Why Dont People Speak Up?
Their reasoning: the Wi-Fi routers on the Crew deck are turned off during the night.
‘We come here to catch phone signal so we can communicate with our families, sir.’
Not only the internet, this rationing also applies to alcohol, shore leave and more things. What is critical and essential to a person is a matter of rank not necessity. This is a story of abuse of power in the shipping industry and I’m only scratching the surface.
Who are these people? They are Ratings, Able-Bodied Seamen, Ordinary Seamen, Fitters, Wipers, and Oilers. Just those rank labels tell us so much about the nature of the problem. Ordinary people doing menial bodily tasks to keep the goods moving around the clock.
Most remain stagnated in their position due to limited opportunities but also because of outright prejudice within the labour markets. There are companies that categorically limit ratings from progressing as officers in their HR policies. Some go as far as claiming – ‘they are not Officer material’.
Public awareness of this dark side of shipping is poor. Apart from a handful of ethnographic studies circulated within academic networks, there is little interest to bring these issues to the surface. When you look up online for books on seafaring, much of the discourse is centred around bravery, courage and the daring adventures of Captain Cook.
One would expect industry-led conferences to take these matters seriously. But most crew conferences are about marketing, selling, networking and beating their own drum. Occasionally, crew members are invited to crew conferences but that’s more of tokenism than listening and understanding their struggles and concerns.
You can sense the magnitude of the problem when an entire industry choses to remain silent about systemic issues.
Underneath these cultural silences breeds and multiplies the abuse of power in ways that are not always obvious even to those within the industry. A multimillion dollar ‘training’ industry – hand in glove with private inspection services – quietly exploits the vulnerable and the marginalised and preserves the status quo. When audits and inspections raise defects and findings, much of it is reframed as the attitude, aptitude and behavioural problem of those at the lower end.
How interesting that the dominant reason to go to Philippines, India, Myanmar and Indonesia to source seafarers becomes the biggest weakness. These people are docile, flexible, always smiling, and they never complain. But they are not assertive! Let’s train them to speak up more. The Assertiveness Paradox.
Business gurus and consultants seem to have cracked this Assertiveness Paradox by:
Sending them for Soft skills training
and a jab of Psychological Safety to boost their courage
Meanwhile, you and I are left pondering why people don’t speak up …
Latest posts by Dr Nippin Anand (see all)
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I hear and see so much rubbish in safety about speaking up and most of it looks to systems or blame for solutions. The real problem is the underlying philosophy that drives organising but Safety shows little interest in understanding philosophy.