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There are specific labor categories that cannot be filled just by paying more. They require more training and experience. So I don’t believe your assertion abou

• ska 3y ago
  While this is true in the short term, it usually means the roles didn’t pay enough to keep the “funnel” open, so it’s an aspect of the same problem.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    There is still a shortage now, regardless of failures to predict the future.
    • ska 3y ago
      The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago… At the end of the day, industries are principally responsible for the health of their workforce overall. If there is a shortage, it is a failure of leadership. That is why “labor shortage” is such a mealy-mouthed term. It treats labor as external to the process, something someone else is supposed to “provide”
      • mcculley 3y ago
        The failures of industry and government in this case are obvious. That doesn’t change the fact that there is a shortage. I agree the shortage is due to myopia.
• omginternets 3y ago
  I would hazard a guess that the replacement rate has fallen below the attrition rate precisely because pay has not kept up with inflation, which would fall exactly in line with the parent poster’s argument.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    Your guess is partly correct. Jones Act and USCG Subchapter M are bigger parts of the problem. It is not just pay rate. Where I can match pay rates, I cannot match lifestyle. U.S. citizens and green card holders have more attractive jobs available to them that do not require being away from family for weeks at a time. (e.g., software development)
    • tayo42 3y ago
      how much does this job pay?
      • mcculley 3y ago
        Licensed captains with Master of Towing endorsement are currently getting $800-$1,200 per day in regions I am familiar with.
        • tayo42 3y ago
          thats actually not to bad. is the work really inconsistent then, so yearly your not making that much
          • mcculley 3y ago
            There is more work than there are licensed captains available. A good captain can work 365 days per year.
    • genocidicbunny 3y ago
      > It is not just pay rate. Where I can match pay rates, I cannot match lifestyle. Acceptance of that lifestyle is partially contingent on the pay. I am sure that plenty of people would be willing to spend long stretches away from home at work if they were being paid $1m.
• pessimizer 3y ago
  > There are specific labor categories that cannot be filled just by paying more. They require more training and experience. This is not exactly true. It's not at all true when talking about training, because paying people is what motivates them to take the risk of paying for their own training (and if you're training people yourself, you don't require trained people.) Experience is created by paying people enough not to leave the profession. > Licensed tugboat captains are retiring/dying faster than new licenses are being granted. Why weren't people trying to become tugboat captains for the past X years? Is it because the job paid too much? ----- edit: I think you could say this is a collective action problem; nobody is willing to raise pay because it will make them uncompetitive against those who don't, but if they all raised pay they would all make more money and be more secure in the future. It's the kind of thing where an active government would step in and manage hiring and/or dictate pay. Instead, since our politicians are only concerned with what individuals are willing to pay them to do, they get lobbied to weaken labor regulations and immigration laws. There are lots of unemployed black people desperate for work if one wants to fill up tugboats and construction sites. Just tell them where to show up.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    Obviously, there are strategies to handle the shortage in the long term. Right now, there is a shortage. If there is a shortage of hammers, one cannot just claim that the shortage does not exist because we can eventually make more hammers. > Why weren't people trying to become tugboat captains for the past X years? Is it because the job paid too much? The recent rollout of USCG Subchapter M has created significant demand while not increasing the available supply. I agree that industry and government should have realized this would happen.
    • rileymat2 3y ago
      I think there is a semantic game being played because increased prices depresses demand. So in some views a shortage is almost always a fiction. Think of it this way, gold has a high price, so I only use it in valuable ways, I don’t gold plate my house. If gold was significantly cheaper maybe I would, is there a shortage? Clearly there is a shortage at the price I would pay to gold plate my house. But I am fine using it for jewelry, no shortage at that price. Your hammer example is the same, there are insufficient hammers at a certain price. Raising price will decrease demand and eliminate the shortage. This increase makes its way through the supply chain increasing prices along the way until demand goes down. Of course this semantic argument is pointless because what people really want is access to the products they are accustomed to at a price they are accustomed to.
• missedthecue 3y ago
  Another good example of this is airline captains. There's a big shortage right now, and simply paying more doesn't give a junior pilots 5,000 more hours in their logbook. They actually have to fly those hours first before they can become a captain. Also, pilots have a hard retirement cutoff for obvious reasons, so you can't even lure them back into work with dollars. Airlines are paying more and more for captains, but it's not solving the shortage. They're just poaching them from each other, the total vacancies stays the same.
  • genocidicbunny 3y ago
    Junior pilots also don't come from nowhere. Just to get to flying an airliner, you need many hundreds of hours of training and studying, and that's not cheap either. And from what I recall, when you look at how much your average pilot is paid when they just start out, and the harshness of the schedule, and it's not a very attractive job for people. So I think with airlines, it is still very much a case of a pay shortage.
