‘A life on the ocean wave’: the ‘post-socialist’ careers of Chinese, Russian and Eastern European seafarers

Abstract

The emergence of the global labour market (GLM) provides a novel platform for young professional workers to design and develop their careers. This is particularly true for those from China, the former Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries, where economic liberation has made it easier for professionals to move both internally and internationally. Taking into account national variations in economic transition and political constraints, several questions are raised. How does the GLM, for example, influence its choice of employers and career development? What are the similarities and differences between Chinese and Eastern European seafarers? What factors contribute to these differences? Those questions are addressed here, through a study of the case of seafarers for whom a global labour market has been established since the 1980s. By collecting crew information worldwide, a global seafarer database has been built in the Seafarers' International Research Centre (SIRC) at Cardiff University. Accordingly, this paper develops a methodological framework for analysing and comparing seafarers' careers, and revealing the features of career development amongst four major seafarer supplier countries: China, Russia, the Ukraine and Poland.

Keywords:

• Global labour market
• seafarer career
• transitional countries

Notes

1 Our use of the word transition here applies to those economies which have undergone the transition from communist to post-socialist ones, including those countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, east Asia (including China) and southern Africa.

2 There is no sample frame for the world seafaring population. Instead, we use the world ocean fleet as the basis for the SIRC global labour market survey. Following a standard procedure of data collection and verification, the term seafarers in this paper is defined as those seafarers who are working on board an ocean-going (ship size > = 1,000 gross ton) at any time. Assuming the distribution of sample vessels within the SIRC database reflects the distribution of world merchant fleets, 5,000 sample ships and the seafarers on board represent over 15 per cent of the total 30,000 ocean-going ships and seafarers onboard (for the detailed discussion, see Wu, 2003).

3 A ship is a strict hierarchy in which the top jobs include four grades in both the Deck and Engine Departments. This includes the Captain on the Deck and the Chief Engineer in the Engine Room at the top, followed by the chief-officer on the Deck and 2nd engineer. While job titles for junior rank may be more diverse, two ranks can be clearly distinguished from each other: the 2nd officer and the 3rd officers on the Deck and the 3rd and 4th engineer in the Engine Department.