I paid money to cross the Pacific Ocean on a Maersk line, 300 meter cargo ship (us_en here). Many people asked me if I worked to be on board, and the answer was "no", Maersk did not allow it. The officers were mostly East Germans who needed a job, while the strictly segregated, "A-Bs" were almost all Pacific Islanders of some kind. The conditions were clean and professional, but I got the feeling soon that this was not a desirable job. The officers would spend at least 60 days on duty, often more.. without a vacation day, but had a weekly day "off" or two, except the Captain who is technically working at all times.
I enjoyed the travel and had a good voyage, with many small things to say about it at another time. As I learn about "business" and the world, I understand more about labor abuses, even with "respectable" companies. And, your outrage does nothing, because people who mistreat others professionally are quite used to the complaining, including yours. I am not at all surprised at this article.
Lowest is Ordinary Seaman (OS). This is the entry level rating in the deck department. The only qualifications required are basic safety and firefighting training. The corresponding entry level rating in the engine department is Wiper.
And, your outrage does nothing, because people who mistreat others professionally are quite used to the complaining, including yours. I am not at all surprised at this article.
I enjoyed your post until this sentence. The article describes a situation gradually deteriorating into a crisis. The barrier between people complaining and things actually happening are indeed high but I still believe taking note of a crisis is a first step to acting.
> taking note of a crisis is a first step to acting.
Yes, in the same way overcoming denial is the first step in personal recovery. The trouble is, like a depressed alcoholic who doesn't care that drink's ruining their life, it's not that those running the company are in denial about the way they're abusing their employees. It's that they know it and don't care.
What's the path from here to them caring, though? One thing that might help is if their clients stopped doing business with them, but do their clients care?
Why? The problem with complaining (such as in an echo chamber like HN often is too) is that it is a way to vent frustration, taking the pressure of an issue. So in a way complaining actually helps the ones you are complaining about.
i particularly liked that part, because too often it seems people conflate posting for meaningful action, to the point that posting is a hinderence to meaningful action.
this is also common on cruise ships and naval around the world. - officers are european, with more lately east european.
Then the staff or A-B are usually filipino, Vietmanese or Indonesian. Its more salary then back where they're from - and it has interesting cultural changes in their socities.
In the philippines, these are called "OFW" families. daddy is never home, but because he works "abroad" his family can have newer stuff, be in a better neighborhood, etc.
> this is also common on cruise ships and naval around the world. - officers are european, with more lately east european.
> Then the staff or A-B are usually filipino, Vietmanese or Indonesian.
Merchant marine, sure, but naval? Wouldn’t both officers and crew be the nationality of the force in the vast majority of cases?
It's a trendy thing to say these days, but history shows that outrage and public opinion do quite a lot, and that is why people work very hard to manage it (including, these days, to try to appear unbothered). There are plenty of labor laws that the public has passed, and you can see, for example, SV companies responses to publicized labor abuses in their supply chains.
Yeah, that's why so many ships are registered to specific countries too, so they can operate with looser restrictions. It's basically "offshoring" but for the regulations. When I worked in fisheries, I remember seeing so many boats registered to Panama, and never knew why:
http://www.pmacertification.com/advantages-of-registering-a-...
> The officers would spend at least 60 days on duty, often more.. without a vacation day
Note that after X weeks on this schedule, the officers commonly get X weeks off at home as well. (Source: my brother is one.) The ABs though are a different story…
Last time I googled this I found it was quite expensive, basically cruise-level per-night prices, at least in my area. Perhaps if you contact the shipping companies directly you can arrange something cheaper.
I did an Atlantic crossing on CMA CGM and it was similar. The officers were almost 100% French and everyone else on board (officers and crew) was Filipino. The longest-serving seaman had been on the ship for 18 months, but typical tours are in 6 month blocks.
The most interesting observation I had was that although there was an "officer's rec room" and a "crew's rec room", it ended up being a "French rec room" and a "Filipino rec room". The long tours don't particularly bother me, I think that's somewhat expected with maritime work.
Every time I meet East Germans, the discussion will inevitably touch the unification and the social tension.
