Seafarers’ Collective Bargain Agreement: Old Wine in New Bottle?

CBA is a contract on hiring, working conditions and dispute resolution between an employer and a union, the latter representing employees of a defined group. It affords the group of employees an opportunity to bargain as a group with their employer regarding wages, hours, benefits and other terms and conditions of employment in a process called “collective bargaining”.

By negotiating as a unit, employees have more bargaining power and leverage on this at the bargaining table.

Speaking with MMS Plus newspaper during an exclusive chat, the President of Nigerian Indigenous Ship-owners Association (NISA) Capt. Niyi Labinjo lamented that the introduction of CBA wouldn’t alleviate the problems in the nation’s shipping sector.

“The problem with shipping in Nigeria isn’t CBA. As a ship-owner, I can have the best CBA with my crew but I must have a contract to be able to sustain the collective bargain. If I don’t have a contract how do I respect the agreement? Operating a ship isn’t the same as maintaining a truck or an airplane. You buy a ship on the guarantee that you have a contract to serve.

He posited that the ineffectiveness of the nation’s Cabotage regime had crippled the operations of shipping; thereby rendering ship-owners handicapped in honouring CBAs entered with their employees.

He pleaded with the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA)

Capt. Labinjo stressed that ships require exorbitant costs for maintenance whether one was in business or not. “If you have a truck you can park it in your garage when there are no jobs but the scenario is different with a ship. You’re going to pay for the shipyard where the ship is parked. You also have to pay the tender and the crew onboard. You cannot afford to have a ship and have no contracts but that is the unfortunate situation many ship owners have found themselves in Nigeria” he said.

He said it could take a year to recover from the fiscal deficits of maintaining a ship for three months without contracts. “This is because in three months you would have incurred overhead costs that in the next one year you would be paying for the mortgage on the ships and overhead cost with the profit you have been making”

“For instance, if your crew collects $40,000 in a month and you’re out of contracts for three to six months, you owe the crew $120,000- $240,000 but you can hardly make this amount as profit in a year. You already owe $120,000 and don’t forget that the $40,000 keeps accumulating and don’t make such profits in a year. There are no jobs because NIMASA isn’t enforcing Cabotage. We have several situations where ship-owners lose their houses, lands and cars because they can’t pay the mortgage on banks” he lamented.

According to Labinjo, CBA is a good initiative but it’s not a new development in the shipping industry and it wouldn’t dissipate the sector’s fiscal woes.

“American ship-owners don’t suffer like this because the Cabotage (Jones Act) is effective, the job of ship-owners is guaranteed” he added.

On his part, the Merchant Navy President; Engr. Matthew Alalade described CBA as a germane agreement between ship-owners and workers onboard vessels, noting that the agreement was crucial to obtaining better conditions of service for seafarers.

Alalade said; “The agreement is a tripartite thing between ship-owners, the employees onboard vessels and NIMASA as the umpire. NIMASA has the responsibility ones to monitor both sides, we are ready, but NISA and the SOAN that are reneging, they never gave any reason for shifting the date, this is the third time now”

They just have to accept it, if the blame is coming, it would come on both the ship owners and the seafarers, we have tried our best for the past one and half year, and what we have come up with is a benchmark, Ship-owners can go above it but they cannot go below it” he said.

However, Ship-owners Association of Nigeria (SOAN) has denied allegations that it was stalling the signing of the CBA as the President of SOAN, Engr. Greg Ogbeifun said the association was excited about the document.

According to the SOAN President, the body had not been chanced to hold a meeting with the seafarers union and the NIMASA to sign the document.

Ogbeifun had argued that, “as the president of the Ship-owners Association, I can confirm that arrangement has been concluded to sign the CBA, so where is this allegation coming from?”

“NIMASA has written to us for the signing of the CBA which is supposed to take place on the 22nd of June and we are very happy about this document. We wrote to them that the time for the last meeting coincided with the common wealth conference in London and most of us are on the 20- man delegation to that conference, so I wrote to them (NIMASA) that we are not going to be in the country and that they should reschedule the date”, he explained to our correspondents.

While CBA has been lauded in several countries as crucial to the growth of the maritime industry, Nigeria’s maritime sector is fazed with more daunting challenges with the most excruciating been the unavailability of jobs for indigenous operators leading many to quit the business while others can barely pay the mortgage on their ships.

This problem has also affected the nation’s capacity to churn out refined cadets as there are no ships available to provide the requisite seatime experience for seafarers. Foreigners continue to dominate all aspects of shipping despite the existence of Cabotage laws to enhance indigenous participation in shipping. NIMASA is the agency saddled with the onus to correct the nation’s unfortunate position in shipping and there is no better time to begin this much-anticipated change than now!

How would CBA change Nigeria’s shipping sector? Or is it simply putting old wine in new bottle?