The incentives are also all over the place. The shipping industry uses a lot of labour from "poor" countries, but on bulk shipping the labour costs are often a rounding error. The main issue is, of course, working conditions. Americans don't want to sit on a freighter for 6 month tours away from their families. The US navy has a hard enough problem doing it for people in their early 20s, and even then that's usually to get access to education funding. People from the Philippines will do it because it is life-changing amounts of money and the alternative is abject poverty.
It is usually 3 month tours, twice a year. So 3 months out, 3 months at home. Repeat.
>"Americans don't want to...."
This phrase needs to die. Americans(or any population) are not some sort of monolithic group that can only do some small subset of work.
"There are approximately 5,600 container ships operating worldwide as of early 2023"(from DuckDuckgo AI). Assuming a crew of 10 per ship; 56,000 people total are required.
"As of August 2025, the civilian labor force is approximately 171 million people."(from DuckDuckgo AI)
So to fully staff the WORLDWIDE fleet with Americans, it would take 0.03% of the labor population. This is a vanishingly small amount and since labor cost is as you say a rounding error, if it offered a competitive pay I am sure that there would be enough takers.
> Americans don't want to sit on a freighter for 6 month tours away from their families
And yet finding crews was never a problem before differential subsidies ended.
In fact crewing US flagged is harder now because the work is intermittent. If people can't find berths they time out on their licenses and go do something else in a different industry.
> People from the Philippines will do it because it is life-changing amounts of money
The international minimum wage for seafarers is about $700/mo. In comparison wages in the Philippines are between 20k-50k pesos a month or $340-$850. Seafaring is an above-average income job in the Philippines but not "life-changing."
