In total, over 15,000 of the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association’s (NSA’s) members were laid off or dismissed during the past two years.
Last year alone, 7,000 of the NSA’s members were dismissed from their jobs wrote Maritime.
7,300 were dismissed or laid off in 2015. Last year, 8,300 of the shipowners union’s employee members became unemployed, of which number, 15 % were laid off, and 85 % (7,055) were dismissed.
The reductions occurred primarily among offshore service shipping companies and offshore contractors, and are fairly evenly distributed among sailors, the rig employees and employees based on land, according to the NSA’s ‘2017 Economic Report ‘.
On Monday, the NSA handed the report to the Minister of Industry, Monica Mæland.
The report shows that last year was worse than many of the NSA’s members had imagined it would be. NSA members had envisioned a reduction of 3 %, but the decline in revenue proved to be more than five times that number.
The estimate shows that the shipowners’ total turnover fell by 16 % in 2016, to 234 billion.
‘The difficult situation seems to be persisting into 2017’, wrote managing director, Sturla Henriksen, of the NSA in the introduction to this year’s report.
The Circulation Registry given to Sysla Maritime indicated that 173 Norwegian-owned offshore vessels were laid up in February this year. 158 of them belong to the NSA’s members, in addition to 25 oil rigs, according to the report.
‘The maritime industry has been through restructuring periods for many centuries. They’re going to do that here too.
But it is serious when many become unemployed, and ships are laid up. I am keen to get feedback from the industry on what the government can do’, said Mæland.
She said she is now feeling somewhat greater optimism, but that this is a serious problem for all those affected by the lay-offs.
Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today
