Learning at work has proven benefits to mental and physical health. But what happens when your workplace is out at sea? That’s where RMT Learning comes in.

The further we move into the digital era, the more important it becomes that we all have access to high-quality broadband. And even more so in a global pandemic, when so much of what we used to do together in the real world – working, learning, even socialising – has had to move online. But the maritime members of RMT knew all about the make-or break value of broadband before many of the rest of us.

They are the members of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA, the civilian operation that provides logistical support to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines), ferry workers, dockworkers, divers, oil rig workers, wind farm maintenance staff and river cruise workers.

Whether they are bringing fuel to warships in some far-flung part of the world or providing lifeline service between remote islands off the west coast of Scotland, maritime workers have to deal with the challenges of isolation throughout their working lives – pandemic or no pandemic – as well as the irregular hours and shift patterns that come with the job.

With the proven benefits of learning for mental health, RMT launched its new maritime learning portal earlier this year – an online resource that the union’s lifelong learning team had been developing long before the pandemic.

The portal was launched in February, and National Shipping Secretary Darren Procter explained:

Quite often it’s difficult for members to get to the union so the union is taking education to the members on a whole host of topics that will make us stronger as an organisation but will also offer benefits to members on topics such as IT, finance, pensions, health and safety, rights at work and social media.”

With its mix of learning suitable for all RMT members and opportunities specifically targeting maritime workers, the portal has already proved successful.

But to reach its full capacity, it requires maritime workers to be able to access its resources as safely and straightforwardly as their land-based colleagues. And that means high-quality broadband access is absolutely vital – whether maritime workers are committing time and energy to improving their skills through online learning or whether they are simply trying to stay in touch with friends and family they don’t see for weeks at a time.

RMT Maritime Learning Organiser Gareth Jameson, who is currently seconded to the role from his RFA job, said:

The internet is so dominant in everybody’s life now: just try going a week without using it and see how you get on – you just couldn’t function,” says RMT Maritime Learning Organiser Gareth Jameson, who is currently seconded to the role from his RFA job.

That goes double for workers out at sea, he adds.

Our people on board, they’re sat in a small cabin of an evening with nothing to do when we’re in lockdown – because they can’t go out, they can’t do anything – so they really need this broadband.”

And when it comes both to promoting and accessing learning opportunities, the quality of the connection and the bandwidth it can cope can make the difference between someone learning and someone not, Gareth points out.

Gareth said:

If you’re telling someone about a course, the easiest way to do it is by email. But if they click the link and nothing comes up because their broadband’s rubbish or it’s just too slow, they forget about it and you’ve lost that person for that course.”

And when maritime members do successfully enrol, the quality of the broadband comes back into play during the course itself, as Maritime and ULR Support Learning Organiser Ivor Riddell points out.

If you’re in a port somewhere, it’s usually a bit easier, but once you’re out at sea you’re limited to whatever the company provides and traditionally that’s not a great service.”

That means it’s almost impossible at times if you’re trying to download resources or even just interact on a course: I’ve been on courses a number of times when people have had to switch off their video because they don’t have enough bandwidth to support it.” 

It’s for these reasons that the 2021 RMT National Education Conference is expected to discuss launching a campaign to make access to broadband an industrial issue.

Ivor points out:

It is an industrial issue, not just for seafarers but across the board,”

They expect people to do a lot of training online, they expect people to be communicating online – especially now with even more people using Zoom and Teams and all that stuff – but actually the access to broadband for a lot of workers is rubbish, quite frankly.”

Recent negotiations by the union’s Scottish learning project succeed in securing access to corporate wi-fi for union learners on the Highlands and Islands ferry operator Caledonian MacBrayne (CalMac) earlier this year.

Scottish Learning Organiser Dan Henderson, who has been supporting CalMac learners for more than a decade, says the union had been trying to secure broadband access for learners for some time.

Dan explaines:

The crew-use and the public wi-fi is good when you’re in the inner islands, closer to the mainland, but the further out you go, the patchier it gets.”

The corporate wi-fi is stable enough for any learning environment and secure but we didn’t get access to it pre-Covid.”

But Dan has now successfully negotiated to get access to the corporate wi-fi and the corporate devices on board every CalMac ship. This has meant that RMT has been able to continue to deliver a. wide range of online learning to CalMac staff throughout 2020, despite the challenges of Covid-19.

