JMC/29/2001/3

Appendix: Extracts from the opinion on “Merchant seafarers' working
and employment conditions”

At its 26th Session in 1991, the Joint Maritime Commission dealt with an item entitled “Changes in the shipboard environment and in the characteristics of seafarers' employment”. At that session, the Commission recognized that the shipping industry had experienced considerable and profound structural changes as regards ship registration and management and its deliberations paved the way for the adoption by the ILO of standards on hours of work and manning of ships, labour inspection and recruitment and placement. The Commission also requested the Office to undertake studies on the effects of “second” or international registers on seafarers' working and living conditions and of external ship management on seafarers' employment conditions. The results of these studies were to be submitted to the Commission with a view to determining what action, if any, should be taken by the ILO.

Therefore, in preparation of this session of the Commission and taking account of the limited resources available, the Office consulted the social partners on the follow-up to be given to the Commission's request. It was agreed that in view of the positions taken by the Shipowners' and Seafarers' groups in 1991, and of developments since the previous session of the Commission, it was preferable to have a broader agenda item which could provide a basis for discussing the future action of the ILO with regards to the conditions of work and life of seafarers. Accordingly, the Governing Body of the ILO decided at its 273rd Session to include in the agenda of the present session of the Commission an agenda item entitled “The impact on seafarers' living and working conditions of changes in the structure of the shipping industry”.

Indeed, this agenda item falls within the ILO's primary goal of ensuring “decent work”, as expressed in the Report of the Director-General to the 87th Session of the International Labour Conference in 1999: “The need today is to devise social and economic systems which ensure basic security and employment while remaining capable of adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances in a highly competitive global market.”

The Office thus requested the Seafarers' International Research Centre (SIRC) (Cardiff University), to gather information on the changes undergone by the shipping industry, especially as regards the institutions which are responsible for their regulation and verification of implementation – i.e. registry – and those who implement conditions of work and life on board – i.e. management. They were also to look into the impact of these changes on the conditions of work and life of seafarers.

This report has been prepared by the Office on the basis of this research and should provide the Commission with a basis for its discussions.

Chapter 1 examines some of the main changes which have occurred in world shipping and influenced the labour market and conditions of work and life of seafarers, especially in its organization as a sector. These include: the shift of ship management to specialist companies, the emergence of alternative types of registers, environmental issues, technological developments and port state control. The chapter concludes with some comments on the thrust of the industry to reduce costs in the face of economic considerations and the consequential impact on crew conditions.

Chapter 2 examines some aspects of the labour market for seafarers as well as a number of changes which have had an impact on conditions of work. It looks, inter alia, at the reduction in influence of national regulatory regimes and the impact of international recruitment on the employment of seafarers. The chapter also examines the employment of women in the industry, the role of unions and collective bargaining, and training and certification.

Chapter 3 deals with the current conditions of work and life in the shipping industry with particular emphasis on shipboard conditions. This chapter examines such issues as wages, hours of work, food, accommodation and welfare as well as certain issues such as gender and abandonment of seafarers.

The Office would like to express its appreciation to all those who contributed to this report, above all to the staff of the SIRC for their dedication to research on the conditions of work and life of seafarers.

The considerable changes in the living and working conditions of the world's seafarers during the past 30 years are, of course, linked to the unfolding political economy of world shipping. Changing patterns in the directions and volumes of world trade are conventionally held to be the underlying determinants of the modern transformation of world shipping. However, major changes in finance and management have also had a profound influence on the industry.

The last 30 years have been marked by rather erratic growth in seaborne world trade. In the 20 years from 1972 to 1992, the total tonnage carried by the world's ships steadily increased by some 52 per cent (an annual average of 2.6 per cent) – from 2,763 million tonnes to 4,211 million tonnes. The 1980-98 period, however, witnessed irregular trends in trade. Indeed, although tonnage carried showed an increase from 3,675 to 5,064 million tonnes (i.e. 2.8 per cent per annum) between 1988 and 1998, seaborne trade actually fell by 400 million tonnes in 1981 and did not climb back to 1980 levels until 1988. This reflected the fact that the 1980s – described by the investment bank, Warburg Dillon Read, as a period of “valiant but mutually destructive competition” – was the worst decade for the shipping industry since the 1920s and 1930s.

