There is much speculation now about the end of this recession. Not that it is going to come very quickly or anything but at least we are speculating that the end is nigh and not that the “The End Is Nigh!” The news at last, appears to have more of the ‘Green Shoots’ of growth stories than the ‘Gathering Storm Clouds’ stories. We will know when we are finally out of recession as at that point the news will be full of ‘Boy of Four Walks again’ and ‘Chicken Adopted By the Neighbour’s Dog’ stories! Still though, no-one has any real idea of how the yachting sector will be affected in the future. Yachting has only really experienced an ever expanding market in the recent past and the industry was more geared toward turndowns than downturns.
One indicator of the yachting industry’s health was thought to be crew. This makes it very interesting that, when viewing crew as a demographic group, very few statistics are available and rarer still is any form of research into their habits, actions and general behaviour. Crew have long been realised to be the ‘intangible asset’ that ascribes yachting it’s subjective value to wealthy owners and yet there is no concensus on much that makes them tick.
It is very difficult to find out just how many crew there are. Estimates would seem to range from 32,000 people to in excess of 40,000. When you consider that the best estimate of the number of large yachts is now about 4000, the crew totals are based on a ratio in excess of 8.5 crew per boat. Plausible? Well maybe, but the median average size of yachts is much closer to the 4-6 crew boats. For this reason I suspect that the number of ‘berths’ and hence jobs is closer to 25,000 -30,000 for yacht crew but that the industry supports up to 40,000 crew members, give or take a few seasonal variations.
This would therefore assume that not all crew were ever employed at the same time. And this in turn would seem to be borne out by history; which always suggested that the levels of turnover were astronomic as a percentage of the total working crew population. The evidence I am basing this on is by the fact that if up to 20% of crew were not working they must have been doing something else which included training. Now we know that crew often would leave their jobs both to train and in order to advance up the career ladder. The numbers of crew training have been down over the last year and the number of available jobs has also reduced.
It would therfore seem to me that the old turnover we used to see was in fact serving the interests of the industry as a whole as it enabled more crew to occupy fewer jobs. The downturn for yacht crew over the last year has been the lack of jobs. This I would hazard a guess at, has beeen caused by no more than, those in jobs staying in them for unusually long periods and not leaving to train or attempt to advance up the career ladder.
So what we are witnessing is possibly like a game of musical chairs. The music has stopped and only a finite number were left sitting down. Follow the analogy through and the laid up boats or those stuck in the yard are a bit like removing a few chairs. Those in their chairs are very reluctant to leave them and so it appears that there less seats when in fact there are just more occupied seats. It is as much the fact that there are fewer boats being used as just fewer crew moving around in and out of employment.
Interestingly this could be said to mirror a major problem seen in economics; market confidence. The best minds in the world are aware that if consumers started spending, the economic situation would improve more quickly. Japan spent ten years in recession as a result of consumers holding on to their money and the glimmer of optimism we see today as we start to move out of the worst of the slump, is as a result of governments spending for us. So as an indicator of better times in yachting, crew probably do serve an important purpose. Their mobility will be a positive sign that confidence is returning to the marketplace. The reason is that as a demographic, crew are relatively well insulated from the financial pain of the recession and they are therefore quite likely to be reacting to the sentiment they feel and hear which is surely what informs confidence and not the pressure of financial hardship.
The big problem with this whole idea is that it does not help establish just when the music is going to start again.