Happiness aboard the world's ships is down across the board, Mission to Seafarers director of advocacy Ben Bailey said at the Connecticut Maritime Association conference Wednesday afternoon.
Giving attendees a preliminary look into the organization’s Happiness Index for the first quarter of 2019, Bailey reported drops in overall happiness, connectivity, diet and exercise and shoreside welfare facilities.
“Worryingly since the relaunch of the index [early last year], the general happiness has fallen, and it’s slowly declined,” Bailey said.
The Happiness Index is a series of 10 questions on everything from training to shore leave, distributed to seafarers across the shipping industry. Respondents rate each question on a scale from one to 10 with the ability to elaborate on their feelings in a comment box.
Bailey said overall happiness was down 5% year over year, to 6.03, while connectivity – which measures things like the communication infrastructure available to mariners – fell from 7.12 to 6.79.
Meanwhile, diet dropped from 6.73 to 6.47, exercise from 6.64 to 6.29 and welfare facilities ashore down from 6.36 to 5.53.
“Crews cite a wide range of issues for this and for their scores, from the lack of connectivity as we’ve heard which is so important to the fear of being abandoned in port or attacked by pirates. Others have mentioned poor diet and the inability to exercise,” Bailey said.
“Long days at sea coupled with increasingly smaller crews is continuing to leave those on board isolated and thinking about things at home. As one seafarer put in his response, ‘I don’t like to think too much when I’m on duty. If I do, I start to worry about life at home and being alone at sea makes it all so much worse.’”
Bailey said complete results for the first quarter would be available in two weeks’ time, when Mission to Seafarers releases their full report.
He also said the Mission to Seafarers has started to work on “bespoke” happiness indexes for individual companies and was building an app to help individual mariners track their own happiness.