    • ericbarrett 3y ago
      I looked into it as a career path a many moons ago; I’d probably just now be making captain at a major if I’d gone that route and did everything right. I was definitely turned off by the pay. Regional pilots, where you do your time if you didn’t join the military, get paid absolute peanuts. You’re looking at a career that pays well under average for most of your younger years, for very skilled labor, then tops out at about the pay of a mid-level software engineer. And you have a terrible schedule and are on call pretty much all the time, so good luck with a family. Oh and if you screw up, you get a mark on your record you have to justify at every interview for the rest of your career—if you’re lucky and nobody died. Not to mention all the layoffs over the years, where you have to keep current when nobody is hiring.
  • rileymat2 3y ago
    This is true on the supply side, but an airline can raise ticket prices until they have the right amount of pilots for the number of tickets they are selling leaving no shortage. These excess profits can be funneled back into to training programs to increase future capacity.
• unethical_ban 3y ago
  Tell me I can make 120k a year while training and 200k a year after, with four weeks vacation and top tier health insurance, then tell me where you're located.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    That is a good way for a company to be better prepared three years from now. Right now, there is a shortage.
    • reducesuffering 3y ago
      So not paying enough 3 years ago caused a shortage now. Yes, there is a pay problem that eventually caused a shortage, got it.
      • mcculley 3y ago
        Yes. When USCG rolled out Subchapter M and increased demand, one solution would have been for companies to hire three years previously people that they did not need and find a way to get them the necessary seatime. Maybe they could have installed more bunks on the boats.
        • genocidicbunny 3y ago
          When did they roll it out? From what I can tell, this was in 2016? Why is there a shortage now then if it takes 3 years to get to captain?
          • thulle 3y ago
            Got interested, found this: > Although the Coast Guard released Subchapter M on July 20, 2016, vessels had two years to meet the majority of the requirements — the deadline falling on July 20, 2018. The Coast Guard is trying to work with the tug and towing companies to make for a smooth transition into the new regulations with minimal downtime. The entirety of the law will be phased in over a six-year period. > The next deadline for obtaining a certificate of inspection (COI) is in 2019. By July 22nd, 25 percent of towing and tugboat companies’ vessels must have a COI onboard. The percentage increases by 25 percent each year after until all vessels in the fleet have their COI onboard. - https://www.mitags.org/subchapter-m-training/ https://www.mitags.org/subchapter-m-training/
• tomcam 3y ago
  Lots of people on HN have range, but you might be the winner. Pretty sure that of millions of Hacker News readers only you can say “I have been running a tugboat company for a number of years..”
  • mcculley 3y ago
    This is an accidental outcome. I was doing software work for 30 years. My father was building a tugboat company. He passed away. I have stepped in for now.
    • tomcam 3y ago
      Thank you so much for answering. I was curious as hell but it felt rude to ask. It’s almost the most obvious answer, but I didn’t think of it once.
      • mcculley 3y ago
        My pleasure. Once I sell the tugboat company, I intend to write up some lessons learned about the ways in which building my software consultancy did not prepare me for managing pirates.
        • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
          I, for one, would love to read that.
          • tomcam 3y ago
            It already sounds epic
    • devnullbrain 3y ago
      Agile methodology in action
    • HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
• dragonwriter 3y ago
  > There are specific labor categories that cannot be filled just by paying more. Maybe, but... > They require more training and experience. Well, sure, those have more lag (all market signals in the real, non-ideal, world have some), and to cut through noise and make sure the signal gets to the labor force, you may need to pay for the training and the work that provides the experience, as well as the target job itself. > Licensed tugboat captains are retiring/dying faster than new licenses are being granted Dying you can't avoid, but sufficient pay can affect the choice to retire. So, to the extent voluntary retirement is an issue, that suggests pay is also an issue.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    Retirement is not very voluntary in this industry, in my experience. The majority of the tugboat captains I have encountered are not in good health and lose their annual USCG medical approval before 65.
    • hotpotamus 3y ago
      You're not really selling the job very well. I often hear about how people used to jump at job opportunities like this or working on pipelines or other infrastructure that required them to work remotely, and I wonder if there's some nostalgia colored glasses there, or if these jobs used to pay a lot better in inflation adjusted terms. Or if maybe there are just better employment options these days.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > or if these jobs used to pay a lot better in inflation adjusted terms. If not inflation-adjusted, possibly in compared-to-best-alternative terms.
      • mcculley 3y ago
        There are definitely better employment options these days.
• dendrite9 3y ago
  Interesting, out of curiosity is this a regional thing or a nationwide issue? What were businesses doing for the last X years to buildup qualified people to promote? Has anything changed to speed up the rate of retiring/dying or just a new limit on the rate of granting licenses? A friend of mine moved from construction to working on a tugboat ~1.5 years ago and I spent a bunch of time talking about it this winter. Some parts of the business sound interesting but I'm not sure it is a good fit due to family health and relationships.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    There are a few trends working together. The two biggest are the demographic decline in the U.S. and the rollout of USCG Subchapter M, which increases demand. For example, some boats now require two captains on board for voyages over 12 hours where previously they would have used one captain.
