Monday Morning Mariner: TWIC Changes & Compensation Survey

On watch with an iced coffee. Photo by Lindsey Erdody, SHFWire.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a Monday Morning Mariner. While the Misunderstood Mariner blog is aimed mainly at the general public and journalists, these occasional Monday posts are for my fellow mariners, and usually address regulatory, labor relations, or technological issues affecting the maritime field. A couple of issues that have come up since my last Monday Morning Mariner post:

Changes to TWIC. In December, the US Coast Guard issued a policy letter that will, it is hoped, ease the burden imposed by the oft-reviled Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC). The revised regs would exempt crew on vessels not required to have Vessel Security Plans. The bad news, if you ever plan on working on a vessel with a required Vessel Security Plan, you’re still going to need a TWIC. At least, for now. In May, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report saying the program had significant security and administrative problems.

Get a copy of the Coast Guard’s Policy Letter here.

Get a copy of the GAO report here.

WorkBoat Compensation Survey. WorkBoat magazine has published a survey of 400 commercial mariners with an eye toward looking at the state of the industry from a payroll standpoint. They get into some other demographic areas as well, and it’s interesting if not all that surprising: an overwhelming majority of commercial mariners are men, the top of the bell curve for both pay and age come in one’s early 50s, and about a third of mariners have a military background. The bad news for the vets is that this doesn’t seem to help a lot pay-wise. One thing I wonder about is whether this survey just consists of just WorkBoat readers or is meant to represent all US mariners. According to the WorkBoat web site, more than half of US mariners are based between Corpus Christie and Pensacola: are half of us really working in to oil patch, or does this just indicate the magazine’s GOM focus?

The full survey is available from WorkBoat here for $195. For a free slide show of selected results, click here.

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