Introduction
Seafarers who work offshore - most usually on oil and gas mobile offshore units and their support vessels – have to cope with a unique set of working and living conditions.
Why are offshore conditions unique?
Workers employed offshore often spend time in constant motion, are subject to extremes of weather, noisy working conditions, excessive hours of work and demanding shift patterns – with night-working common.
These conditions put offshore workers at increased risk of accidents, poor health, anxiety and stress, and general fatigue. A survey of seafarer fatigue by Cardiff University, published in November 2006, found that workers from offshore oil installations had higher levels of fatigue and poorer health than other seafarers.
Offshore workers are often unorganised and unprotected by national agreements covering their minimum pay and conditions, health and safety standards, and living conditions. ITF has been successfully campaigning to ensure such agreements are now put in place.
How does the ITF protect the rights of offshore workers?
ITF is working to protect seafarers in the offshore industry through negotiating for offshore collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) to secure acceptable working and living conditions. To view an ITF standard offshore collective bargaining agreement, use the link on the right of this page. ITF set up its Offshore Task Force in 1997 to assist with this campaign, and the task force has helped broker the following model CBAs for offshore workers:
• CBA for all seafarers serving on Norwegian-owned offshore support and diving vessels. As a result of this agreement, reached in 1997, the ITF 2008 minimum wage benchmark for an able seaman working in the North Sea (whatever their nationality) is now $3,291per month, with many other benefits for seafarers
• The Norwegian agreement was instrumental in helping ITF to negotiate implementation of a CBA in a range of companies. Based on the ITF’s standard offshore CBA of 2004, this sets minimum rates of pay, working hours, public holidays, overtime, rest, sick pay and minimum safe crewing levels. Companies now covered by a CBA include: Acergy (Norway), Saipem (Italy), Havila (UK), Farstad (Norway), Subsea 7 (Norway), OSM (Norway), Great Eastern (India), Greatship (India), Ravenscroft (USA), Technip (France), NMM Ltd (UK), Bibby Offshore (Isle of Man), Gulf Offshore (UK), BJ Offshore (UK), Prosafe (Singapore), Heerema (Netherlands), Harms Offshore (Germany) and Gardline Survey (UK)
• Worldwide CBA covering crews on offshore pipelay construction barges (including many Indonesian seafarers) employed by Saipem (Italy), Acergy (Norway) and Heerema (Netherlands) – this agreement was reached in October 2007 and will be reviewed annually
Plans are currently in progress with ITF’s Australian, UK and Norwegian affiliates to develop a worldwide CBA to cover the offshore diving industry.
What else is the ITF doing?
ITF's offshore campaign has also supported successful agreements ensuring minimum wages and conditions for offshore workers in: Australia, USA, Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, East Timor, Brazil, Indonesia, Trinidad & Tobago. Talks are also currently under way to establish a CBA in Singapore.
ITF is also helping offshore workers to organise around the world, including the first ever conference for North Sea workers in summer 2008, where delegates from UK, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands and Ireland will meet to discuss issues and campaigns.
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http://www.itfseafarers.org/offshore-spotlight.cfm
Offshore workers in the spotlight
2002
The ITF is stepping up its campaigning on behalf of workers on rigs and supply boats in the offshore oil and gas sector.
Efforts are being spearheaded by the ITF Offshore Task Force which is breaking new ground in global solidarity between seafarers and between affiliates of the ITF and the ICEM, the international body representing oil and energy unions.
Norrie McVicar, Chair of the ITF Offshore Task Force, explains that the ITF’s renewed campaigning comes against the background of the anti-union activities of employers operating in the Gulf of Mexico. In particular, a worldwide solidarity campaign has centred on support for US unions fighting one notorious anti-union operator, Trico Marine.
“This campaign is a demonstration of real solidarity by affiliated unions in support of offshore workers’ rights,” says McVicar.
As well as the Gulf, the ITF is also active helping affiliates and unrepresented seafarers in the North Sea. Renewed contacts are being made in West and Southern Africa and Trinidad and Tobago, where the Caribbean unions face many of the same hostile employers as in the Gulf.
Adding to the urgency underlying the ITF’s activities is the growing evidence of excessive working hours in the industry. This is one of the key factors behind the unionisation drive in the Gulf.