What I heard were complaints on
* privatization by the West and sometimes closure of enterprises. People of age 40 and older remember well the tough years after unification when their parents had no job and had to take a lower-level one.
* they claim that management of states and enterprises was taken over by the Wessies
* a lot of complaints about amerikanization of the culture and aligning with the US in every international policy question under Merkel. I regret I did not ask further about the culture, but just an example: by default radio stations in Germany put American music, more than stations in other Western European countries that I heard. It's very hard to stumble upon songs in German, just as any other language but English. (If you listen to French stations, foreign non-English music is much more probable to hear.)
* East Germans are more atomized and secular. That's similar to other East European contries.
* Women were forced to emansipate in the East, because they needed to work, whereas in the West they could afford being housewifes. And a surprising consequence, in the West a man can't be friends with a married woman -- Ossies living in the West complained of that too.
That's what I've heard from them and some my own superficial impressions from radio. I can't confirm that, but sure it's more or less founded info.
I'm not OP, but I've looked it up before, and it's actually quite expensive. Ballpark of around $75/night (USD). And, of course, it's slow, so you'll be using a substantial portion of your banked vacation time to do it (if that's a concern for you).
I think OP paid to travel as a passenger. They explicitly didn't get the option to work on the ship for a discount on their passage. Apparently you can just pay to travel on these container ship lines, although it can take more than 2 weeks to cross the ocean and accommodations vary.
I think ships are a bit like the wild west... one of the last “anything goes” jurisdictions. The cruise industry especially goes to great lengths to avoid regulatory oversight at all costs.
My cousin is a Merchant Marine Engineer. Some big ships can't leave port without one, yet they are in short supply. So he's paid a lot per voyage. Two or three multi-week voyages and he'd done working for the year.
Early on in his career, an officer would request his passport. To make things go faster in port, all the passports could be presented at once for quicker clearing of customs etc.
Of course he learned immediately, this meant he could not leave the ship in foreign port. And the officer sandbagged when he requested his passport back. The result was, he was essentially held captive for several months aboard ship, several times longer than he was contracted for. And the ship could count on having an Engineer for every leg of the journey.
Now he knows better, keeps his passport on his person at all times.
That's surprising that is still happening nowadays.
My brother is a Merchant Mariner. I think he is officer first class now but he worked his way up from AB.
He just left out, he is probably going to be on the ship 8 months, maybe more depending. It used to be 3 months on 3 off.
The contract he had gotten back from was supposed to be that but because of the world right now ended up being 6 months. I think he was only back for 3 before they called him back.
He was the health and safety officer on his last outing, said that people were going crazy. Kept imagining they were getting Covid when they had been to sea after a month, said that there was a suicide on another vessel by someone who thought he was sick.(either was worried everyone was going to hate him for spreading the disease or afraid he would spread it to others.)
Hope your cousin is staying safe out there. Don't know your nationality but the hopefully he can warn others quietly about that, the US is supposed to have a guild/union but I hear they aren't always the best.
And you never work in your professional industry ever again... Black listing is very real in almost any situation where technically you can report someone for something heinous.
I was just reading about Cuba the other day. It seems that only the captain can leave the ship there until all passengers are cleared. I presume he needs to take their passports with him. That creates a bit of a catch-22 here.
Seems like you should order a second passport once you have the first. Give the Capt the first one that is now invalid, but since he can't scan it, how will he know?
I still don’t understand why passports are required in official paper. It’s just a bar code that guy scans to retrieve the official record with photo ID on their server. Anything printed on paper passport is worthless and untrustworthy.
> It’s just a bar code that guy scans to retrieve the official record with photo ID on their server.
This would require a fully connected graph between all Departments of State around the world (i.e., the holders of their respective countries' passport DBs), and that is definitely not the case. It will also never be the case, since there are various geopolitical advantages to having a secret passport database (like being able to mint identities for spies, or deny the existence of a person).
The bar code you're referring to is just a machine-readable version of the information printed on the paper. It doesn't carry any proof of authenticity.
