From Canada to Panama, tugboat workers are being squeezed as shipping companies earn record profits.

A tugboat directs a ship in the waters around British Columbia, Canada.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

Jason Woods, a longtime tugboat worker and the president of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 400, quotes a former colleague who described his job as “hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror.” There’s plenty of standby time waiting on the boat, or sometimes long hours of towing that can be dull. But workers are always just a heartbeat away from danger.

“The ship’s moving, the tug’s moving, everything is moving,” Woods says. “Even something like pulling a ship off of berth, something that’s so standardized and easy, can go badly just because of the size of the equipment and the forces that are generated by the power.”

That’s why the February 2021 deaths in British Columbia, where Woods works, of two tugboat workers, Troy Pearson and Charley Cragg, still weigh heavily on his union members’ hearts and minds. The Ingenika, a small tugboat, sank in “70-knot winds and freezing spray and an outflow wind,” Woods says. It was weather that Pearson, the captain, knew was hazardous. But the crew was pushed to get a bargeload of equipment to a Rio Tinto mining site.

“Troy wasn’t a hot shot kind of guy. He wasn’t the guy that would take risks, especially if the risks involved other people,” Judy Carlick-Pearson, Troy Pearson’s partner, told reporters. “That afternoon, he did not want to go.”

Woods is a second-generation tugboat worker, and his 20-year-old niece is about to become the third. The industry, he says, is full of such family connections, and that makes it more painful to recall the deaths. When he mentioned the Ingenika to his father, Woods says, “he listed off all these tugs that had sunk in his time and all these co-workers that he’d worked with that had died, and he’s like, ‘And nothing’s changed.’”

When we talk about global shipping, most of the conversation revolves around container ships, which have only grown more massive in recent years. But the safe travel and docking of those behemoth vessels relies on comparatively tiny tugboats and workers like Woods, who risk their safety every day to guide the big ships in and out of ports, through canals, and sometimes on long distances along coasts. When the Ever Given infamously got stuck in the Suez Canal, pictures of the tugboats working to free the vessel became popular memes, but Woods and his colleagues saw little change in appreciation for their work.

Instead, they continue to struggle against a global “race to the bottom” that sees tugboat operators squeezed by a consolidating industry, and pressure to cut costs that winds up costing lives. Because of unions like the ILWU, and internationally, the work of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), tugboat work can be a good, family-sustaining job. But the labor crunch is hitting even well-unionized workforces.

Tugboat work can be a good, family-sustaining job. But the labor crunch is hitting even well-unionized workforces.

The tugboat companies have demanded that tugboats run with bare-bones crews of two or three people, which Woods says is just asking for catastrophe. “I’m in the water, how is my captain going to effectively rescue me while trying to operate the vessel?” In the year since the Ingenika sank, the ILWU and the families of Cragg and Pearson have demanded stricter regulation and safety provisions on small vessels. But “there’s downward pressure on maintenance and all those other things, because now everybody’s fighting over rates,” Woods says.

Taking a tugboat out of commission to do maintenance work on it would cost the company money, so operators wind up skimping on necessary upkeep, assuming that they won’t be inspected. Woods points out that with the number of inspectors currently on staff with Transport Canada, “you could see an inspection every nine years if they decided to show up, if they got to every vessel in Canada, which they don’t.”

In British Columbia, tugboats often move vessels carrying hazardous materials, sometimes for long distances—petroleum products down to Oregon, for example. During longer jobs, workers are supposed to have six hours on, six to rest, and six on watch, but with understaffed crews, that often leaves exhausted workers, like on the Ingenika, manning the controls. Woods notes that the barges are sometimes “just a flat box with tanker trucks strapped to the deck, and then they’re towing up and down the coast. You get into weather, that barge heels a little bit, and that tanker truck’s in the water.”

This isn’t just theoretical. In 2007, heavy equipment, including a fuel truck, slipped off a barge in the Robson Bight ecological reserve, spilling diesel into the water. Woods worries that undersized, understaffed tugboats create “an oil spill waiting to happen.”

When the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, tugboats became recognized but not greatly appreciated, workers say.

THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM happening in British Columbia is a global phenomenon. “We now have a system that puts a few dollars before the lives and livelihoods of tug workers, while shipping companies and lead firms are making tremendous profits,” ITF General Secretary Stephen Cotton said in a statement.

The story will be familiar to Prospect readers. A few corporations at the top are raking in astronomical sums as demand for shipping has skyrocketed. In 2021, the ocean shipping industry earned $190 billion in profits, five times as much as it made between 2010 and 2020 combined. Despite this windfall, companies work together to wring every last penny from their tug and towage contracts. In turn, those pennies are wrung out of the workers on the tugboats. The container ship is the profit center, everything else just a cost to be driven as low as possible.

