Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

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My wife and I have gone on 20+ cruises since selling our own small cruising sailboat 25 years ago. We have decided “never again.”

The thing that has put us off the last few cruises is realizing how workers on the ships are treated. Twenty years ago, it seemed to us that we would see off duty room stewards and other crew going ashore with their friends, and getting some down time. I know this is subjective, but over time, it seems like giving workers much needed down time stopped happening.

Then fast forward to the present time, my wife and I just don’t want to take a chance getting on a ship because the current new corona virus is so much worse than the Nora virus, which used to be what you worried about on ships.

The very real bummer though is this: there are many hundreds of small ports around the world where people rely on extra income from ships disgorging passengers who spend money. A young engineer in Yalta Ukraine told me that he augmented his income as a scientist from tourist related activities, and it was important income for him.

Yes, the cruise industry should go away, but there will be collateral damage.

It's not subjective. Having worked on a cruise ship 25 years ago: It was always somewhat exploitative, but it's gotten much worse over the years. Yes, you could use your one day off a week to go ashore. More importantly, you weren't yet asked to do two jobs at the same time.

By now, a lot of cruise workers work 12-16 hours a day. Staffing/passenger has decreased. That one day "to go ashore" often goes to just sleeping for once, doing laundry, and various mandatory all-hands drills. So, yes, down time is vanishing. And the pay hasn't improved significantly.

But it's still a field that allows especially people from low-income countries to make more money than in their home country, so that too will fall under collateral damage.

>allows especially people from low-income countries to make more money than in their home country

It seems strange to want to eliminate someone else's best employment opportunity simply because it isn't up to your standards.

If you were to take your business to another cruise line that provides workers better working conditions, I could see that, but is not going on cruises entirely really the best way to improve things?

> It seems strange to want to eliminate someone else's best employment opportunity simply because it isn't up to your standards.

"simply because it isn't up to your standards" is the reason for all labor laws - OSHA, child labor, etc.

We shouldn't treat those born in poverty differently than those born into wealth - and it seems like a tiny step to require cruise ships to treat their workers well.

>We shouldn't treat those born in poverty differently than those born into wealth - and it seems like a tiny step to require cruise ships to treat their workers well.

And neither do they. Their offer of employment is valid for rich people too.

If groby_b were arguing for bans on cruise ships, I could see your objection. But they are perfectly free to spend their own money in different ways.

Perhaps they would use the money saved on cruises instead to buy more cheap goods from China and Bangladesh? Those factory workers benefit from demand for their wares, too.

These jobs don’t have to be eliminated. They can be improved.

This mass commercial cruising needs to go the way of the dinosaurs.

It's a military style mandatory entertainment camp with a lot of retail, and very little space.

They are incredibly deceptive and exist solely to extract money from you (I'm talking about Carnival here)

>The thing that has put us off the last few cruises is realizing how workers on the ships are treated.

I read somewhere that the main reason these cruise ships, including those owned by well known US companies like Disney, won't register their ships under the American flag is so that they can avoid US labor laws, I don't know if this is true but it sadly wouldn't surprise me.

It's true. You could still use cheap foreign labor and provide decent working conditions under flag of convenience, but it's the fierce competition that really forbids it. These massive cruise ships have become part of mass tourism. People look at the price first. If the price is 5-10% above competition without better service, it does not work as a business.

It's the non-caring consumers that enable consistent bad treatment of workers in the large scale. People like OP who stop are the only force besides enforcing tighter labor laws in the blue waters that can fix this.

Then there are billionaires in their yachts treating cheap labour as animals just because. That's just cruelty for fun.

The problem is, people who stop are not an effective force for fixing this, as they effect good actors equally as much as bad ones. To fix this with consumer pressure, you need consumers who still buy cruises, but discriminate based on how well the workers are treated (and are willing to pay the premium for good treatment).

It seems similar to the coffee market.

The industry should create a mark that represents and enforces a minimum of worker treatment, but doesn't appear to be as imaginative as Starbucks.

And then cruise ships are by faaaaar not the worst offenders in abusing flag's of convienence. They are under the most scrutiny so, having passengers on the ship 24/7.

Is this problem not easily solvable by forbidding cruise ships under flags of convenience from docking? Would there be any real downsides to doing so?

Where would you draw the line?

Labour laws, environmental and safety regulations, and numerous other requirements. "Flags of convenience" are a race-to-the-bottom Gresham's Law dynamic, also referred to as "the law of competing standards":

https://fs.blog/2009/12/mental-model-greshams-law/

That blog post is misquoting a version of Gresham's law that's not actually true.

For 'bad money' to drive out 'good money', you need some force that compels sellers to accepts 'bad money' the same way they accept 'good money'. Because otherwise sellers will natural only accept the bad money with a discount or even refuse outright.

