Need for More State Oversight of Pilot Monopolies
By John McLaurin, President, Pacific Merchant Shipping Association
The use of a state-licensed maritime pilot is mandated by state law in most coastal waters. State pilot mandates were created for the safe transit of vessels and the protection of people and the environment.
Pilotage is also a state-sanctioned monopoly. Vessel operators do not have a choice of pilot organizations to do business with, nor, for the most part, can vessels select or hire their own pilot. Most state pilots are assigned to vessels only by the monopoly, can only work when approved by the monopoly, and operate under work rules developed by the pilot monopolies in private, without public input or scrutiny.
Yet, while state-mandated pilot monopolies are said to exist primarily to protect the public, the environment, and the state, as well as vessel operators, whether these state interests are in fact being achieved is often not analyzed by the state itself. For instance, when and how much each individual pilot actually works is often confidential or unknown, or is not easily determined. Yet the issue of pilot fatigue and hours of service is a safety issue of tremendous importance.
It is also of tremendous concern to a vessel operator, because the monopoly chooses which pilots get assigned to a particular vessel without customer input. Pilotage customers must either trust the state to provide a system which ensures competent, well-trained, and well-rested pilots or trust the pilotage monopoly to self-police itself to ensure these outcomes.
That’s why in 2012, on the heels of a large accident and oil spill involving pilot fatigue in Texas, and at the recommendation of the National Transportation Safety Board, PMSA sponsored legislation in California to require the state Board of Pilot Commissioners to conduct a Fatigue Study for San Francisco pilots and to promulgate enforceable hours of service and rest regulations.
This study was only just recently completed in July 2018. The researchers conducted a review of pilot assignment data from July 2016 to June 2017, and they found that pilots worked an average of 128 “work periods” per year – and that the average “work period” was 7.6 hours (this includes a buffer time added to and from jobs to cover commuting). Under these numbers, an average pilot works 972.8 hours per year, or an average of about 18 hours per week.
These numbers are very similar to those in the Puget Sound, where 28 out of 52 weeks in a year, pilots are not on duty. For the 24 weeks that they are on duty, they take approximately 145 assignments per year equating to about 59 piloting hours per month. Even so, the competition and compensation for these jobs continues to increase. In 2017, the Average Net Income for each San Francisco Bar Pilot was $495,726. In Puget Sound, average earnings after pilots reported “operating expenses” was $545,385, which is then distributed as benefits and income according to their internal rules.
Unfortunately, while the consultants who conducted the pilot fatigue study for the San Francisco Board of Pilot Commissioners were allowed to review the data regarding pilot workload, that data remains unavailable to the public. The Board of Pilot Commissioners does not have detailed pilot assignment data. Interestingly, the Board has passionately litigated against the public’s right to access and possess the actual individual pilot work-load data, and they specifically included a clause in the Fatigue Study contract to preclude the release of the pilot data to the public by the researchers.
As a result, we have a situation where the State of California, which requires a state license to pilot a commercial vessel in the San Francisco area, allows a monopoly to mandate that a ship owner must take whatever pilot is assigned based on work rules set by the pilots in private, not the state. And, strangely the state seems to have no desire to know how often each pilot works. Whether it is once a day, once a week, once a month, or every day for two weeks straight, the state ignores whether these work patterns have fatigue implications.
The next task ahead is the writing of new rest and hours of service regulations, and one key question will be whether the San Francisco Pilot Board desires to have a rule which is enforceable by itself with data requirements reviewable by the public. Or, is the Board still not interested in having the data necessary to enforce a pilot rest regulation, preventing vessel operators and the general public from having this information as well.
To be fair, there is always one time that individual pilot workload data is reviewed by a state Board: AFTER a casualty has occurred, like when the Cosco Busan was piloted into the Bay Bridge, spilling 53,500 gallons of fuel oil into the Bay.
If the reason to maintain these pilotage monopolies is to protect the public by preventing maritime accidents, then the state needs to demonstrate a level of supervision necessary to properly ensure and regulate their activities. If states are not policing pilot monopolies with respect to their actual vessel operations -- and are actively prohibiting the public from accessing the data to review these operations -- one can only speculate as to which interests the states are working hardest to protect.