Comment by AHASIC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AHASIC | Hacker News Reader

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lolmao, medical treatement for crew onboard is a whole book in itself...

For the corona crisis, everything was done as basic and cost-saving as possible.

Without the corona situation, god forbid you get fucking sick on the ship. They feed you up with some basic 2 pills they give to whoever is sick of anything. As far as I could notice, those were some stimulants with the end goal to have you back on duty as soon as possible.

Even if you get sick, like legitimately sick and get treated, you end up with a mafia-style talk with your manager about "your recent performance". If you keep yourself off the sick train for the next months, you will get a pat on the back and a good review, where the 'recent performances' one from previously seemingly never happened. Truly disgusting practices.

This has to do with the fact that “high seas” are not legally under any jurisdiction, right?

Cruise ship business was being slowly dragged¹ into the public eye as of last year… and then COVID hit. I imagine things must have gotten only worse in the general chaos of the pandemic.

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nCT8h8gO1g

Not really a high-seas problem, onboard a ship the regulations of the flag country apply. However, flag countries are picked to be very lax in both laws and their enforcement.

E.g. you will not find any carribean cruise ship from the big lines that is under a US flag.

Exactly, high seas and maritime law means you’re under the jurisdiction of the flag country (if you have one), and US law is very lax in what cruise lines have to report when it happens outside US jurisdiction.

According to WaPo’s report last year, the most commonly alleged crime is sexual assault (with a third of the victims being minors), and it is not required to be reported. Considering passengers have to put up with that, I struggle to imagine what many crew members have to deal with.

The ships get the flags of small island-countries, where there are almost no laws protecting the crew and only loosely regulated laws about things like gambling, taxes and so on, things these companies misuse to garner profits.

I believe there are 0 US flagged ships that are part of the cruise industry that in the U.S.

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