GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

by ship and all the time that that has to happen will dictate, hopefully, that our

members will have employment on board those ships. Over the last ten years

we have reinvented ourselves, if you like. For about 140/150 years we were

mainly representing British officers and we needed to look at that about ten

years ago, because most of the employers that we deal with, and we have

dealt with for many, many years, most of the multinational companies like BP,

Shell, Maersk, Esso etc., they are all globalised, they are all worldwide, so we

have to respond to that and we have got our members who are serving in every

corner of the world on every type of ship, but they are resident in the UK in the

main, so we need to make sure that they are protected wherever they are.

So we made a decision about ten years ago to reinvent and we changed from

representing British officers to representing maritime professionals and that is

worldwide, so a quarter of our membership as of today is of another nationality

than British and they will reside abroad as well. The majority of our members,

99% of them, will be on offshore contracts. That means that no UK legislation

will apply. They have no protections under the UK, so they rely on the union

very heavily to provide that legal protection worldwide. I will go through that in

a moment. We are part of a federation called the International Transport

Federation, 110 seafaring unions around the world, which we are one of, and

what that allows us to do, being part of that federation, is that our members are

protected anywhere in the world at any time, so if we have a dispute and we

have a member who has not been paid wages or there is no food on board or

there has been an accident or there is some negligence, all we have to do

through the ITF as that federation is let the Australian unions know, for

example, and within two or three hours they are on board that ship and if that

ship has to be arrested then it will be arrested.

For a very small specialist union, we utilise the shared services and the

federation as all one body, so when that person goes on the ship in Australia

and says that ship is going to be arrested, if there is produce on that ship, that

can be up to £1 million a day in lost revenue for an owner, so it concentrates

their minds very, very quickly. As surprising as it seems, every union official

has the right to arrest any ship anywhere in the world at any time. That is quite

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