Unverified references, misconduct swept under the rug and careers built with no foundations: for too long, these have been the realities of life below deck. Dockwalk sits down with Captain James Battey, a mariner who has spent more than two decades at sea watching these issues play out firsthand, to find out why he founded Yacht Workers Council, and why he believes transparency is the key to putting crew back in control of their careers.
A new crew career registry called Yacht Workers Council (YWC) has launched to give superyacht crew a verified record of their identity, certification, sea service and employment history as they move from boat to boat. Despite the industry's scale and sophistication, founder Captain James Battey points out that it has never had a unified system for tracking a crew member's career, certificates and professional reputation.
"I've always found, unfortunately, in yachting, there's never really been any career pathways or infrastructure in place," he says. "I always use the example: if you're building a house, what's the most important thing? Foundations, because then you can build whatever you want. We've never had the foundations in yachting, and yet we keep piling up on top, and then we wonder why things start to fall down."
YWC is Battey's answer to that missing foundation. The platform stores crew certificates and documents, connects crew with employers through its job board, and houses a directory of training schools and other relevant products and services for crew. Search results across the platform are ranked purely by relevance, distance and rating, with no sponsored listings.
Community sits at the heart of the platform too, with its forum built to break down isolation and open up peer knowledge beyond the walls of a single yacht. "As a crew member, you tend to be a product of who you've been working alongside, because that's who you ask questions to," Battey says. "So why are we only getting advice from that, when we can actually put it out into the community?"
That same philosophy extends to honesty about the industry itself. For Battey, openness and discretion are not mutually exclusive. "In yachting, unfortunately, we have tended to swipe the NDA paintbrush over everything, so you can't talk about anything. We can't talk about owners or charters, quite rightly - discretion is key. However, we can talk about our industry. We can talk about the great bits about it, but we also need to be able to talk about the uncomfortable bits about it, and that's how we get better."
At the core of YWC's trust model is a review system, designed to close the door on fabricated references. A review can only be written by a crew member or captain who was genuinely part of a confirmed placement. "When you leave the boat, the boat is asked to leave a review on you, but you are asked to leave a review on the boat as well," Battey explains. Authors have seven days to edit their review, after which it becomes permanent, unable to be removed by anyone. Reviews stay private, but employers and crew can request them during the recruitment process. "If they say ‘we're not happy to share that’, that in itself is a red flag," he says.
Privacy runs through the rest of the system in the same way. No employer or agency can browse crew records or certificates freely. Nothing leaves a profile unless the crew member actively shares it with a named recipient, for a time period they set and can revoke.
Management companies, too, stand to benefit from this structure, Battey argues. "Management companies are in a really impossible position. You have the owner who pays them, but they're trying to manage the owners' wants and the crew's wants," he says. YWC aims to ease that tension by acting as an intermediary, relaying crew feedback directly: "We relay the information to them and say, 'this is what people are telling us, and it needs to change'.”
Underpinning all of it is a simple conviction that getting crew welfare right lifts the rest of the industry with it. "Crew are the foundation of this. We're the commodity in this industry. If you get that right, it makes everything better," Battey says. "You walk into any service industry - a hotel, a restaurant - and it doesn't matter how good the food is or how amazing the hotel is; if the staff aren't happy, you pick up on that instantly. It's the same in yachting, and more so because we eat, sleep and live in that space."
Yacht Workers Council is free for crew to join, offering career history storage, verified documents, a job board, community forums and training resources. A paid Platinum Plus tier allows profiles to be independently verified by Crewdentials, enables automated sea service tracking via Digital Sea Service and includes other benefits such as partner discounts. Listing a business, training school or job vacancy is free for all.