A nosy customs official can flip through the other stamps in the passport to see if you've been some place that makes you suspect. Also, certain countries will tag your passport which marks you for automatic extra inspections without even looking at your photo/name info. This happened to me specifically in Australia.
Tie all the abandoned ships together and turn them into a floating city where the only law is the law of the sea. I mean, we're aiming for full on dystopia aren't we?
Most recent discussion of the Great Bitter Lake Association (googling seems to indicate it'd been posted on HN before - but the Ever Given's grounding made it relevant again)
You might be interested in the story of Radio Caroline, back in the '60s the BBC had a state monopoly on British radio and it was very stuffy and conservative. To get around this people used to set up AM transmitters and studios on ships just outside of UK territorial waters and transmitted from beyond the jurisdiction of the government. There were quite a few of these but Radio Caroline was the first and longest-lived - they lasted up to 1990 when the British government gave itself the power to raid radio ships in international waters (!) but it eventually returned with a license and is still around today.
While it wasn't exactly a dystopian floating city (quite the opposite, it was dedicated people who wanted to be there) it's still really interesting from lots of points of view I think.
Reminds me of Radio Ceylon Hindi. All India Radio refused to play music that people actually wanted to listen to and it had a monopoly. Radio Ceylon filled the need and made millions from advertisements.
"Friedman and Gramlich noted that according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country's Exclusive Economic Zone extends 200 nautical miles (370 km) from shore. Beyond that boundary lie the high seas, which are not subject to the laws of any sovereign state other than the flag under which a ship sails. They proposed that a seastead could take advantage of the absence of laws and regulations outside the sovereignty of nations to experiment with new governance systems, and allow the citizens of existing governments to exit more easily"
"The project picked up mainstream exposure after PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel donated $500,000 in initial seed capital[4] (followed by subsequent contributions). He also spoke out on behalf of its viability in his essay "The Education of a Libertarian""
Patri Friedman is described as a former Google employee, a transhumanist and rationalist, and a very good poker player.
"Since attending the Burning Man festival in 2000, Friedman imagined creating a water festival called Ephemerisle as a Seasteading experiment and Temporary Autonomous Zone. Through The Seasteading Institute, Friedman was able to start the Ephemerisle festival in 2009, aided by TSI's James Hogan as event organizer and Chicken John Rinaldi as chief builder."
It doesn't really interest me, but I guess it does make a lot more sense than Mars colonies?
"Women on Waves (WoW) is a Dutch pro-choice nongovernmental organization (NGO) created in 1999 by Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts, in order to bring reproductive health services, particularly non-surgical abortion services and education, to women in countries with restrictive abortion laws.[1] Other services offered by WoW include contraception, individual reproductive counseling, workshops, and education about unwanted pregnancy."
You could contact your lawmakers and ask for a crew bond escrow requirement for ships, insolvent companies forfeit the money and it pays to send the crew home with a year's pay.
I don't think any of the suggestions made thus far will do anything to help out.
I think that one of the only methods that has a chance is to go to the UN and work out a treaty on human rights for maritime workers with the stipulation that once a supermajority of nations ratify/adopt it, ships flying the flag of a nation that hasn't ratified it are not allowed in the ports of the nations that have.
For a start, buy goods and services from ultra-local sources, a boycott of shipped goods if you will. Know that your sources get their supplies shipped to them, but just go down the local-sourcing chain as far as you deem reasonable.
Does that help them? It makes the trade that at sports the abuses less financially viable, but that might make the abuses worse. If the trade stops they lose their jobs and money stops flowing from wealthier regions to poorer regions.
Fair trade is better than no trade (other things being equal) if you want to support foreign workers.
Just global trade systems are a hard problem, as I see it, and really can't be organised from the consumer end (ie by simply choosing where/if to buy goods).
And all those poor sailors suddenly retire and live happily ever after, NOT. Buying local is not a solution to sailors and not a solution to buyers either as so many things are simply not being made locally.
What is needed is a control. If company does things like this then countries can start issuing huge fines should any ship of said company visit the their ports. That'll teach them proper.
It’ll never be possible. Locally produced food/gadgets were made using raw materials and equipment that were likely imported.
