| Summary: | 博士 === 海洋大學 === 航運管理學系 === 96 === Abstract
In recent years, Taiwan is one of the key players around the world with regard to the shipping industry, and Taiwanese seafarers have indeed made a tremendous contribution. However, following Taiwan’s economic development, the rise of people’s living standard and the interaction of the international seafaring market, the employment market for Taiwanese seafarers is gradually shrinking. According to the investigation conducted by the Baltic and International Maritime Conference/International Shipping Federation (BIMCO/ISF), Taiwan has become one of the main importers of foreign seafarers since 1995. Therefore, it is understandable that the convergence of seafarers with multiple nationalities has become a common situation in Taiwan’s shipping industry.
There is no doubt that Taiwanese seafarers’ feelings about future job security must be deeply threatened as their job environment has been rapidly deteriorated in recent years. In other words, since Taiwanese seafarers realize that their job opportunities were replaced by lower-waged foreign seafarers and that their job site is commonly converged with seafarers of multiple nationalities, their sense of job insecurity is naturally there to grow.
Viewing this, this paper focus on Taiwanese seafarers so as to collect relevant data about their ‘perceived job environment threat’, ‘job insecurity’ and job related attitudes based on a questionnaire survey. Then this study uses the structural equation modeling to analyze Taiwanese seafarers’ job insecurity and its leading factors with their impacts on work related attitudes.
The study results indicate that: (1) Taiwanese seafarers’ current ‘perceived job environment threat’ is consisted of ‘lack of government support’, ‘decreased job opportunities’, ‘competition from Chinese seafarers’ and ‘company’s revolution’. And these factor loadings of ‘competition from Chinese seafarers’ and ‘decreased job opportunities’ are higher than the others. This result reveals that the main sources of job environment threats perceived by Taiwanese seafarers come from the competitions of Chinese seafarers as well as the following decrease of job opportunities. (2) All path analyses except the elder sample reveal that ‘lack of government support’ significantly affected their ‘job insecurity’ directly, and then affected their job related attitudes indirectly. This shows that ‘lack of government support’ perceived by Taiwanese seafarers will result in their job insecurity, and then lowering their job satisfaction and professional commitment as well as raising their intention to turnover. (3) In the final path models of those samples, within the four dimensions of ‘perceived job environment threat’, only the ‘lack of government support’ significantly affected their ‘job insecurity’ directly, and the percentage of variance explanation seemed low. This result points out that the ‘perceived job environment threat’ for those currently employed Taiwanese seafarers does not significantly affect their ‘job insecurity’ directly as they are not under the immediate risk of being replaced by foreign seafarers. In addition, as the shipping industry is prosperous around the globe in recent years and the shipping companies’ demand for seafarers continues to expand, such phenomenon is understandable.
In summary, those final path models except the elder sample show that the ‘lack of government support’ significantly affected their ‘job insecurity’ directly, and then affected their job related attitudes indirectly. Therefore this study suggests that the Taiwan government has to make some proper procedures with regard to protecting domestic seafarers’ job opportunities, so as to keep sufficient seafaring human resource in future.
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