The Maritime Community of the Philippines is anxious about the decreasing number of their seafarers on the vessels of the world fleet. Currently a lot of shipowners state that the employment domination of Filipino seafarers is under threat.
According to report 2018 of the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA), an amount of employed seafarers has decreased by 111, 961 people.
Such a decrease in records is connected with new cheaper workforce, for example, from India, Indonesia and Bangladesh. Lower wages for seafarers from these countries may let them displace Filipinos from the world fleet.
There are also other factors that contributed to such underperformance, such as great official circumlocution, abuse of health reimbursement by citizens of the Philippines and decrease in standards of education that endangered their accreditation by the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) and IMO.
Nelson Ramirez, President of the United Filipino Seafarers (UFS), which numbers about 57, 000 of Filipinos, considers this situation a true threat.
He says that every year core higher educational establishments of the Philippines graduate thousands of seafarers – but there are no workplaces for them.