You can see that in action in many black markets around the world, where people use American dollars because their local currency is 'bad'.

Wikipedia has a lot of detail and background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

> Those examples show that in the absence of effective legal tender laws, Gresham's Law works in reverse. If given the choice of what money to accept, people will transact with money they believe to be of highest long-term value. However, if not given the choice and required to accept all money, good and bad, they will tend to keep the money of greater perceived value in their possession and to pass on the bad money to someone else.

Have a look at https://web.archive.org/web/20130317073119/http://eh.net/enc... as well.

The full and proper qualification, as concerns money, is given in the first 'graph of the essay:

"Whenever coins containing precious metals have been used along with base metal coins of the same denomination, both legally accepted as tender, the bad coins have driven the good coins out of circulation."

(Emphasis added.)

The key is that within a given monetary system, "bad" and "good" coin have the same social or statutory (whichever effectively governs) exchange value.

This is not the case in a black-market exchange where U.S. dollars displace local currency, just as it was not the case in the early post-revolutionary United States where commodity currencies (often pelts or grain), or foreign denominations (Spanish "pieces. of eight" reals or English pounds) displaced the much-derided "continental dollar".

The black-market currency does not face the same nominal exchange rate as the inferior currency, but instead has an independent (and almost always far more stable) exchange value. So long as the black-market currency is generally exchangeable for goods and services generally required, and the official currency can be readily obtained for transactions in which. it is mandated -- say, payment of national taxes, you'll see a preference for the black-market currency.

This balance point may be further shifted by mandates that, say, retail, payroll, and banking transactions be in the official currency. In most regions with a substantial black-market role, institutional trust and regulatory and statutory compliance are low enough, and often the true underlying dysfunction, that their role, and hence effective monetary compliance capacity, are effectvely nil.

For what it's worth, I've been exploring Gresham's Law and related dynamics for some time:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=gresham%27s+la...

Not only cruising ships, but many (most likely, most) commercial vessels are registered under a so called convenience flag. Usually Panama or Liberia.

true that.

not just cruises. nor just leisure and touristic activities either. tons of jobs have similar working conditions. and tbh, i am not sure avoiding or banning these activities is the solution.

i mean, we are not throwing our smartphones away yet, are we?

> tons of jobs have similar working conditions

I get the impression commercial air travel isn't that bad, but it's not great. Cruse ships get away with it by using workers from developing countries. Airlines pitch it as "travel the world" and a lifestyle, so there are a lot of people who want the job. It's like software in the video game industry.

Shipowners try to avoid all sorts of stuff... labor law, environmental laws, taxes, etc. The only US flagged ships are ships that transit between two US ports.

There's beneficial owner who may or may not be easily known. They register the ship in Panama or Liberia. The officers are usually from a western country (depending on the owner or the purpose), crew from a place like Philippines or Indonesia. Some of the customer facing staff may be from a western country as well.

> The only US flagged ships are ships that transit between two US ports.

And that's only because of some really archaic, protectionist laws that are driving up logistics costs for American businesses and keep freight off the waters and on the roads.

True, yet they still want a bailout from the US government...

Hasan Minhaj did a segment on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nCT8h8gO1g

US labor laws don't apply in the international waters, if the first place.

I think it's to avoid US laws generally, but labor law is surely a big part of that.

Cozumel’s entire economy is based on cruise ships docking.

I agree with what you are saying, but want to clarify the example a bit. Yalta is in fact in Crimea, I believe most people there would ask you to not call their land part of Ukraine (note: this doesn't mean I believe that annexation was a good idea). They probably don't have cruise ships there, most tourists are from Ukraine and Russia. If Russians won't be able to go to Turkey this summer (almost sure) but will be allowed to go to Crimea (we'll see how that goes…), this major part of Crimean economy might be actually in better shape than before.

To me modern cruises are one of the most egregious cases of late-stage capitalism:

The original idea is sound: visit multiple destinations on a mobile hotel!

The drive for value is acceptable: make the mobile hotel as fun as the destination with decent restaurants and entertainment

But the inevitable result is catastrophic: increasingly gigantic ships that cram customers and attractions in, cost-cutting measures that harm the environment, exploitation of port towns

Why do you think cruise ships are catastrophic?

Before the virus hit, they seemed quite popular with paying customers and people were signing up to work for them voluntarily.

You might not like it, but that doesn't make the business catastrophic. (I'm not really in the market for a cruise either.)

(The main way you could help cruise ship employees would be to give them better outside options. Eg by opening up migration to rich countries more. Or by otherwise improving the economy of the places they hail from.)

The John Oliver about the cruise ship industry shows a bit on how sick the industry is.

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