• flandish 3y ago
  You could pay to license someone, making the cost to you more but the position attractive: even with a 3 year lag. It’s not a labor shortage, it’s a business decision. Sometimes they’re tough.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    We have paid to license captains. It is a shortage and a business decision and a government decision. USCG Subchapter M increased demand for captains while we are producing fewer humans overall.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    Just to be clear, we have deckhands in the pipeline to become captains now. We understand the need to invest for the future. That does not make it any less of a shortage today.
• voisin 3y ago
  How did you get into this business?
  • mcculley 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951413
• sharts 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • mcculley 3y ago
    I’m uninformed? I have been hiring captains for 33 months. Do you have information I do not? Yes, if there had been a good pipeline for the last decade, there would be no shortage now. It is an industry-wide problem.
• IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  Have you considered offering non-monetary perks to tip the scale ? One example : Software engineers often get the "Work From Home" perk. Not sure if the industry offers software to remotely operate a tugboat, similar to a drone operator ? If it didn't exist, what if you developed such software ?
  • mcculley 3y ago
    I have considered perks and implemented as many as I can. The biggest lever I have found so far is flexible schedule. We are willing to fly the captains out to the boat and fly them back home on whatever schedule they want. All companies in the industry are doing this now. This has limits, of course, some voyages are simply longer than some crew want to do (and have no stops near an airport). As for remote control, no, this will be one of the last industries to allow remote control. In port and at many points during the voyage, captain and crew make quick decisions that require situational awareness. The deckhands have to wrangle lines and physically interact with the tow.
• efficax 3y ago
  no, you just offer pay for training and apprenticeship for experience (instead of making people pay to be trained).
  • mcculley 3y ago
    Yes, that is how companies like mine are addressing the shortage. That does not change the fact that there is a shortage now and that licenses require training, tests, and seatime.
• hinkley 3y ago
  Paying more means spending more cash for the same or less output. I would include on the job training in that category. Also paying people who are good at training extra money would be good. They are creating competition for themselves later on.
  • mcculley 3y ago
    Yes. These are good strategies for addressing the shortage. I was replying to the assertion that there is no such thing as a labor shortage (“EVER”).
    • hinkley 3y ago
      Very few labor shortages are real though. There's a lot of feudal toxicity out there and people want to work with someone passive and cheap, not an expert who is 'uppity' and expects their opinions to be objectively evaluated instead of being told to shut up and work (monkey). There's a shortage of people willing to put up with being treated like shit and not even being paid hazard pay for dealing with management. And then there's the habit of trying to keep the absolute bare minimum of employees in order to boost quarterly profits, which means there's no float of extra people you can poach if you get a giant project landing in your lap. It's Prisoner's Dilemma and everyone has been defecting since the 1970's.
      • mcculley 3y ago
        I agree that in many cases, one can just apply money and get more labor. But I find that a lot of the value created is in the cases where this is not possible.
• mptest 3y ago
  Uh, Pay people to train then? That sounds like a "people won't do a free/low paid 'internship' for years" problem... Pay the trainee positions more = more trainees? "Learn x career and get paid decent money" really, really wouldn't work in your mind? I find that very hard to believe
  • mcculley 3y ago
    Paying people to train them does work. We do that. We have always done that. That is how we are addressing the shortage. In a few years, we will have more licensed captains. I am replying to the assertions that there is no such thing as a labor shortage. It takes years of seatime to become a licensed captain. It takes more than money to make one. Our tugboats have berths for 4-6 crew. There are physical and regulatory limits on how many deckhands can be in the pipeline to becoming captains.
    • mptest 3y ago
      Fair enough, you know the field better than me, I just interpreted it as more there's never really a labor shortage due to people not wanting to work, it's pretty much always a lack of good incentives. The regulations on how many "trainees" can exist at any one time is an interesting point of contention. Honestly, sorry I commented if that's the hold back for you guys. I still struggle to imagine there is any job a six digit (or local comparative equivalent) salary with a fully paid training won't spur an abundance of candidates for. If your career is one, I'm sorry I so confidently doubted you
      • mcculley 3y ago
        No worries. I agree that “nobody wants to work” is a thought-terminating cliche. I think it is a dumb oversimplification, like “there is no such thing as a labor shortage”. The process is that one generally comes on as an uncredentialed deckhand or mechanic and accrues necessary seatime, then takes courses and passes tests. One must pass an annual physical and be subject to random drug tests. The deckhand must be able to get a TWIC card and a passport if doing anything international. Candidates with previous problems with DUIs, child support, etc. have trouble with this. Then you have to be willing to live in cramped quarters with 3-5 other men 24 hours a day. All of these requirements cut down the pool of likely candidates. One has to work at this job for a few years to be able to have accrued the seatime and learn on the job and take some courses and then take a test. So even if I could pay a deckhand $500k per year, that doesn't fix the problem we have today. That deckhand will not be a captain for years. And most deckhands don't have the aptitude to become captains. You don't have to take my word for it. You could talk to anybody in the industry. See, e.g.,: https://www.google.com/search?q=tugboat+labor+shortage https://www.google.com/search?q=tugboat+labor+shortage