Annual General Assembly 2003 - Alexandria

Session 11 WGII

Social Aspects of the Seafarers' Integration on the Maritime Jobs Market

Eugen BARSAN

Constantza Maritime University, 104 Mircea cel Batran Street, Constantza 8700, ROMANIA
E-mail: ebirsan@mail.imc.ro

ABSTRACT

Many countries with hundreds of years of tradition in the maritime sectors have less and less enrolled seafarers, while in other countries the national fleet decreased dramatically. The first part of this process is a normal consequence of the economic prosperity in some countries, where shore jobs are relative easy to find and well paid and the maritime sector has an important shore based component, ready to absorb many of the personnel with sea-going experience. The second part of the actual process is generated by the world political evolution after 1990, especially in the Eastern Europe, where the full state economic control was replaced by the free market and competition. Unprepared to face such a challenge, many huge national fleets had lost their ships year after year due to bad management.

For Romania, the reality was very crude. From an aprox. 300 ships fleet and 16000 enrolled seafarers in 1990, after six-seven years we owned less than 40 ships and we lost around 8000 seafarers. The government practical implication for solving this economic and social problem was limited to sporadic interventions of bringing home some crews from the retained Romanian ships in foreign ports.

The aim of this paper is to present the positive changes of the Romanian seafarers perspective after year 2000, the social protection measures undertaken and the problems we still have to deal with for maintaining the Romanian seafarers tradition.

Back to Session Index