But without tugboats, those massive ships can’t maneuver, and the Ever Given’s clogging of the Suez Canal reminded us all how easily global shipping can be disrupted.

The major ocean shipping companies have formed three global alliances whose market share rose from 30 percent of container capacity in 2011 to 80 percent today, according to a recent White House report. The alliances have given these shipping companies more market power and more leverage in negotiating with tugboat companies, along with cargo owners and seafarers and everyone else who relies on them. But tugboat work in particular is highly specialized, skilled, and dangerous—a key choke point in the supply chain. Without tugs, the pileups of container ships at the big ports would be far worse, and far riskier.

The backlog at the ports, Woods notes, is a reminder of what happens when companies don’t want to pay for skilled labor. The refusal to hire more workers—because ILWU members have successfully organized to drive up their wages—has left companies scrambling to move freight, just as the deregulation of trucking has led to an artificial shortage of drivers, as workers leave the industry. It’s the ILWU’s willingness to strike, whether it’s in West Coast ports (where the current labor agreement expires July 1) or the waters of British Columbia, that has led to good jobs. The union, Woods says, has “got their hands on the levers of commerce, and they’re not afraid to use it.”

But what happens when the workers aren’t allowed to strike?

The new locks in the Panama Canal require a lot more work from tugboat drivers.

IVAN DE LA GUARDIA, a Panama Canal tugboat captain and leader in the local Unión de Capitanes y Oficiales de Cubierta (UCOC), has seen conditions deteriorate even more rapidly in the canal since 2016, when new, expanded locks for bigger ships opened. The canal operates under its own labor system, which bans striking and operates on the principle, de la Guardia says, that “the canal cannot be stopped.”

That principle overrides everything else, de la Guardia explains. The workers are supposed to have a set of compensatory guarantees to make up for the lack of a right to strike, and a labor board that is supposed to mediate differences between management and labor. But in practice, he says, the system isn’t working, and right now, all of the unions that represent canal workers are at an impasse in their contract bargaining. “The negotiation of our CBA has taken two years. That’s unheard of,” de la Guardia says. But because the canal brings in a lot of money—toll revenue has been approaching $3 billion a year—“no one messes with the canal.”

The new locks require a lot more towing work from tugboat drivers, and the work is more dangerous, according to de la Guardia. It can take five or six hours, he says, to escort a container ship to the other side of the canal. And that has to be done without letting go of controls—meaning no time for a bathroom break, much less rest. Overtime, he says, is regular; tugboat workers are sometimes toiling up to 16 hours straight. While some welcome the money that comes with overtime, he notes, “you can imagine the damage they’re doing to their personal life.”

In 2018, a study on the pressures on the canal workers commissioned by ITF called the long hours and understaffing after the change to the new locks “a disaster waiting to happen.” Dr. Isabel Gonzalez, an occupational medicine physician, and Dr. Barry Strauch, a transportation human factors specialist, found that, in addition to health consequences including hypertension, sleep disorders, and anxious-depressive syndrome, the irregular and grueling schedules could have “a direct, negative impact on the safety of Panama Canal operations because of the degradation in tugboat captain cognitive performance … Since the cognitive activities needed for safe tugboat operations include situation awareness, vigilance, attention, and decision making are activities that degrade when operators are fatigued, the captain’s ability to maintain safe operations when fatigued is limited.” (The Panama Canal Authority disputes the findings.)

The Panama Canal, like other key nodes in global shipping, is only seeing more traffic lately. There have been more accidents in recent years, de la Guardia says, and while none have been catastrophic, dangers have heightened with the reduced crews that tugboats have been operating with since 2018. In that year, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) cut the staffing on the tugs to the minimum—one captain, two deckhands, and one engineer. When several tugboat captains protested the cutbacks, they were sanctioned by the ACP. De la Guardia feels like he has nowhere to turn but to the international community for pressure.

The canal, de la Guardia says, is always full, and it has raised prices on the ships, including for use of the tugboats. There’s more money for everyone, in other words, except the workers. “All these supply chain disruptions, believe it or not, have been beneficial to the Panama Canal and the government,” de la Guardia explains. “Not actually to the workers, and not even to the people of Panama.”

Tugboat workers, like others along the supply chain, are weighing their options as they watch corporate profits spike while their employers lowball them at the bargaining table. “The supply chain can be fixed,” Jason Woods says. “They need more people and they need to pay a living wage.” At the moment, though, the workers feel that their employers would rather risk their lives than spend more money.

Sarah Jaffe is the author of ‘Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt’ and ‘Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Leaves Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone.’

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