Developments in the shipbuilding industry are not explored in this paper but deserve a brief mention at this point, not least because part of the immediate cause of the severe recession of the 1980s lay in the shipbuilding industry. Based on the expectations of growth in world trade, many new and cheap ships, frequently built with state subsidies, were launched or ordered in the late 1970s and onward into the mid-1980s. Undoubtedly they helped to make a bad trading period worse. Despite a high rate of scrapping in the early to mid-1980s, it was not until the 1990s that the demolition-newbuild ratio (see table 1.1) began to show some consistency leading to a steady reduction in the volume of surplus tonnage (see figure 1.1). The data in table 1.2 shows reassuringly modest annual growth rates in the most volatile sectors (tankers and bulkers), negative growth in the ship types being displaced by container ships (cargo-passenger and general cargo ‘tween deckers) and obsolescence of ore-bulk-oil (OBO) carriers. Although the potential for future disruption from the shipbuilding industry has diminished through the removal of subsidies, it has by no means disappeared. Attempts in the later 1990s by GATT and its successor, the WTO, to manage capacity rationalization met with limited success.

Ownership, organization, finance
and competition

Ownership structures vary considerably from sector to sector in the shipping industry. While the privately owned and privately owned limited company (PLC) forms of ownership can be found in all sectors of the industry, generally speaking the largest firms and firms operating the more sophisticated ship types are more likely to be equity-funded, listed companies. The equity-funded, listed companies are also found in those subsectors where ownership is relatively concentrated, e.g. large chemical tankers and liner-container vessels. Throughout the twentieth century, the liner trades of all the traditional maritime nations showed high levels of concentration. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world's liner trades are for the most part concentrated in a shrinking number of global firms.

The mergers, takeovers and acquisitions that resulted in the large container firms becoming progressively larger throughout the 1990s has now reached a point at which the sector will soon be dominated by perhaps six global carriers. The largest carriers who seem set to grow even further are not just owners of large fleets of ships running “mainline” services. Through their vertical and lateral ownerships of ports and terminals, warehousing, road transport, rail rolling-stock, freight forwarding and feederships, the liner companies of today are adopting exactly the same sorts of strategies first developed by the first consolidations which occurred in the liner trades of the late nineteenth century. There are however some important differences: the earlier consolidations and vertical integrations were all pursued from within a logic which saw shipping as the core business where everything was aimed at maximizing ship efficiency. In this new wave, a century later, the vision is the formation of global companies whose business is supply chains of which ships are but one element.

Integrationist global strategies are especially feasible in cases in which finished goods can be collected direct from producers for delivery to end-users. It is therefore possible for similar policies to be pursued in other trades such as the carriage of chemicals or vehicles. In the late 1990s there were some noteworthy developments in these trades: a Wallenius Wilhelmsen merger in car carriers; a Hoegh-Unicool merger in reefers; and a Stolt-Nielsen purchase of Van Ommeren shares in the chemical transport sector. The Wallenius Wilhelmsen merger created a fleet of 80 ships and a 35 per cent market share and Stolt-Nielsen further consolidated its already dominant position. In the tanker and dry bulk trades there are fewer opportunities for uncertainty-reducing strategies. Shipowners in these sectors are frequently independent carriers to the shippers of raw materials such as the oil majors and the world's steel-makers and are therefore classic cases of “price takers”. There is, however, some scope for shelter in these trades. Tanker pools grew stronger in several market niches in the 1990s and the oil majors' self-regulatory measures, emphasizing quality standards, work to the long-term advantage of owners of well-found ships. In the bulk trades there is strong evidence that well-found ships enjoy competitive advantages in those world regions where port state control measures are rigorously applied.

Unabated volatility in the freight markets unquestionably disadvantages owners operating well-maintained ships. When freight rates go down, shipowners with high costs have difficulty to compete with tonnage of lower quality. Andreas Ugland, when chairman of the International Association of Independent Tank Owners (INTERTANKO) in 1993, complained: “The employment of sub-standard tonnage continues ... and there is an unfortunate spiral. Companies that have invested in high-quality state-of-the-art vessels are unable to earn sufficient income to support the investment.” A Greek underwriter, speaking to the International Union of Marine Insurance in 1993, made exactly the same point: “The situation gets worse if one takes into account that seamanship has seriously deteriorated in recent decades. International shipping has got involved in a vicious spiral of recession in low freight returns, poor maintenance in general, and then cheaper crewing costs.” By way of response to these claims, the OECD published in 1996 the results of its study into the financial advantages accrued by operators of sub-standard ships.^[1] The conclusions of this report supported the view that declining freight rates had led to lower operating standards and that regulatory avoidance by sub-standard operators results in savings of a significant percentage of total operating costs.

