Employment-related mobility, regulatory weakness and potential fatigue-related safety concerns in short-sea seafaring on Canada’s Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway: Canadian seafarers’ experiences

Mapping the Maritime Occupational Health and Safety Challenges Faced by Canadian Seafarers

“…Frequent calls to ports in the near coastal regions will also require seafarers to be on call and shorten their rest hours (Pauksztat 2017). Shortsea seafarers are more vulnerable to fatigue compared to deep sea seafarers, which is a recently recognized workplace hazard (Shan and Neis 2019). The remainder of this chapter will explore three aspects of the OHS challenges faced by Canadian seafarers: challenges caused the climate change, in particular, the increase of Arctic shipping activities; challenges related to commuting and intensive work-related mobility; and challenges arising from insufficient OHS rights.…”

“…Maritime OHS challenges faced by Canadian seafarers are underexamined in the current peerreviewed academic literature, particularly in coastal and inland shipping. To fill this D. Shan (*) Marine & Environmental Law Institute, Schulich Law School, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's, NL, Canada e-mail: desai.shan@dal.ca research gap, this chapter draws on and extends recently published findings from a study of Canadian seafarers working on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway (Shan and Lippel 2019;Shan and Neis 2019), and from a legal analysis of current international and Canadian occupational health and safety law to explore the health and safety challenges in the context of Canadian short-sea shipping and Arctic shipping. The related studies were conducted between 2017 and 2018.…”

Occupational Health and Safety Challenges From Employment-Related Geographical Mobility Among Canadian Seafarers on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway

“…In particular, the Welland Canal with eight locks is reported to be the most fatiguing part of the Seaway system for seafarers. 13 In Canada, the Seaway and Great Lakes region has the highest numbers of shiprelated injuries and fatalities, accounting for 60.7% of the accidents involving fatalities or injuries in the maritime sector in Canadian waters for the period between 2004 and 2015. 14 The demanding logistics, safety, and environmental protection obligations associated with shipping make the maritime sector a challenging work environment.…”

“…Seafarers who regularly "migrate" away from places of residence to work in a totalistic working environment, a mobile vessel on water, are faced with significant OHS challenges. While they are touched on in the seafaring literature, there are two underresearched areas in the current research on OHS in seafaring: (1) OHS challenges related to commuting mobility between home and ship are often underexamined, 13 and (2) most studies focus on international seafarers and European seafarers, while the experiences of Canadian seafarers and seafarers engaged in coastal/inland trade are rarely examined. Nor are there studies on the confluence of international and internal mobility and international and domestic workers found in areas similar to the Seaway.…”

“…We have examined the issue of commuting to work and vessel mobility and its relationship to fatigue in another publication. 13 In this article, we report on a case study of Canadian seafaring OHS on the Seaway and Great Lakes to address research gaps and to identify regulatory gaps created by the neglect of domestic shipping, the tendency to normalize and eclipse mobility within maritime OHS studies and regulation, and the failure to explore the confluence of internal, national, and internationally mobile ships and crews and their potential individual and collective contributions to risk and injury in the sector.…”