Crews are abandoned on ships in record numbers without pay, food or a way home
wsj.com
wsj.com
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.
So whereas ships are more efficient per ton than airplanes, but the end result is that jet air travel is about 5-10 times as efficient per passenger-mile because it's just a chair instead of an apartment. Plus the capital utilization (renting an aluminum chair for a few hours vs a small steel apartment for a few days) aspect.
For room and board? That's pretty economical.
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.
whether it's farming, cruises, factories, transportation, etc.
not supporting it, but that's the current setup.
For factories, you sometimes have the problem of the factory shutting down after the locals become dependent on it.
For migrant working, it's hard on the children of the family and it causes tension between the families not participating.
Philosophically, one could argue it's exploitation and is very close to slavery except the small amount of pay. Until this type of work is extinct I don't think one can morally campaign for UBI can you?
Currently this type of work is apparently necessary so we've accepted that the system cannot either pay the more wealthy citizen's wage nor up the wage of the foreign workers.
Is there a demand to up the wage of these non-represented workers that make far below minimum wage?
Is there a demand to up the wage of minimal wage for citizens and are the foreign workers mentioned?
Is there a demand for UBI for citizens to not work at all while foreign workers pick up the slack?
What you describe is not exploitation, people are working of their own will and that's the best deal they can have.
When you'll eliminate those jobs with income redistribution and minimum wage those people (especially if they're coming in from a different, poorer country) will just be out of a job.
It may be the best option for these people, but you are exploiting their poverty for your profit, otherwise you'd pay the minimum wage.
It's the people who cry minimum wage hikes while exploiting this business that make my blood boil.
I agree about UBI, it's immoral, period.
But yes people supporting near slave labor while also wanting UBI does make my blood boil, lazy fucks.
As does child-trafficking, bank bailouts, defense contract laundering, nepotism, etc.
Gotta have ice cold veins to counteract all that blood boiling bullshit in the world, dontcha.
This is a 5 minute budget analysis and not even a real thought process, but people get so emotional about these things that all rational thought goes by the wayside of any benefits that might occur. People might not have so much worry about job insecurity of being one bill away from homelessness. Higher education would be more attainable for so many people. A single income family might be able to take care of a child while one of the parents focused on educating and helping the child become a decent member of society.
If you don't want to help fix the present and the future then you shouldn't complain about it. If you're fine with the direction everything is going, then that's great.
In that, say the US pays UBI, which people use to purchase basic goods, which come from non-US manufacturers.
(and I realize this next flies in the face of 200 years of economic theory)
... But if UBI is a bridge to a post-scarcity society, then shouldn't the emphasis be on post-scarcity? Not just redirecting funds? Which is to say, funding highly automated manufacturing of basic, non-customized, functional good to zero?
The present system requires you to have active hands in the creation of these commodities or you don't get a share. In the face of increasing efficiencies, offshoring, etc. people's offer of labor may not find a buyer, making them unemployable. That's where UBI comes in, to assure that post-scarcity is enjoyed by all, not just those that have marketable labor.
Where this gets complicated is the moralizing. But it's not the moral thing to let your neighbor starve when you've got surplus food, even if there's some game theory that you will generate free riders, or some of these people aren't "deserving", or working folks divert a little bit more of the fruits of their labor than they already do, or other societies that are a race to the bottom of human welfare will out-compete us.
I have no issue with income distribution of a social value store since allowing it to be monopolized to prop up the value of a minority rich, to let millions starve, or die of preventable disease is immoral and violent.
I don’t believe Elon Musk is worth billions. I just can’t take his real stuff.
Letting our social value store be co-opted by a handful of memes isn’t exactly free agency, speech, or market of ideas. When “get job, buy stuff” is the one true sentence, why believe ideas like freedom matter?
It would be nice if people spent just a tiny amount of time studying economics before pronouncing on it.
A US dollar, for example, is backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States Government", and this has an objectively measurable value (because there are pairs of almost identical securities where one has "full faith and credit" and the other doesn't).
Unless your argument is "all securities and currencies are imaginary," of course, which has no practical value.
Please note that I'm a far-left socialist and I consider capitalism destructive to the planet. But that doesn't mean I don't believe in economics.
What we should realize through the study of economics is just how screwed things are. Anyone with any math sense should see inflation deflates buying power for the public, and has nothing to do with real trade but belief that a billionaire is leveraging real property so well on his own… oh wait all of humanity serves him by not changing the rules to serve themselves. What a convenient self fulfilling prophecy.
The math makes it obvious which people are winning and science makes it obvious no one is more than one of seven billion. Somehow it’s miraculously a specific few winning big.
Stop listening to it all. People trade. That’s it. There’s no need to speculate and manage the behavior to send billionaires in space on empty promises of humans …magically… becoming the first space faring civ. Sure seems to give Bezos a helluva life. I’m crazy though; humanity has never succumbed to shared fallacy at scale before.
Who knows, maybe healthcare and education for all actually empower the kid who goes on to engineer the next big leap, but contemporary political memes filter those break throughs out by miserly tracking currency debts.