Nowadays, banks play a major role in the industry. Bank lending is the prime source of capital in the building of new ships, buying of second-hand ones, providing working capital when bridges are needed and restructuring misjudged historic loans. The actual number of banks involved in ship finance constantly varies and it is not unusual for one bank to sell its ship loans portfolio, either in whole or in part, to another bank. Estimates in the late 1990s suggested that worldwide there were some 40 banks involved in ship finance, of which about 70 per cent were European, 18 per cent United States and 10 per cent Asian.

Bank finance began to assume increasing importance in shipping industry finance in the boom years of tanker building in the 1960s. Such was the rate of growth in crude oil shipments in this period that traditional methods of financing newbuilds through retained earnings was no longer adequate to support large fleet expansions. Furthermore, the then emerging trend of building specialist ships for specialized trades likewise indicated the need for new sources of capital. Even the conservatively managed and equity-based liner groups turned to bank borrowing to establish themselves in the new niche markets. In the independent tanker and bulk trades where private firms were dominant, bank lending was the only possible source of new capital unless they relinquished some control by floating share issues. In the 1960s, at least, there was little incentive to do this. So lucrative were time charters from the oil majors in the mid-1960s that a bank loan up to 90 per cent of the cost of a ship could be paid off in five years.^[2] Commenting on this epoch, Helmut Sohmen, whose family firm became the world's largest owner of very large crude carriers (VLCC), said: “Many financial institutions entered shipping for the first time, confident that high freights and expanding bulk trades suggested few risks in shipping. Syndicated loans became a common way of financing the new generation of very large tankers and bulkers. In the buoyant market conditions a 220,000 dwt tanker built for US$12-14 million in 1968 might be valued at US$30 million in 1971 and US$47 million in 1973.”^[3]

Banks specializing in ship finance do not necessarily carry all or even most of the debt. They may, for example, sell on some or all of the debt to other organizations which might be other banks or institutional lenders such as pension funds or insurance firms, although the extent to which this is possible at any given moment necessarily depends on trading conditions in the capital markets. In the conditions of a buyers' market, it is not uncommon for implausible debt to be bought by inexperienced and ill-informed lenders. During the mid-1990s, for example, the responsibility for the financial collapse of Adriatic Tankers with its 90-ship fleet could be evenly divided between a commercially incompetent owner and five banks and institutional lenders, who between them had contributed US$244 million to the (private) firm's expansion.

The relative absence, in the past, of PLC company structures in shipping made it difficult for a bank to make a conventional assessment of a prospective loan. Apart from the lack of any kind of historic data series enabling comparison with other operators' performance, a shipowner based offshore might or might not have had a balance sheet and was unlikely to possess either audited accounts or an impressive suite of offices providing apparently tangible evidence of a well-run firm. In these cases, however, bank debt could still be available on the basis of “name lending” or “relational banking”. That is to say, where there was some equivalent continuity between the individual banker and the individual owner, trust relationships could commonly be the basis of long-term sequences of lending.

When mortgages failed, as they often did in the 1980s, banks and other lenders could either repossess ships and appoint a ship manager to operate them until a disposal decision was made or the debt could be turned into equity, thus making the bank an institutional shareholder. This latter option was never popular and resorted to only where the debt was large and shared by a number of other banks. For example, in 1986 the family-controlled Wah Kwong Shipping and Investment group in Hong Kong, China (the third largest shipping group), owed more than US$850 million to 46 creditors who eventually agreed to reschedule the debt as equity.^[4]

The precise balance of ownership in the world fleet as between private and public capital may not be known but there is no question of the growing importance of equity funding and PLC status. It was estimated in 1995 that there were more than 300 shipping companies quoted on the world's stock exchanges with a total market capitalization of more than US$30 billion. The pace of change to PLC status, however, is unlikely to be rapid or uninterrupted except in the liner and “liner-like” trades. At least in the medium term, name lending is likely to remain predominant in the least specialized bulk trades. The inherent risk in lending of this sort is acknowledged by banks in the relatively low level of tolerable exposure to any one owner, even if the total exposure to shipowners is high. This type of lending, other things being equal, will help to sustain fragmentation of ownership, speculation in ship values and, therefore, freight market volatility. Continued volatility will reinforce the sceptical attitudes toward the shipping industry generally held by institutional lenders and thus ensure slow progress toward concentration of ownership.

There has been some debate over how far bank lending has encouraged shipowners to buy speculatively, thus exaggerating freight market volatility – with all the attendant consequences for seafarers. At the time of the Wah Kwong restructuring in 1986, Paul Slater, a prominent shipowner/financier, said publicly:

This is a persuasive argument. There can be no denying that – at least in the 1970s and 1980s – the banks were responsible for funding the speculative ship purchases which led to over-tonnaging, depressed freight rates and the pressure on labour costs. Indeed, the responsibility was theirs alone because neither retained earnings nor equity were any longer important sources of capital in the 1980s, least of all in the tanker and bulk trades where the over-tonnaging problem was especially severe.