The raw material was extracted and the equipment itself was produced by yet another layer of equipment. And so on, until you get to the iron ore and copper and so on. No way will all of that be local.
How does that help the people in the shipping industry? Let's say you did reduce shipping and therefore there were fewer shipping jobs, the people currently doing this work would lose these jobs and have to find other work. Something which would be even less attractive than shipping. How's that help them?
You can't "buy less stuff" when the things we're talking about are necessities, often times food and critical supplies like fuel. Container ships don't just ship you game consoles and televisions.
And even if you managed to reduce all private consumption to zero, commercial consumption probably makes up an order of magnitudes more than private does. It doesn't matter what YOU do, you can't change the scales that these ships operate.
The only thing that will fix this is government intervention and fines that make it less cost effective to abandon the ship than to deal with the consequences.
Ask that your federal representative legislate against this sort of behaviour, and to give teeth to enforcement agencies.
Unscrupulous actors get away with this because there are few rules against it, and enforcement is non-existent. If a shipping company is sanctioned from entry into American ports based on misbehavior on the other side of the world, they'd have an incentive to clean up their act... Or at least, to subcontract everything to shell corporations.
I'm sorry but is this a template response? This kind of situation is a bureaucratic mess spanning an awful lot of jurisdictions. What "your representative" can possibly do to help abandoned crewmen on a ship in a forgotten port in whatever place in the world when the ships operator is a chain of shell companies to the point that's virtually impossible to pinpoint a single entity to blame. It has to be a better way.
Pressure politicians to implement covid rule exemptions/changes, budget hikes, and personnel bonuses to keep docks open. They are too often closed to incoming ships due to unreasonable requirements such as vaccine passports for all sailors and quarantines whenever there are mild/asymptomatic breakthrough infections among vaccinated dock staff.
When I worked with a container shipping company there was a mechanic trapped on a ship for months past his shore date but there was no one to cover him. He looked at me, the computer guy from the office, carrying a large wrench, like he wanted to kill me just to get off the ship.
Something interesting to me is that this article comes a t a time when shipping is reaching record highs. We used to pay around 4k for a container from Asia to the US, now the price is 25k.
It looks like there a a large amount of volatility in the shipping system as this is not the first time we have seen price jumps and crashes. I remember hearing about shipping congestion/issues in SEA a couple years ago as well as periodic stories about congestion/issues at Longbeach.
With global trade ever on the rise, we should expect to see it remain profitable, unless there are too many companies coming in and trying to undercut each other.
Wow this seems like an easily solvable problem and one reason why we have the UN. I guess they'd rather be bickering in committees than helping individuals trapped on these boats.
Readit News
I enjoyed the travel and had a good voyage, with many small things to say about it at another time. As I learn about "business" and the world, I understand more about labor abuses, even with "respectable" companies. And, your outrage does nothing, because people who mistreat others professionally are quite used to the complaining, including yours. I am not at all surprised at this article.
https://www.mitags.org/course/able-seaman-course/
Deleted Comment
I enjoyed your post until this sentence. The article describes a situation gradually deteriorating into a crisis. The barrier between people complaining and things actually happening are indeed high but I still believe taking note of a crisis is a first step to acting.
Yes, in the same way overcoming denial is the first step in personal recovery. The trouble is, like a depressed alcoholic who doesn't care that drink's ruining their life, it's not that those running the company are in denial about the way they're abusing their employees. It's that they know it and don't care.
What's the path from here to them caring, though? One thing that might help is if their clients stopped doing business with them, but do their clients care?
Why? The problem with complaining (such as in an echo chamber like HN often is too) is that it is a way to vent frustration, taking the pressure of an issue. So in a way complaining actually helps the ones you are complaining about.
Dead Comment
Then the staff or A-B are usually filipino, Vietmanese or Indonesian. Its more salary then back where they're from - and it has interesting cultural changes in their socities.
In the philippines, these are called "OFW" families. daddy is never home, but because he works "abroad" his family can have newer stuff, be in a better neighborhood, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Filipino_Worker
Merchant marine, sure, but naval? Wouldn’t both officers and crew be the nationality of the force in the vast majority of cases?
whether it's farming, cruises, factories, transportation, etc.
not supporting it, but that's the current setup.