Fighting anti-unionism
How the ITF is assisting US unions campaigning to unionise offshore workers in the Gulf of Mexico.
"I’ve been a captain for 10 years and in my time in the oil industry, it rarely (never) happens that you work 12 hours and rest 12 hours. It’s more like 16 hours work and 8 hours rest. This is due to not having qualified reliefs 80 per cent of the time. So in order for you to save your job and be able to pay your bills and feed your family, you do what you have to – and that is ‘break the law’ and make the company happy… I’m expected to suck up to the customer at no matter what cost – working 20 hours a day, injuring a crew member or whatever."
Hostile attitudes
The “law” (quoted above) is the 12-hour rule and the country is the United States. Mariners in the offshore industry of the US Gulf of Mexico are being made to break the law on the hours that they work, or risk losing their jobs and being blacklisted. The captain quoted here cannot be named for fear of reprisals.
Their daily pay may be good, but they have no job security. Many are hired on a daily basis and can be fired at will, particularly if they show any interest in a union. There are few of the benefits which unionised offshore workers elsewhere in the world can expect such as overtime pay, paid holidays, sick leave or union-negotiated company pensions.
In a union survey, 66 per cent of offshore seafarers said that they worked on average more than 80 hours a week.
Meanwhile, maritime unions in the US have been kept out of key industry bodies where regulations are set and safety issues discussed such as the National Offshore Safety Advisory Committee. The unions also accuse the US Coast Guard of failing mariners, especially the lower level ratings. They report that the international Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping (STCW) Convention, which the US like all other nations must respect, is barely known by seafarers in the Gulf.
To grapple with this alarming situation, five US maritime unions formed Offshore Mariners United (OMU) in 1998, launching a major campaign to unionise the offshore seafarers in the US Gulf.
Dave Eckstein, field organiser for the OMU, has an office in Houma, Louisiana, a dockyard town which is the base for many of the supply companies. His job is as tough as it gets for a union organiser. Louisiana is one of the Deep South’s “Right to Work” states where unions are bad-mouthed and harassed, and Houma is a company-dominated town.
As soon as mariners speak up publicly against the injustices or are found out for making contact with the union, they face the sack or simply never get work again.
Eckstein and his fellow union activists are being confronted with a vicious anti-union offensive by employers in the Gulf. Eckstein feels sure there is “some type of collusion going on between law enforcement and the oil industry business owners”. He has become sufficiently worried for the safety of his fellow organisers that the OMU has been considering asking for FBI protection.
Workers are scared and communities are being turned against the unions. Employers have brought in the notorious union-busting consultant Jay Cole, of Cole Associates, based far to the north in Chicago. Cole helped to set up a group around Houma called Concerned Citizens for the Community (CCFC) which, despite its name, is an employer-backed association.
At public meetings, the CCFC hammers home the message to local people that unions have only come to intimidate them and take their money. Union activists who try to speak up at CCFC meetings have been led away in handcuffs. Hundreds of CCFC billboards have sprung up in recent months to line Houma’s highways with the message “There is no you in union”.
Fact-finding mission
In this climate of intimidation and repression, the OMU sought help internationally. Many of the companies operating in the Gulf, whether the oil and gas giants or those that run the supply vessels, also operate offshore Norway, the UK, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere. In those countries, the offshore workers are unionised and work under collective bargaining agreements between the unions and the self-same companies.
In June 2001 an international union fact-finding mission visited Louisiana for five days to see for themselves. On the delegation were union representatives from the Norwegian, British and Australian operations of companies such as Trico Marine, BP-Amoco, Statoil, Tidewater and Norsk Hydro, a number of which operate in the Gulf. It came as a great surprise to many of them that employers who sit down and negotiate with unions in one part of the world can be so rabidly anti-union in another.
Birger Pedersen, Assistant Secretary of the ITF Special Seafarers’ Department and leader of the ITF contingent of the mission to Louisiana, has a background in the North Sea offshore industry. He says that one of the greatest shocks was to see the almost complete absence in the US Gulf of regulation, of the “health and safety culture” which has governed working practices in the North Sea since major disasters like Piper Alpha.
Above all, says Pedersen: “This is an issue which is pure human rights. The mariners are intimidated. They can be turned out of their beds to watch anti-union videos and receive anti-union propaganda. This completely violates their basic rights under international standards.”
