid of new competencies to be developed among the industry’s workforces. Regarded as one of the truly globalized industries in the world, the maritime transportation business is intrinsically multicultural and will require that future skill developments consider the social skills of the workforce to build cultural competence among them. Also, knowledge/competencies in sustainability are increasingly becoming a core requirement as climate change imperatives have now caught up with the maritime transportation sector. Ships and ports must now operate with the highest level of environmental considerations and consciousness to reduce their carbon footprints [11]. Thus, the future sustainability of maritime transportation hinges on the unhindered supply of a highly skilled workforce that is well grounded in the emerging set of skill demands being instigated by industry changes connected to technological advancements and regulatory requirements.
The emerging new skill demands only mean that the competence profile of people working onboard ships and on the landside in ports will see significant change. It is evident from the extant literature that the maritime transportation workforce of tomorrow will need to be equipped with ambidextrously amphibious skills. This simply means that the skills they acquire should prepare them to comfortably work both at sea (onboard ships) and on land (seaports). Any flexibility in switching skills between the shipside and port side of the sector will further promote sustainability. For instance, Caesar, et al. [15] note that limited career options for ship officers are one of the reasons for their early movement to landside jobs in other industries. This means employers equipping them with these amphibious sets of skills (in high demand and usable both on ships in ports) will help carve out a sustainable career pathway for them. Naturally, ship officers are likely to reciprocate any skill investment in them by rewarding the employer with longer years of service at sea. This counterintuitive approach might help increase the number of officers serving onboard at sea at any given time to lessen the effect of high turnovers on the already exacerbating skill shortage confronting the sector.
Thus, the need for emerging skills is not confined to the maritime transport industry but extends to various sectors. This is largely driven by the digitalization of the workplace which is almost revolutionary due to the numerous benefits it bestows [30]. The literature thus shows that decarbonization (largely driven by regulations and pressure group activities) and digitalization imperatives are increasingly changing the structural landscape of the global maritime transportation sector [11][34]. This change is set to only intensify. To achieve sustainability for the sector, timely alignment must be sought between the training given to the workforce and the critical skill demands emerging from the ongoing sectoral changes. This suggests that any gap (lacuna) between emerging sector realities and current training content must be identified and bridged in time. Already, Emad and Shahbakhsh [35] acknowledge the existence of a gap between cognitive skill expectations and what the maritime workforce currently possesses. Heering, et al. [36] for instance note that the demand for cyber skills is increasing for seafarers but the training package currently administered to them lacks that content. This means a life-long learning approach that will see structural changes to the content of conventional industry training standards such as the STCW for seafarers is imminent. Figure 1 provides details on the technological innovations within the maritime transport sector and the implications, among other things.
Figure 1. Maritime sector innovations and implications.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su16010239

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