Accidents are a prevalent feature of working in the maritime industry. While studies have shown to what extent accidents and fatalities have occurred, the current research has generally been limited to commercial shipping. There is nearly no academic research focusing on the safety issues in the superyacht industry. This paper analyses the importance of promoting safety culture in the superyacht industry, the role of maritime legislation in maintaining safety and the role of Port State Control in ensuring all legislation is implemented. It aims to provide a critical examination of safety culture in the superyacht industry and evaluate the appropriateness for further measures to ensure safe working practices. It found out that while some superyachts do maintain an effective safety system, there remains almost 50% of the investigated fleet that do not promote the desired safety culture. It becomes evident that complacency and poor education contribute to the reduced and limited safety culture. The lack of education and awareness is demonstrated when the study shows individuals believing they maintain good safety practices but still admitting to taking various life-threatening risks.

Non-compliance with labour standards impedes enforcement of workers’ rights in human resource supply chains. Despite governments’ efforts to improve labour standards and encourage employer-centred voluntary compliance programmes, infringements of workers’ rights are widely reported. Using a qualitative socio-legal study of Chinese seafarers’ workers’ compensation rights, we investigate whether shipping companies and their crewing agencies comply with their legal obligations following workplace injuries and fatalities. Through 74 semi-structured interviews and analysis of crew management policies from 7 shipping companies, we identify a failure of most shipowners’ internal policies to comply with legal obligations. Furthermore, multinational shipping companies use crewing agencies to evade their liabilities to injured seafarers. We propose the establishment of a joint liability mechanism between employers and labour intermediaries to fill this compliance gap that exists in global human resource supply chains.

Effective communication among seafarers is an important part of ship resource management. The improvement of effective internal communication among seafarers has an important impact on the improvement of work performance. This paper conducts an empirical study to determine which factors are related to the impact of seafarers’ communication on work performance. A questionnaire was designed to investigate 339 seafarers from different companies, different ship types and different ranks. The hypotheses were tested and analysed by five-point Likert scale, hierarchical regression analysis and path analysis. The findings of the study show that communication frequency and communication quality have a significant positive effect on performance. The effect of communication quality on performance is greater than the effect of communication frequency on performance. Two dimensions of team diversity – knowledge and skill diversity – have a significant positive impact on communication quality. Based on the questionnaire and relevant analysis, this paper puts forward some suggestions to improve the seafarer's work performance from the perspective of communication.

Recently, the quality of Maritime Education and Training (MET) has drawn more attention from employers of the shipping industry, because incompetent officers have frequently contributed to ship accidents. The authors intend to explore answers to three questions: (1) Is the quality of Chinese MET satisfactory to the maritime stakeholders? (2) What are the major factors affecting the quality of cadet training? (3) Are there feasible solutions to improve the quality of MET? The authors take China, a major seafarers supplying country, as empirical evidence to disclose the causes of the problems. By an exploratory factor analysis technique, this paper presents the findings of semi-structured interviews and questionnaire surveys and identifies four principal factors affecting the quality of MET in China. Shortage of skillful instructors, lack of onboard training, over-reliance on theoretical teaching, and limited funding sources are prominent factors in this context. Practical solutions are proposed for the purpose of improving the overall competence of Chinese cadets expected to become the dynamic workforce for the global shipping industry.

Before banks rose to dominate credit markets, ordinary people raised credit themselves or through alternative intermediaries. However, obtaining a comprehensive overview of the size and functioning of the non-bank segments within the credit market has been a great challenge for historians. Notarial deeds are widely available, but typically shed light on the borrowing of relatively well-to-do members of society. Probate inventories and insolvency records do provide insight into the modest loans of ordinary people, but only haphazardly and not for the overall stock of loans. This article exploits an exogenous shock, the Discipline Act introduced in the Netherlands in 1856, which forced lenders to record all unredeemed loans they had provided to a particular group of borrowers: seafarers. The c.14,000 loans that were recorded, in combination with several additional sources, provide a unique insight into the overall size, composition and functioning of a particular segment of the non-bank credit market.

The Center for Epidemiological Studies – Depression (CES-D) scale is a well-validated and frequently used measure for assessing symptoms associated with depression. This scale was developed primarily on the basis of American populations, however, and previous research has suggested that the original factor structure may not be appropriate for all populations. One such population is the Filipino population. This study represents the first study we are aware of to examine the factor structure of the CES-D scale in a sample of Filipino seafarers. Seafaring is considered a high stress and high risk occupation. Based on data collected from 135 Filipino seafarers, we conducted factor analyses to identify the appropriate factor structure for the CES-D in this population. We found that a three-factor structure better described the responses of Filipinos in our sample than the standard four-factor structure. The Filipino factor structure appears to collapse depressive affect and somatic factors found in previous research, while including a specific factor of social-focused symptoms of depression. This structure maintains the positive affect factor found in previous work. Implications of this for clinical psychology assessment and practice in the Philippines are discussed.

The importance of Africa and African agency in the formation of the Atlantic world is now widely acknowledged by historians, but Africa has drawn less attention than other regions in analyses of the British Atlantic. Drawing upon the nascent methodology of global microhistory, this article contributes to a scholarly rebalancing by examining two maritime lawsuits from the 1640s concerning British voyages to Senegambia and Sierra Leone, both of which resulted in conflict between British seafarers and with their African trading partners. A close study of the documents surviving from these lawsuits provides an unusually detailed glimpse of these particular moments of contact and violence across cultures. More fundamentally, such an approach illuminates the ocean-spanning networks within which these ventures took place, and reveals the ways in which British traders and sailors perceived trade in Africa within their own legal frameworks. This article argues that by the middle of the seventeenth century, as merchants and politicians in Britain began to imagine an Atlantic empire, trade in West Africa was an important part of their vision of the Atlantic world.