Before the pandemic, the union had agreed with CalMac that when learners took time off to attend classroom courses on certain subjects where the employer had a corporate responsibility, such as mental health, the company would pay them for their time in the classroom and cover the costs of their travel and accommodation.

Dan says:

We made a decision quite early in a development group with STUC that we were going to move forward by delivering courses through Zoom, Teams and Webex.”

Before Covid, we had been looking at a 16-hour coaching skills course for mentors of apprentices so, working with the providers, we decided that we were going to attempt to do this online through Zoom.”

The course proved a success, delivered to 12 mentors over four two-hour sessions (two hours being the maximum learners can realistically deal with in a videoconferencing session).

The union has also delivered a mental health course using the same approach, using two presenters so that one of them was always available to support a learner in a virtual breakout room if a part of the course triggered any difficult emotions.

Delivery over video conferencing technology has opened up new possibilities, Dan points out.

In places like Coll and Tiree in the outer isles, we had people onboard these ships getting time off with pay learning on the corporate device – something we’d never done before and something we’ve never expected to do.”

We had three retail staff doing a coaching course on a boat that left Islay at 9.45: they started at 10 and they had just finished when the boat got in at 12.15.”

Raising awareness of mental health issues and promoting positive approaches to help maritime workers in particular through learning has been a top priority for RMT Learning on both sides of the border.

The circumstances in which maritime workers do their jobs make this especially important. While most of us can walk away from mental health struggle at work and find relief among family or friends, when maritime staff are on board for weeks at a time, their co-workers become their family and friends.

Dan says:

In the maritime industry, when you’re working two weeks on, two weeks off, for those two weeks you’re on a ship, that’s your family, so we became involved with our tutors and our education department early doors in getting people to feel comfortable to speak, to take away the stigma and discrimination.”

Everybody’s got mental health: at some point in your life it can be good, bad or indifferent. It’s not a class thing, we all have it: life can be crap for all of us at some point. It’s getting that message across – to everybody.”

Dan speaks on this issue from his own experience, saying:

I live with depression and anxiety and I speak to the people around me and that’s been the biggest thing for me.”

It’s about encouraging people to have someone you can speak to, for people to be there for other people, for people to ask that question, ‘How are you doing?’.”

That’s why the learning team is making good use of a new RMT publication aimed at the entire membership, Campaigning for Mental Wellbeing at Work.

The booklet is a vital tool in the union’s drive to change the workplace culture around mental health issues through union organising. Around 300,000 people with a long-term mental health condition lose their jobs each year, and at a much higher rate than those with physical health conditions, the booklet points out. And the economic costs are huge.

Failing to effectively address mental health issues among their staff costs UK employers between £33m and £42m every year, according to the Thriving At Work independent review.

And more than half of that is down to presenteeism, when individuals are less productive due to poor mental health despite spending more hours at work, with the rest due to sickness absence and staff turnover. But while RMT backs the proposals in Thriving At Work, it argues that most employers are likely to implement them only if they are compelled to by strong and effective union organising.

 It includes a case study of the mental health learning for RMT ULRs and frontline managers that Dan has put in place at CalMac, which is supporting a change in culture within the organisation.

It also includes useful tips on how union reps can support members experiencing mental health difficulties, promote mental health learning in the workplace and build alliances with organisations that are expert in the field.

Ivor said:

We’ve found it a powerful booklet and something we’re going to use going forward as a talking point to get the discussion going in the workplace.”

With its maritime learning portal, the RMT’s own mental health resources and guides produced by other organisations with the union’s help, the union’s learning team is set fair to play its part in further developing a culture of wellbeing, with an important place for learning, among its maritime members.

But to be successful, this culture of wellbeing cannot leave individuals to carry the burden, especially when so many of them are already struggling. What will make the difference is when employers are persuaded to take responsibility.

Dan added:

The key for me is how we take it from picking up the pieces and firefighting mental health to actually creating a culture of wellbeing.”

It’s having a structure within an organisation, that policy that everybody adheres to from the bottom to the top.”

And like learning, Dan believes mental health should be treated as core union business.

It’s about what we are: we’re trade unionists, we’re socialists, we look out for each other – our core value is we’re there for each other.”

It’s trying to instil those values in everybody: ask the question, have the conversation, look after each other and look after yourself – probably now more than ever.”

This article first appeared in the Spring 2021 edition of the Learning Rep.