During their attempt to visit the companies’ shipyards, the delegates had first-hand experience of the police harassment that has become rife in the area. At the company gates of Trico Marine, they found the local Sheriff’s Deputy already there, barring their way. He even refused to let them deliver a letter to the company. Elsewhere they were made to show their passports and detained between two sets of squad cars for about an hour. Throughout the rest of the day they were trailed by no less than nine police cars. The ITF is considering legal action for unlawful detention.
Trico Marine
Trico Marine is one of the companies with which the OMU has had most difficulty. In a company hand-out, it boasts that it is, and always has been, “a non-union company”. Trico Marine says that any trade union “would be bad for the company, bad for the employee, and bad for the industry”.
Trico has sacked union activists, consistently refused to meet with union representatives, refused the union reasonable access to its employees, and has had union representatives illegally barred from a Trico annual shareholders’ meeting. It regularly hires uniformed police on private detail to keep unions out of its premises.
This is a far cry from Trico’s behaviour in the North Sea. Knut Nikolaisen, an AB seafarer and a shop steward from the Trico workforce in Norway and an Executive Board member of the Norwegian Seamen’s Union, was on the fact-finding mission.
He told the American trade unionists: “We have a good relationship with Trico. We never have to wonder what’s going on with the company. All of our questions are answered when the union agents go to the Trico managers.”
On Trico vessels in the North Sea, the size of the crew is mandated and so they never have to worry about sailing short-handed. In Britain too, Trico has recently renegotiated its agreement with the officers’ union Numast.
Trico must be a chameleon, or a “hypocrite” as Dwayne McCullough put it. He is one of the union activists fired by Trico.
The visit to Louisiana made a deep impression on the foreign trade unionists. There they met conditions which they barely could imagine would exist in a developed democracy. “No-one back home in Norway would have believed us if we told them, but luckily we made a video of it,” says Birger Pedersen.
Once the visitors returned home, Trico came under intense pressure from international action. The Norwegian Oil, Petrochemical and Energy Workers’ Federation (Nopef) represents workers on the offshore oil/gas platforms in the North Sea and was also on the mission. Nopef’s Second Vice President Torbjørn Teigland said: “We cannot any longer quietly look at situations where workers in other countries are sacked because they unionise.”
Nopef’s response was swift and serious. A month after the mission’s return, Nopef warned Trico of its intention to launch a boycott unless the company lets employees decide for themselves whether or not to join a union, free of any interference, harassment, discrimination or threats. Nopef’s members on North Sea platforms are in a position to refuse to work with Trico supply vessels.
A second line of action was to take the issue up with some of Trico’s key business partners. Among these are the oil and gas companies with whom Trico has contracts and the company’s bank DnB. Subsequently Norsk Hydro halted negotiations with Trico on the chartering of vessels. In the case of Statoil, the company has signed a global agreement with the international trade union movement. This guarantees that not only will Statoil respect workers’ fundamental freedoms in its own operations but that it will collaborate with its suppliers to do the same.
The ITF and the OMU also asked the US government to investigate breaches of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s “Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises” by Trico Marine.
Trico, whose headquarters are in the US, has about 100 vessels worldwide. In the fourth quarter of 2000 it made US$1.4 million in profit. Revenues increased by US$13 million over the same quarter in 1999.
By contrast, operating costs, of which labour is by far the most significant, only increased by about US$1 million. OMU’s Dave Eckstein says this shows the company could treat its workers better. “We’ve been saying ‘give it back’ for over a year now.”
But, as the OMU says, as long as the mariner is getting the least that the company can get away with, then turnover, lack of training and a shortage of qualified, licensed people will continue to exist in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Offshore Mariners United comprises five US maritime unions: the American Maritime Officers, the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association, the International Organisation of Masters, Mates and Pilots and the Seafarers’ International Union (which now includes the National Maritime Union).
Solidarity from Latin America
International solidarity for the US campaign against union-busting Trico Marine is growing. In September 2001, three unions in Brazil – where Trico Marine also operates – signed a Solidarity Accord, pledging support for the international campaign for workers’ rights offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
Signed in Rio de Janeiro, the pact pledges international co-operation to promote fairness, justice and a voice at work for mariners working on Trico Marine’s US-flag vessels.