Deleted Comment
It's a trendy thing to say these days, but history shows that outrage and public opinion do quite a lot, and that is why people work very hard to manage it (including, these days, to try to appear unbothered). There are plenty of labor laws that the public has passed, and you can see, for example, SV companies responses to publicized labor abuses in their supply chains.
Note that after X weeks on this schedule, the officers commonly get X weeks off at home as well. (Source: my brother is one.) The ABs though are a different story…
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21868783-the-cargo-ship-...
The most interesting observation I had was that although there was an "officer's rec room" and a "crew's rec room", it ended up being a "French rec room" and a "Filipino rec room". The long tours don't particularly bother me, I think that's somewhat expected with maritime work.
What I heard were complaints on
* privatization by the West and sometimes closure of enterprises. People of age 40 and older remember well the tough years after unification when their parents had no job and had to take a lower-level one.
* they claim that management of states and enterprises was taken over by the Wessies
* a lot of complaints about amerikanization of the culture and aligning with the US in every international policy question under Merkel. I regret I did not ask further about the culture, but just an example: by default radio stations in Germany put American music, more than stations in other Western European countries that I heard. It's very hard to stumble upon songs in German, just as any other language but English. (If you listen to French stations, foreign non-English music is much more probable to hear.)
* East Germans are more atomized and secular. That's similar to other East European contries.
* Women were forced to emansipate in the East, because they needed to work, whereas in the West they could afford being housewifes. And a surprising consequence, in the West a man can't be friends with a married woman -- Ossies living in the West complained of that too.
That's what I've heard from them and some my own superficial impressions from radio. I can't confirm that, but sure it's more or less founded info.
Just want to point out that yes, companies dismiss complaints, but they don't dismiss it when workers stop working together. Then they get panicked.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
My cousin is a Merchant Marine Engineer. Some big ships can't leave port without one, yet they are in short supply. So he's paid a lot per voyage. Two or three multi-week voyages and he'd done working for the year.
Early on in his career, an officer would request his passport. To make things go faster in port, all the passports could be presented at once for quicker clearing of customs etc.
Of course he learned immediately, this meant he could not leave the ship in foreign port. And the officer sandbagged when he requested his passport back. The result was, he was essentially held captive for several months aboard ship, several times longer than he was contracted for. And the ship could count on having an Engineer for every leg of the journey.
Now he knows better, keeps his passport on his person at all times.
My brother is a Merchant Mariner. I think he is officer first class now but he worked his way up from AB.
He just left out, he is probably going to be on the ship 8 months, maybe more depending. It used to be 3 months on 3 off.
The contract he had gotten back from was supposed to be that but because of the world right now ended up being 6 months. I think he was only back for 3 before they called him back.
He was the health and safety officer on his last outing, said that people were going crazy. Kept imagining they were getting Covid when they had been to sea after a month, said that there was a suicide on another vessel by someone who thought he was sick.(either was worried everyone was going to hate him for spreading the disease or afraid he would spread it to others.)
Hope your cousin is staying safe out there. Don't know your nationality but the hopefully he can warn others quietly about that, the US is supposed to have a guild/union but I hear they aren't always the best.
I assume he is a westener, so just tell customs your held against your will and the guy with passports goes to jail.
This would require a fully connected graph between all Departments of State around the world (i.e., the holders of their respective countries' passport DBs), and that is definitely not the case. It will also never be the case, since there are various geopolitical advantages to having a secret passport database (like being able to mint identities for spies, or deny the existence of a person).
The bar code you're referring to is just a machine-readable version of the information printed on the paper. It doesn't carry any proof of authenticity.
The Outlaw Ocean https://www.amazon.com/Outlaw-Ocean-Journeys-Untamed-Frontie...
This is based on a series of articles the author wrote for the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/24/world/the-out...
I had been under the impression that international waters were much more regulated. Man oh man, was I wrong.