The industry's structural problem of having too many ships to allow a reasonable return on ships that ran to high professional standards could not be resolved by the rescue operations banks were obliged to mount if they were not themselves to be driven into crisis. It was simply commercially impossible for them to write off their assets by selling them for scrap, least of all at a time when scrap prices were low. They were therefore obliged to keep their assets at sea and trading and selling them at the first best opportunity. As Paul Slater pointed out, the logic of the situation was ironic: “If anything the problems are compounded as ships sold or auctioned at a fraction of their recent original costs then return to the market at rates reflecting their new low value and thus continue to depress freight rates and cause further collapses.”

Despite all this, bank lending will continue to be the major source of funding for capital projects due to the high level of investment required. If, at any moment, capital is plentiful, looking for outlets that are available on attractive terms while shipping is coincidentally enjoying a run through buoyant markets, banks will be competing with each other for lenders. But the banks will only be doing what banks do. The perennial problem of the depressive effects of over-tonnaging on the labour market cannot be laid at the door of the banks and other short-term lenders. There may be problems with the capital markets – but perhaps the greater problem lies with the ownership structure of the shipping industry.

The most dramatic example of change in ownership structure in recent years came with the privatization of the shipping industry in Eastern Europe. The demise of the Romanian and Georgian fleets resulted in bankruptcy and abandoned crews with ships in appalling conditions being detained by port state control agencies. The relatively well-managed Polish fleet went through a lengthy period of decline, in the course of which large numbers of well-trained Polish seafarers, officers especially, quickly found employment in the flagged-out ships of the traditional maritime nations (see Chapter 2). The fleet in the former German Democratic Republic was of course quickly disposed of and officers wishing to continue at sea found work on ships belonging to the Federal Republic. Developments in the Baltic States, Ukraine and the Russian Federation were far more complex. In a number of cases privatized companies were refinanced through offshore registration and subsequent bareboat chartering back to the privatized company for manning by indigenous crews. In 1999, large numbers of ships crewed and operated by Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian crews, were mortgaged to Western banks and mainly flagged in Malta, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Cyprus and the Bahamas. Several European shipping and ship-management companies were involved in brokering these arrangements and providing commercial management services. A number of these arrangements have not worked well, commonly because of the new owners' financial practices.

The process of privatization effectively left the former USSR (including the Baltic countries) and its closer partners such as Bulgaria with two fleets. The newer and better ships were mortgaged and flagged-out; the older and presumably unmortgageable ships remained with the national flag. The flagged-out ships have generally fared better because they have benefited from Western commercial management experience. The high port state control detention and abandonment rates experienced by Russian- and Ukrainian-flagged ships and crews, accurately reflects the relative fortunes of the two fleets. Another consequence was that well-trained seafarers from the former USSR easily found relatively well-paid and secure employment outside of their countries; indeed, the timing was good and they often made up the shortage of well-trained officers.

Without a doubt, therefore, the excessive supply of vessels in the preceding decades, made worse by the availability of bank finance, has caused a high degree of competition with negative impact on freight rates. In the face of competition, shipowners have had to take tough measures to cut costs, some of which have influenced conditions aboard ships.

Growth sectors: Boxboats and dreamships

Apart from roll-on-roll-off passenger ships mainly operating in near-sea ferry trades, the high growth rates have been in the liner trades and in cruise shipping. Although the liner trades have been steadily expanding for more than 30 years as they have eaten into more and more of the trades formerly served by geared ‘tween decked cargo ships, cruise shipping has more recently accelerated into a growth trend best compared, perhaps, with the development of the package-holiday industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Where the liner trades are concerned, the growth emphasis has been on developing two main types of ship – mega-carriers dedicated to the mainline hub routes and various-sized feeder ships flexible enough in draft and carrying capacity to be switched between spoke routes. As far as crews are concerned, the mainline ships probably offer the best employment conditions to be found. The feeder ship crews, by comparison, can experience long hours of work in trades involving rapid turnarounds in ports and short sea passages. Overall growth in the container trades is expected to continue: 12 per cent of general cargo was carried in boxes in 1990 and 27 per cent in 1999. The forecast for 2005 is a conservative 40 per cent.

