Personal communication, a seaman’s right.

To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing- not even in the much hyped Maritime Labour Convention- that requires shipowners of all ocean going ships to compulsorily provide internet or email facilities to their crews. That, in 2013, four of five seafarers have no access to the internet at sea is ridiculous. That the picture is even more dismal for ratings- 97 per cent of whom have no internet access- is also discriminatory.

There are more than a few shipowners and shipmanagers that provide generous email facilities for officers- and, increasingly, for ratings as well- aboard their ships. They are the smarter ones, but, as figures show, most seamen are not granted this apparent luxury.

Ashore, with work-personal life lines getting increasingly blurred, and with smartphones (often company paid) everywhere, personal communication during working hours is a commonplace occurrence. Our seamen, who have little personal life at work anyway, deserve more, not less, of this facility. At the minimum, they should have a codified and legal right (legal, since depending on shipmanager goodwill is breaking wind against thunder), to be able to send and receive emails to anybody they want to on a daily basis. And they should have a right to do this in some sort of privacy. 

Even those spurious arguments that were put forward against free shipboard email access half a decade ago don’t apply any longer. Installation of new facilities is relatively inexpensive even if these are needed. But in most cases even that is unnecessary; tweaking the software and the installation and networking of a few ‘extra’ computers on each ship is all that is required. If bandwidth cost is a concern, ban attachments or limit their size, if you must. And reduce by half the thousands of emails that your office sends the ship every year, while you are about it.

Other fake arguments against crew email have included the stupid (crew won’t work), the callous (it is not in their contract), the patronising (crew’s families don’t normally have email accounts, Captain,  one Superintendent told me not all that long ago) and the plain dumb (We didn’t have email when we sailed, one 55 year old manager told me once. We wrote letters. Sure you did, I thought. And before you they used carrier pigeons. And before that, they wrote messages in a bottle and threw it over the side. And before that, they probably shouted across the water. So what’s your point? Regression is virtuous?)  

It is reprehensible how we expect ship’s crew to sail for months on end with such little contact with their families. The advent of mobile phones has eased the situation somewhat: anybody who has sailed recently will tell you for the rush for prepaid SIM cards at each port of call. When sailing on fixed runs, all of us had a half dozen or so of these cards, one for each country that we touched. Stories of ships hugging the coast to get a good mobile phone signal are well known; I have done this myself.

(Tut-tut, some out of date shipping gaffer will no doubt tell me from the safety of his shore office. That practice can be a safety hazard. That is another fake argument, sir, and insulting to boot, because it questions my competence.)

Today, short port stays and restricted shore leave mean add to the seaman’s isolation from family and from society. I can tell you, from experience, that I used to find it very difficult to even find time to call my family using my own mobile phone in port, work was that crazy. Terminals across the world, barring few exceptions, usually have few phone or internet facilities. Internet cafes and long distance calling booths have closed down as demand has collapsed with mobile phones and internet saturation ashore. All this makes communication for a seaman much tougher than it used to be. Than it needs to be.

Which is why cheap and regular communication at sea should be every seaman’s basic right. Not an industry ‘best practice,’ as shipmanagers will have you believe, but a right. In any case, shipping’s best practices are best left uncommented upon.

Somebody amend the Maritime Labour Convention, please. Just one line: ‘On oceangoing vessels, free email facilities must be provided daily to each crew; it is a seafarer’s right.’

Maybe the MLC will then do some good after all.

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The MLC and flexible responsibility

President Borromeo of InterManager- the trade association of ship managers- asked Flag States a few weeks ago to exercise ‘maximum tolerance’ and ‘flexibility’ in the implementation of the MLC. Intermanager claims to represent the management of almost 5000 ships and to be ‘responsible’ for some quarter of a million seafarers, as its website says. It feels that, ‘as the MLC requires total commitment from its global stakeholders, restraint and a common interpretation of the rules needs to be seen from inspecting authorities.’ 

Apprehensive about disruptions to ship’s operations and schedules post the convention coming into effect, Borromeo says that “InterManager welcomes the entering into force of MLC but remains concerned that many of the world’s major ports which our members’ vessels visit, lie within the borders of countries which have yet to ratify the MLC such as the US, Korea, UK, Italy and Japan”. 

I can understand Intermanager’s angst; the words in shipping legislation often have a habit of running away with themselves, sometimes being interpreted- as in the Port State Control regime- in a dozen creative and unintended ways by lazy, arrogant or corrupt officials. The MLC has the potential to be pretty draconian unless common sense is applied. Which may explain some of Mr Borromeo’s concerns; there is scope for mayhem until everybody ratifies it and the dust settles, after which we can all presumably live happily ever after. 

However. 

My memory is poor; which is probably why I can’t recall such apprehensions being expressed before with, for example, the implementation of the useless ISPS convention, which has done little except add a layer of daily drudgery to a seaman’s life without adding an iota to a ship’s security. (Ask the hundreds of seamen that are still being taken hostage every year.) I don’t recall such public misgivings before the ISM Code was implemented either; that was the one that started the conversion of seamen into clerks, running around the ship with clipboards and checklists; that was the one that contributed immensely and directly to fatigue at sea. That was the one that asked ship’s crews to lie in writing. It still does; nothing has changed. 