The Outlaw Sea: https://www.amazon.com/Outlaw-Sea-World-Freedom-Chaos/dp/086...
It's a pretty good look into the world of international sea travel as well. It even gets into the ship-breaking industry as well.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet
2. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/great-bitter-lake-ass...
Most recent discussion of the Great Bitter Lake Association (googling seems to indicate it'd been posted on HN before - but the Ever Given's grounding made it relevant again)
While it wasn't exactly a dystopian floating city (quite the opposite, it was dedicated people who wanted to be there) it's still really interesting from lots of points of view I think.
Carve her legend on the bow, Caroline 452
"Friedman and Gramlich noted that according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country's Exclusive Economic Zone extends 200 nautical miles (370 km) from shore. Beyond that boundary lie the high seas, which are not subject to the laws of any sovereign state other than the flag under which a ship sails. They proposed that a seastead could take advantage of the absence of laws and regulations outside the sovereignty of nations to experiment with new governance systems, and allow the citizens of existing governments to exit more easily"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seasteading_Institute
"The project picked up mainstream exposure after PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel donated $500,000 in initial seed capital[4] (followed by subsequent contributions). He also spoke out on behalf of its viability in his essay "The Education of a Libertarian""
Patri Friedman is described as a former Google employee, a transhumanist and rationalist, and a very good poker player.
"Since attending the Burning Man festival in 2000, Friedman imagined creating a water festival called Ephemerisle as a Seasteading experiment and Temporary Autonomous Zone. Through The Seasteading Institute, Friedman was able to start the Ephemerisle festival in 2009, aided by TSI's James Hogan as event organizer and Chicken John Rinaldi as chief builder."
It doesn't really interest me, but I guess it does make a lot more sense than Mars colonies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_on_Waves
"Women on Waves (WoW) is a Dutch pro-choice nongovernmental organization (NGO) created in 1999 by Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts, in order to bring reproductive health services, particularly non-surgical abortion services and education, to women in countries with restrictive abortion laws.[1] Other services offered by WoW include contraception, individual reproductive counseling, workshops, and education about unwanted pregnancy."
Don't watch the dance episode.
I think that one of the only methods that has a chance is to go to the UN and work out a treaty on human rights for maritime workers with the stipulation that once a supermajority of nations ratify/adopt it, ships flying the flag of a nation that hasn't ratified it are not allowed in the ports of the nations that have.
Fair trade is better than no trade (other things being equal) if you want to support foreign workers.
Just global trade systems are a hard problem, as I see it, and really can't be organised from the consumer end (ie by simply choosing where/if to buy goods).
And all those poor sailors suddenly retire and live happily ever after, NOT. Buying local is not a solution to sailors and not a solution to buyers either as so many things are simply not being made locally.
What is needed is a control. If company does things like this then countries can start issuing huge fines should any ship of said company visit the their ports. That'll teach them proper.
The raw material was extracted and the equipment itself was produced by yet another layer of equipment. And so on, until you get to the iron ore and copper and so on. No way will all of that be local.
Solution: make more of these companies fail?
Think hard before buying something "new". You may not need it, or you may be able to find alternatives, such as hand-me-downs, secondhand, etc.
And even if you managed to reduce all private consumption to zero, commercial consumption probably makes up an order of magnitudes more than private does. It doesn't matter what YOU do, you can't change the scales that these ships operate.
The only thing that will fix this is government intervention and fines that make it less cost effective to abandon the ship than to deal with the consequences.
Unscrupulous actors get away with this because there are few rules against it, and enforcement is non-existent. If a shipping company is sanctioned from entry into American ports based on misbehavior on the other side of the world, they'd have an incentive to clean up their act... Or at least, to subcontract everything to shell corporations.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-31/for-st...
Dead Comment
It looks like there a a large amount of volatility in the shipping system as this is not the first time we have seen price jumps and crashes. I remember hearing about shipping congestion/issues in SEA a couple years ago as well as periodic stories about congestion/issues at Longbeach.
With global trade ever on the rise, we should expect to see it remain profitable, unless there are too many companies coming in and trying to undercut each other.
Our orders come from Asia to Eastern Sea board.