All that I'm going to write are just speculations, rumors and mostly theories on what is going exactly on my current predicament with my company.
*For some
time now , I have been here in the Philippines for a very long time given with
the length of my stay , I had been thinking a lot of thing on why Career Ship
Management hasn’t called me yet. One speculation I have is that that the
principal I have (specifically CSM) wants to haggle on my salary, after all the
salary being offered to O.S. on my previous principal was 1268 U.S. dollars ,
while CSM pays only 905 U.S. to their current O.S. which is at least 300 U.S.
Dollars less - may not be much to some but if you translate it in Philippine
Money its more than 15000 Php and cumulate that to about 9 months then the loss
of income would be as much as 135,000 Php on the whole contract, The dirty
tactic their playing is that their trying to put me on "indefinite
hold" status in order to bow to pressure and accept the one sided terms.
Probably they figured that putting me 6
months or more without any income would force me to yield and accept the job offer
of being paid less. In either case if this is the scenario than I could tell
that CSM or Career Ship Management is an opportunistic and exploitative sassy
bastard ! . I speculated this because I heard rumors lately about one of my
co-workers "THEO" has already
been assigned to the ship CAPE TAFT which I recall correctly is one of the
ships that has a similar pay rate as in CAPE TEXEL (ship I was assigned before
the recall). Now the question here is that, I came in the Philippines first and
how come my co-worker who just arrived on the latter gets to be in assigned
first on the ship very similar to mine ?
*Another
likely Scenario I came up is that, someone or something might have sent the
office a bad report and that I'm being excluded because of this. At some point
Mr. Nidoy might have something that he is not telling me. I recall back a few
months earlier that CSM refused my transfer back to their principal and that
Mr. Nidoy even called on my phone and asked if their was any problem I had with
CSM, I replied to them that I don’t recall any of it and he's guess is as good
as mine. Bottom line is that whatever is the reason why I'm staying here ,
coincidence or not - there is something blocking my progress.
*Another
likely scenario, On the first week of 2016 I reported to Mr. Nidoys office and
asked why I was pulled out on the line up. He said that the reason why I was
pulled out was that my job position was replaced by Chinese workers and that
CAPE TEXEL will be dominated by foreign crew.
*Why just
leave if the employment conditions of Career Ship Management are becoming less
desirable ? Leaving and resettling on another company is much easier and quick
compared to earlier "deck cadet" years - as long as my U.S. visa
remains Valid and intact , it should post no problems however coincidentally
2016 - 2017 memo from the MARINA (government agency handling maritime affairs
in the Philippines) require all sailors to renew their certificates every 5
years starting 2017. To simply put most of my documents have now only less than
a year of validity and sooner I will have to renew it. The hindrance from me
leaving the company is because of the cost of renewing these certificates, The
solution I had been thinking of in this kind of scenario is replacing my
certificates with cheaper versions of the same kind of training certificates ,
another solution if there is no funding is I will have to take a local land
base job to generate funding.
*Another
likely scenario, is that Career Ship Management might be punishing me after
some fiasco's that I had dealt with in the past , like my refusal to be
assigned to Cape BARI and refusal to be dispatch on short notice in CONTI
Guinea, and the latest was my questioning of being returned back to CSM , an d
assigned to Cape Texel. I do admit that I had been at odds with Career Ship
Management every ship assignment or so , but my only complaint on this matter
if this was the scenario is that they should have told me directly about this -
so it would be sparing me a lot of time figuring things out and spent the time
wasted in looking for another company.
For the
moment while writing this , I had been in the Philippines for 4 months , 2
weeks and 5 days already. Or equivalent to 142 days.