No concern has been expressed, as far as I know, about the need, effectiveness or usefulness of the new courses that the STCW regime has slapped on seamen with every amendment for the last twenty years. As we speak, for example, hundreds of seamen are running around trying to get a certificate for the ‘Designated Security Duties’ course, another one in a long line of piffling courses that should have been aborted with extreme prejudice before it was born. 

The problem with selectively expressing concern, as Intermanager has done, is that organisational credibility takes a toss. People wonder about who is actually being sought to be protected. People know what the real agenda is. People suspect that asking for flexibility may be another way to wiggle out of the financial cost of responsibility.

Which reminds me. I take exception to Intermanager’s claim that the organisation’s members are ‘responsible for some 250,000 seafarers.’ 

With a small handful of notable exceptions that actually value their seamen, the driving force for most ship managers’- particularly  third party ship managers- is the retention of old clients and the addition of new ones. Other major forces include penny pinching, blinkered short term outlooks and the covering of the organisational backside. Responsibility for seamen is very low down on their agenda. I can tell you, from first-hand experience, that some of these managers- including many considered blue chip- care two hoots about the seamen working aboard their ships. But then you know that already.

Had I suffered from the misconception that these managers were ‘responsible’ for me in any way whatsoever, I would have died at sea long ago. 
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The shaky fourth pillar: Reneging on the MLC

One of the bedrock tenets of capitalism is that the capitalist investor bears the financial risk of the enterprise, and that workers’ wages are never on the line. This is only fair; after all, the capitalist does not share windfall profits he makes in good times with his workers, so why should labour share his losses when times are bad?

The Maritime Labour Convention- which, I have said before, will fail its stated intentions, since a piece of paper will not change attitude- was, amongst other things, supposed to formalise that capitalist tenet. It was going to ensure that seafarers’ unpaid salaries were protected in the event of financial default by a ship’s owners. Seacurus had even rolled out an insurance policy recently - CrewSEACURE- that covered wages, repatriation, medical and personal accident liabilities if owners defaulted.

In a singular gesture of bad faith, it now appears that shipowners and their P&I Clubs want to reinterpret the MLC regulations to wriggle out of their basic responsibility. They say that, in the event of an owner abandoning the crew, crew repatriation is covered under the MLC but wages are not.

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In short- owners need not spend money buying insurance or making provisions for financial security for crew wages, since those poor suckers are going to be on their own for ‘several years’.

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The UK P&I Club claims to insure 'over 200 million tonnes from more than fifty countries across the globe’. This is what the Club says, in a ‘clarification’ to its members:

“This Standard (they mean MLC and its guidelines) does not include a provision on outstanding unpaid wages following abandonment. Liability for unpaid wages following abandonment is a feature of the principles agreed in the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 2009. These principles are not applicable at this stage and there is no requirement in the MLC 2006 to provide financial security by way of insurance cover for unpaid wages.”

They further claim, attempting to snidely pass the buck, “It has been suggested that that the MLC introduces an obligation on owners to maintain financial security for unpaid wages. As noted above in the context of insolvency this is incorrect. The MLC does not introduce a requirement on owners to provide financial security for the payment of wages. It does, however, introduce obligations on States Parties and in turn States will require owners to ensure seafarers are paid. This does not require owners to meet their obligation to pay wages through the provision of financial security”. 

Apologists for shipowners will undoubtedly claim that it is the provision of financial security that is a problem for cash strapped owners, many of whom have never- and have no intention of- defaulting on wages. They will add, no doubt, that P&I Clubs are in the business of addressing the collective risk their members are exposed to, and so obviously do not want to accept liability if they can wriggle out by claiming that none exists.

As the UK P&I Club happily claims in the same clarification, (after dismissing the MLC and saying that wages come under ILO rules instead): “The ILO principles (on unpaid wages, they mean) are subject to further discussion and negotiation and to take this forward ILO has scheduled a meeting for April 2014. It will then take several years for the principles to be considered in ILO, finalised and implemented in MLC Member States” (Italics mine).

In short- owners need not spend money buying insurance or making provisions for financial security for crew wages, since those poor suckers are going to be on their own for ‘several years’. 

To be honest, I feel for the shipowner of today; this is no time to look forward to additional high costs of compliance, whether it is in connection with the MLC, ballast water or environmental regulation. There is simply no money out there. But my point is that the MLC, the much overhyped Fourth Pillar of the maritime regulatory regime, does not subject shipowners to any additional obligation as regards crew wages. That obligation already exists- it goes way back to the birth of capitalism. The responsibility to pay crew their wages is a pillar of capitalism, and paying crew their wages, no matter what, has been a legal- and moral- duty forever. 

The formalisation- and the costs involved- of this basic responsibility are now being objected to. This absence of good faith underlines the propensity and ability of shipowners to disregard the much hyped ‘human element’ completely, and will be the undoing of shipping. For, if the MLC is today sought to be reinterpreted to dilute or negate the fundamental duty of paying wages, what are the odds that the other, lesser, elements of the MLC that hit owners’ pockets- pertaining to working conditions, for example, or fatigue- will be allowed to succeed tomorrow? 

I suspect that the shaking of this fourth pillar of maritime regulation will become a regular affair, as the industry seeks to dilute the MLC’s scope and short change the seafarer wherever possible. The problem is that, when pillars- whether of capitalism or maritime regulation- become shaky, they eventually collapse and bring down the entire house on one’s head. If you don’t believe me, ask Samson or the Philistines.