Money is an abstract distributed ledger conceived of from our old way of imprinting quantity on clay tablets, to track trade.
We’re lead around by gossip, fads, trends… memes… where to look for the best paying jobs, sales… by restricting acceptable discourse around not the literal solution to problems, but the expectations we solve them for corporations to own, and leverage for profit with “fair apportionment” dictated by Byzantine economic math not even the experts can penetrate (there was just a story on HN about how no one knows who owns what in any clear way; it’s all ad hoc to fit a narrative; Google Varoufakis)
We’re told that’s just how it goes and it’s all correct and politically policed for correctness. Yet last year we saw in the news they just hand out hundreds of millions to those in the political network and make everyone else work for them in return.
Relative network effects are the reality of physics and it makes a good concept for understanding society. Adam Smith called for equality of condition to prevent gross inequality and extreme division of labor making for humans dumber than any animal (paraphrasing).
Bring on the universal healthcare, and economics that protect the biological well-being of all people first and force austerity on a minority in the form of an aristocracy
Merchant marine, sure, but naval? Wouldn’t both officers and crew be the nationality of the force in the vast majority of cases?
Some West germans still look down on Ossies, even though Merkel was one herself. It's a lot like how northern states look down on southern states in the U.S.
The cure for this is immigration, but the people that remain in the rural areas are very right wing and very xenophobic.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fvoxeu.org...
"Average Wage in Germany by County
Notes: Average daily wages obtained from a 50% random sample of establishments via the Establishment History Panel (BHP) of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). Real wages are expressed in 2007 euros valued in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, using county-specific prices. East–West border is drawn for clarification; there is no border today."
TL;DR: at the 50th percentile, net worth of west germans was ~40k in 2012 vs ~14k for east germans (in euros).
IIRC the discrepancy between population share and elite share for Ossis is even worse than for American blacks.
I remember when the reunification started I firmly believed that the East would quickly get up to speed once the Western system was applied there. It should be easy and the Easterners would be happy. Turns out that progress was slow despite enormous investments and the Easterners didn't really appreciate that the West completely ignored things that Easterners actually liked (their "achievements" = "Errungenschaften" was a big word).
When you consider how difficult the process was/is despite East and West Germany being very close culturally it becomes clear that things like "fixing" and "democratizing" countries like Afghanistan and Iraq are pretty hopeless endeavors. I don't think as Westerner you can even remotely understand the culture and the fact that maybe the people there don't want Western culture.
Same at first, but then having spent time in the South years ago I also realized the prejudice from the North on the South for economic reasons.
The South is typically seen as the most affluent of all of Germany and depending on the Stat the most influenced by politics: as in the case with Baden-Wuttenburg and the Green Party. Hell, people from the Schwabish part (Stutgart) are used looked down on by the rest of Baden-Wuttenburg for being typically very stingy and aloof (even by German standards) and seen as not worth building ties with. I had a bad experience with them, after being warmly welcomed in Germany, but I took that more a random situation rather than anything worth looking deeper into.
It's frankly a very odd situation and makes you wonder why they're even united at all, I spent time in the North near Cologne this summer and to be honest the amount of Turkish people was a very welcomed sight especially how well integrated they were in Society.
I wish I could have remained with that feeling because stuff like this makes me realize how deeply scarred the German psyche is in regards to this topic.
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.
Nah, that's no longer true as of today. It used to be like that in the 60+ generation, but among younger people, it really depends on the partners involved.
In the sense that someone from a state over would be viewed very differently than someone from up north.
Caveat: This is almost imperceptible in major urban centers, and far more of a thing in rural areas.
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.
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?
The only solutions are political, with some combination of giving those people being subject to abuse better options so that the abusers are not able to abuse, and by making said abuses illegal.
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.
Not encouraging, really.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21868783-the-cargo-ship-...
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.
Lots is happening.
Also, outrage doesn't need laws to be effective: Plenty of corporations do things that aren't legally required, in order to please the public. The NFL didn't have to address racial injustice, but it did. Bad things happen too - lynchings, for example.
> Todays outrage is managed ressource going nowhere.
I'm saying that it definitely went somewhere, it created major changes, including laws.
'Historically, outrage has accomplished things by resulting in laws. Today's outrage is ineffectual because it isn't resulting in laws.'
I would argue, that this is actually the goal of todays outrage culture- not to change things for the better within the legal framework of a democracy, but to keep the emotional core of a "movement" going.
I agree about the priority: It's a reactionary, ideological culture/movement; they need to be against something; members need to demonstrate their ideological adherence by being more and more extreme. Passing outrageous laws can be part of that. Passing constructive laws by bringing people to the table, listening to their needs, and creating consensus would indeed undermine the movement, IMHO.
What positive changes have there been about gun control since the Brady Bill in 1994?
What positive changes have there been about voter suppression ever?
Voting rights certainly have advanced many times, including suffrage, voting rights for African-Americans in the 1960s, and smaller advances like motor-voter and mail-in ballots since then. The last few years have been awful, though.