The pact says: “The Brazilian and US unions call peacefully and lawfully on the customers of Trico not to engage in any further contracts with Trico from this day forward until Trico ceases its anti-union activities.”
Fatigue: What are its effects?
New ITF-backed research aims to find out more
by Professor Andy Smith, Director of the Centre for Occupational and Health Psychology, Cardiff University
Long working hours are common on ships in the offshore oil industry. More than half the 563 members of an officers’ union, questioned as part of a survey, said they worked more than 85 hours a week. One might assume that these long working hours lead to fatigue, which might affect safety. But until there is a standard reporting system, it is impossible to establish whether or not there is a link between the fatigue the seafarers certainly experience and accidents at sea.
More than 10 years after it was recommended* that reporting should be standardised, this has not happened. One set of data we examined as part of the current research programme, for example, contained barely any reference to the number of days into the tour, hours into the shift or even the state of the sea. Sometimes the type of injury was not mentioned, or the severity of the injury.
What is clear from our research – pulling together other research papers and undertaken with shipping engaged in offshore oil support and exploration, including shuttle tankers, offshore supply vessels and diving support vessels – is that excessive hours are worked on ships. Working at night, in particular, was found to be associated with reduced alertness and impaired performance, and night work at the start of a tour is the most likely scenario for impaired performance, especially at the end of the shift.
Nearly a quarter of the ships’ officers surveyed (members of Numast, the British union) said they had difficulty falling asleep and nearly half said they often woke up as they tried to sleep. Noise and motion were common causes. The three most common shift patterns – 12 on/12 off, 6 on/6 off and 4 on/8 off – could also lead to fatigue. Despite the absence of evidence for a link between fatigue and accidents, seafarers themselves perceive that long working hours cause stress, reduced safety, poor concentration, fatigue and incidents related to fatigue.
Three per cent reported an accident within the three months before the survey (higher than the accident rate for onshore groups), but this could be a reflection on the working environment rather than on human error. There is, however, little evidence of a cumulative effect of fatigue: several studies show no decline in alertness with the length of the tour of duty.
Good physical and mental health also emerge from the survey, with very low sick leave and low use of medication. This may reflect the fact that those who develop health problems leave the profession at a relatively early stage in their career.
Alternatively, seafarers’ views of their own physical and mental health may not mirror reality: a 1998 survey of Great Barrier Reef pilots found that they thought themselves healthy in all respects, but more than half were obese, and a third were smokers. In addition, when one considers only those with the greatest fatigue (poor sleep, working rotating shift cycles) one finds that this sub-group report a much higher incidence of both physical and mental health problems.
Our analyses show that most accidents happened between 09:00 and 16:00, and usually during the first four hours of a shift. These are not times that correspond to natural troughs in everyday rhythms. More accidents happened at the beginning of a tour, especially during its first week, and when sea conditions were calm. The last factor could just reflect the fact that more risky exercises are undertaken in calm conditions.
The age group most likely to have accidents is 30-50, which accounts for 50 per cent. One set of accident statistics showed that contractors were most likely to be injured, followed by marine personnel. The most common area for injury was the open deck (more than half of all accidents). Arms were most frequently injured, followed by legs. Another set of statistics showed that more than 20 per cent of accidents involved machinery faults, and nearly a third were slips, trips or falls.
Using the data in current and past research, the programme has been able to come to certain conclusions about fatigue. It is possible that we have been largely studying “best practice” and there is a strong need to have more detailed information about situations closer to a “worst case scenario”.
But an inevitable conclusion is this: until reporting systems are standardised, commercial shipping will lag behind many other industries (such as manufacturing, road transport and civil aviation) in its knowledge of how working hours and conditions affect performance.
* Study into Hours of Work, Fatigue and Safety at
Sea (1989), ID Brown, Cambridge: Medical
Research Council.
Aims of the programme
Researchers at Cardiff University aim to provide advice on:
• how much fatigue arises, and what its effects are, on specific ship types and voyage circles,
• the best shift patterns and duty tours to minimise fatigue,
• identifying individuals at risk and factors affecting tiredness and quality of rest,
• the significance of patterns of work and rest in trying to improve the health and safety of seafarers on board ship,
• suggested procedures that minimise or prevent the effects of fatigue,
• suitable guidance for seafarers on how they might avoid fatigue.
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