Crewing crisis at Military Sealift Command

Nautilus members at the Royal Fleet Auxiliary are under pressure due to a recruitment and retention crisis – but they are not alone. Seafarers at the United States Military Sealift Command, which fulfils a similar role to the RFA, face many of the same problems. Rob Coston spoke to Sal Mercogliano – former MSC merchant mariner, maritime historian and host of What’s Going On With Shipping? – to find out what’s happening there

Rob Coston (RC): How does Military Sealift Command (MSC) compare to the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA)?

Sal Mercogliano (SM): Very similar, I would argue. The MSC runs the auxiliary vessels for the US Navy. All the underway replenishment vessels are operated by these civilian merchant mariners, who are direct employees of the US government. Basically, they operate 1/5th of the US fleet, a very similar proportion to the RFA and the Royal Navy, including a range of different replenishment vessels.

If there's a major difference between the two organisations, it's that the MSC is not commanded by a mariner or a chief engineer like the RFA commodore. It's typically commanded by a US Navy admiral, which has been part of the problem, as the connection between the merchant mariners and the US Navy has weakened over time.

RC: The crewing crisis at the RFA has largely been caused by declining pay. I understand that there's a similar recruitment and retention problem at the MSC, but it has quite different origins?

SM: If you look at the salaries being offered by MSC, RFA personnel would love that kind of money! it looks great! We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars for starting jobs. The US Navy has literally been throwing money at the problem.

The issue has really been really the leave policy. As civilians, MSC mariners operate under the same leave system as other federal employees – you're at sea but you basically have the same policy as someone working in Washington DC.

People who sail with the RFA will understand that a job at sea is not a job on land. You don't go home every night, it's not nine to five Monday through Friday with holidays and days off that you can schedule, so that you can make a life of it.

This has been a persistent problem. A new mariner on board, whether a deck officer, a mate, or an engineer, would have to work onboard almost 10 months of the year to get their full leave in. So they would have to be onboard for quite a long period of time.

The policy for getting on and off ship has also been a problem. MSC guarantees you a four-month sea tour; you're supposed to be onboard four months, and then with a guaranteed two months off. The problem is those guarantees don't work. No one's getting off in four months. And the two months you have off, a lot of that is unpaid because you haven’t accrued enough leave to cover it. And then even when you do get off, you're kind of harassed to get back onto a ship or else you may lose your spot.

That's because they need the people – MSC has a workforce of about 6,000 mariners to fill 5000 spots. There's 1.2 people for every spot, and it's just an unsustainable number to cover the whole fleet. You would need, in my opinion, about 10,000 MSC mariners for adequate cover.

Now they're trying to reform this system and get more leave, but it's just been ridiculously slow. In fact, it one of the reasons I left MSC back in the 1990s was the leave policy – I was on my first ship for 11 months until I got relieved.

RC: A ratio like that of personnel to berths onboard must be having a really serious effect on seafarers?

SM: It is.

Let me just say, MSC is a great job. I did it for a long time and I think it's one of the most interesting jobs you can do as a seafarer. But with the leave problems, one of the things we're seeing is high turnover. Especially in the lower ranks, at the unlicensed and junior officer level, they're churning through a lot of people. This creates a big problem because if you can't retain people at that junior level, you're not able to train them up to the middle and upper level.

That has created a problem. MSC has had to bring a lot of people in at a much higher level, which means they have to be educated. As RFA personnel will tell you, a job like this is not the same as running a tanker from point A to point B. It's very dynamic and require an understanding of the situations like sailing right alongside a vessel at 150 feet at 12 or 13 knots while pumping very volatile diesel and jet fuel over to them.

That's because they need the people – MSC has a workforce of about 6,000 mariners to fill 5000 spots. There's 1.2 people for every spot, and it's just an unsustainable number to cover the whole fleet

RC: For our members at the RFA, we think that the solution to recruitment and retention really does begin with pay – which isn't just about money but is also an indication of the respect the government has for the organisation. What would you say the solution might be for MSC?

SM: Right now, we're seeing MSC trying to repair things. There's a lot of work going on behind the scenes to get that leave policy fixed.

We're also seeing everything from Starlink being put on ships to attempts to improving the shore leave policy. That will go a long way, much like getting  the RFA the pay rise which has been denied to them for 14 years – something I still can't believe.

I also think it's a big problem that there is no mechanism to put mariners ashore, at least on a short-term basis. And while there's some mariners who do transition to shore after their careers, I think it'd be really interesting to have more of them on planning staffs because there's a lot of issues that the Navy doesn't understand about the logistics behind the vessels.

One of the reasons that the US Navy has transitioned completely to all civilian auxiliary vessels was because of cost, they could reduce the crew onboard. Plus you don't have the operational requirements that you worry about with the US Navy – we keep hearing about carriers being deployed way past six months, well, the Navy doesn't care about that for an MSC ship, you can keep it deployed 365 days of the year because it's crewed by civilians. That kind of different treatment creates a kind of opposition between MSC and the Navy. It really undercuts camaraderie, and I think, you know, at times it goes to the pay issue you're talking about – there's the sense that mariners want to be treated better, and that means addressing either pay or leave.

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See more videos at Sal's popular YouTube Channel, What’s Going On With Shipping.