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…
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.
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.
Really though, most embassies will issue travel documentation if your passport is lost without too much difficulty ( it is effectively lost if you cannot get access to it).
If that sailor really wanted to leave, he can get another one from his embassy. This is more power dynamic between employee/ employer , I have seen similar stunts pulled by agents who get foreign workers in middle east.
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.
Because how would your next employer react to this?
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.
I'd be curious to learn more about how they verify those signatures as well; I can imagine it being nontrivial/de facto limited to a collection of trusted partner nations.
The standards are all public and anyone can write an app to verify e-Passports. There are Android apps on the Play Store that can do it, although they don't necessarily have complete collections of national certs.
[1]: https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p9_cons_en....
Edit: oops yes you're right I meant ICAO, IATA is a different airline related organization.
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...
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.
I had been under the impression that international waters were much more regulated. Man oh man, was I wrong.
That doesn't mean the slots will be more than 80% payout, but there will be a payout to someone.
Large national parks, western states, or open ocean: there are still a few places you can be hours from the nearest person, without cell service.
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.
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.
The second advantage is that you don't have to pay, so it is more likely that items will find a good home instead of being discarded.
The third advantage is non-participation in the money system, if you're into that sort of thing, and also the elimination of overhead for store and inventory upkeep.
One downside, of course, is that most people aren't willing to keep their "stock" around for too long, so there's limited inventory at any given time that you can browse.
> The most direct way to participate in this amazing experiment with us is to join the BuyNothing App.
Oh, also, there're a lot of plants and things that get exchanged, another difference from second hand shops.
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.
This isn't really an excuse in e.g. USA, which produces surpluses in both of these commodities.
I disagree with your statement that "it doesn't matter what you do". It is all that matters, because what everyone else does is beyond my control, and only what I do is under my control.
Individual action and its spread through word-of-mouth is pretty much the only way anything changes in this world.
It's a set of misaligned incentives that create a hole where ships like these fit. No amount of your individual do-gooding will fix that incentive misalignment.
However, it does help you not be comlicit to their treatment.
Companies that use these services could exert pressure for better conditions, just like some have done with other companies in their supply chain.
I have somewhat limited agency in this world, limited to the little bit of money I spend, the movement of my arms and legs, the words I speak, the things I look at, and my thoughts and intentions.
Willingly trying to avoid global shipping would actually make you more complicit.
They don't have direct relationship to that sector anymore, after all.
I hope there is a middle way.
If the economy is in a state of overproduction and extreme waste while the effects are the burn-up of our own habitat, shouldn't it tune down a bit anyway?
Note that few of them will do the design/engineering work for you. But if you have a "blueprint" they will build it. Be prepared to pay - they are all making good wages for your city not third world step above slave wages.
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.
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).
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?
1. Complain on the internet. This is easy but utterly ineffectual.
2. Alter your buying behavior. Unless you are the purchasing director for a multinational conglomerate, also utterly ineffectual.
3. Do something stupid like trying to blow up a containership. Also ineffectual, will land you in jail and will almost certainly kill some innocent people.
4. Contact your local representatives and get them to do soemthing about it. This will be easier if you are part of a larger group. Then your group and your representative(s) can contact someone higher up and so on.
Yes this particular problem and many others relating to ship operations thrives because there is little direct control and everyone is from 20 different jurisdictions, but perhaps some of those jurisdictions can team up and tax those that don't follow their rules or whatever. I am not an expert in this but some people are and the most I can do is let my representatives know that I care about this stuff. Maybe I actually should go and do that.
(although I have noticed something unfortunate: I have a LOT of 5-star documentaries to watch, but rarely do, while I watch even 2-star scifi stuff almost immediately)
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.
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...
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.
I'm sure there's a flaw in my logic...
Ideally it would be as simple as you say, but when you're talking about potentially billions of dollars in machinery and cargo, owned by probably hundreds of different interests, the people on these ships get caught in the middle of the mess and nobody with a financial interest in the situation wants to help the poor saps take their money from them.
>Without Pay, Food or a Way Home
the civilized version would be to go the local authorities and initiate abandoned property/lien proceedings against the ship and the cargo for some port fees/fines for some violations by the ship (which is easy to commit if you're in control of the ship) or do a bit of freight Uber - after all you have a ship :).
It'd be better if they did, really, as then it would cause authorities in the port countries to pierce the veil and shake down the owners.
If you have crew from the middle east it is possible they will be tried in a kangaroo court for some weird theft charges related to abandoning the ship.
> I don't understand why this content is allowed.
It's certainly an appropriate post for a US-centric forum.
Because a workaround is available.
> And I'm not going to buy a subscription for the three articles I read every month.
Then click the link in the comment you replied to and read it.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles...
Edit: wording
There's a picture of a "garden" bucket in the article, with an obviously just bought fresh onion on top of the dirt. I guess to communicate its "garden"-ness.
I cant help but wonder, if its OK to stage small details like that to be more favorable to the narrative, ... where is the line drawn?
Its not a sprout; its fresh.