Looking for a Ship by John McPhee

many merchant ships are under construction?”
    Andy answered, “None, in American yards.”
    Mac said, “That’s a God-damned sin.”
    Andy said that the several ships being built in Germany for American President Lines were “post-Panamax”—too large for the Panama Canal—and were intended for runs in the Pacific. The latest Panamax ships were the so-called econs, or Econships, built in Korea for United States Lines and now owned by Sea-Land. “They are not ships but shit,” Mac said. “They were made with a hammer and nail.” Captain Ron Crook’s Sea-Land Performance, which Andy had night-mated in Charleston, was an econ. Taking his work seriously, Andy had done his best to heed a sign on the bridge that said “CAUTION, DON’T WITHSTAND VOLTAGE & INSULATION RESISTANCE INSPECTION.”
    Mac picked up a piece of chalk and began writing cryptic numbers on the top of the steering selector. He could ignore the wheel, because the ship was on automatic pilot.
After adding, subtracting, erasing, multiplying, he said, “These hours have cashed in on my durability.” He was computing his overtime.
    Two-thirds of his work was overtime. There was required overtime, for dockings and undockings (handling the stern mooring lines), and most days he opted to work on deck for the bosun—chipping and painting—from nine to twelve in the morning and one to four in the afternoon. Weekends were pure overtime—on watch as on deck. His base pay was fifty-three dollars a day for a five-day, forty-hour week. But he wasn’t working a five-day, forty-hour week; he was working fourteen to eighteen hours a day seven days a week. His hourly overtime rate was only thirteen dollars and seventy-eight cents, but there would be enough of it, he figured, to triple his base. In twelve weeks, he would earn about fourteen thousand dollars.
    That is when I said, “This is a good watch.”
    And Mac said, “This is the only watch. The overtime watch. Sailors with the oldest shipping cards can name their watch. Nine out of ten prefer the four-to-eight. The early worm gets the bird.”
    It occurred to me that in being carried out to sea the word “overtime” had acquired enough special meaning to make it remarkably subtle. With its resonating nuances of opportunity and fairness, it created an entrepreneurial illusion among people who were actually working like ponies in a Scottish coal mine. Base pay or extra pay, it was all pay. Basic time or overtime, it was all time. With aggressive self-interest, with rewarded dedication, with nothing better
to do, you willingly worked an eighty-hour week, worked eighteen hours on some days, for—as your chalk or your calculator would quickly tell you—about ten bucks an hour.
    This, of course, had occurred to Mac, too. He said, “The only one who makes a decent salary is the bosun. It’s chalk and cheese between my salary and his.”
    In the payoff port—Charteston, Newark, or wherever —an armored car drives up to the gangway, and the crew is paid in cash.
    For the unlicensed deckhands, overtime is almost a synonym for chipping rust. It begins after breakfast. Mac, Calvin, Peewee, and others report to the shelter deck, where the bosun disperses jobs. Chipping rust is a job for people made of neurological nylon. They use hand-held jack-hammers—needle guns, chisel guns, Bumble Bees, triple scalers. They dislodge rust and they create sound. Wherever they are, wherever you are, you can hear them. You can climb the flying bridge, wrap a pillow around your ears, stuff yourself in a hawsepipe, hide under a table—you cannot escape the sound. As a result, there are union rules limiting the sound to six hours a day. Depending on where you are, the chippers can seem to be hovering aircraft, they can seem to be splashing water, they can suggest a dentist drilling in a cavity hour after hour.