From the perspective of seafarers, by far the most important growth has been in cruise shipping, involving unprecedented levels of demand for women seafarers. The number of the cruise ships (1,000 gt and over) in the world cruise fleet has risen from 147 in 1980 to 225 in 1998 with gross tonnage having increased from 2,045,000 in 1980 to 6,307,000 in 1998^[6] and the passengers carried from 1.5 million in 1980 to over 7.5 million in 1998. The cruise sector has been looking for economies of scale and this has led to the “mega” ship of 100,000 gt or over, with a berth capacity of 3,000+ passengers (see table 1.3). For example, one of the recent cruise vessels, Voyager of the Seas, owned by Royal Caribbean International, is 142,000 tons and has a capacity of 3,000 passengers and 900 crew. Most of these ships are owned by companies of a few countries such as the United States, Norway and the United Kingdom and fly the flags of the open registry States of the Bahamas, Liberia and Panama. The fleet has been built mainly in Europe. There are ten main owning/operating companies with the top five largest owners and operators listed in table 1.4.

Table 1.3. Development of cruise shipping, 1980-98
(with ships of 1,000 gt and over)

There are considerable economies of scale to be had from operating large cruise ships with 2,000 to 3,000 berths. Both capital cost and operating cost per passenger decreases rapidly with the increase of ship size. Indeed, operating cruise lines have become so profitable that Carnival, for example, reported a net income of US$157.8 million for its first quarter in 1999, a 44 per cent increase on the previous year. This made it the 31st consecutive quarter that the company has reported improvements. Royal Caribbean also reported an income growth of 16.3 per cent for the first quarter, from US$77.5 million in 1998 to US$90.2 million in 1999. The current economic “prizes” to be found in this sector are considerable – but the entry costs are high and this has ensured a small number of dominant firms and a high merger rate.

Technological developments

Already in 1991, in a report to the Joint Maritime Commission, the Office had identified technological development as a cause of the reduction in employment opportunities at sea. It also pointed out that automation, the increase in size of ships and various other technical innovations had also contributed to a reduction in the size of crews, increased fatigue and isolation while increasing the need for highly skilled personnel.^[7]

Shipbuilding technology has allowed a rapid increase in ship size which has been matched by developments in cargo-handling equipment and port infrastructure. The bulker and tanker sectors have reached a stage where a further increase in ship size, although technically possible, would not seem at present to be commercially viable. Other shipping sectors have seen a marked increase in ship size over the last decade. Outstanding examples are container vessels. In less than two decades ship sizes have doubled from Panamax (3-4,000 TEUs) to the latest generation of post-Panamax vessels (6-8,000 TEUs). Furthermore, there are already plans to build vessels with a carrying capacity of 15,000 TEUs.

The use of bigger vessels has been accompanied by a change in the geography of ports. Earlier ports were built close to the hinterland they served. Today, the environmental, operational and commercial considerations raised by the increase in ship size dictate port development in remote areas, typically far away from urban centres. From a seafarer's perspective, the remoteness and fast turnarounds in modern ports can make shore leave difficult or impossible.

During the past two decades, the use of high-speed craft has been growing in coastal areas around the world. Until now, this type of vessel has been used mainly for passenger services. However, as supply chains in different industrial sectors move towards integration and ever-higher efficiencies, the demand for high-speed crafts for transporting commodities over much larger distances is increasing. The first transatlantic high-speed service is currently at an advanced stage of planning.

The shipboard organization aboard high-speed craft resembles more that of an aircraft than of a ship. The levels of automation and integration require highly specialized training for all of the crew. Given the high capital cost involved, maintenance and fast turnaround time in port are paramount, as failure to run is failure to earn. The crews of high-speed crafts, like airline pilots, are at present only subject to national regulations on hours of work. It is not yet clear how regulations on working time will apply to transoceanic services when they start to operate in the near future. Neither is it clear what the duties of the crew will be when in port. Will a ground crew for loading and unloading replace them? Undoubtedly, these crews will need a working regime different from the one applicable to crews aboard conventional cargo vessels.

It is also reported that on short sea passenger ferry routes, high-speed craft may replace conventional vessels – with corresponding job losses.

The reduction in turnaround times has also been impressive in almost all trades, especially in dry and liquid bulk trades and in the handling of general cargo through unitization.

Since its development in the 1950s, containerization remains the most important development in cargo unitization. Although container systems require a very high initial investment they do achieve added benefits such as very fast rates of handling; they also provide a seamless link with other modes of transport. Container ships are equipped with special features specifically designed to optimize efficiency of handling operations. Cellular guides partly do away with the need for lashing cargo prior to a sea passage and easy access to holds reduces dramatically the turnaround time in port. The speed with which cargo operations are conducted also requires the maximum attention to cargo calculations and stowage on board as any error quickly becomes buried under stacks of containers making it extremely expensive and time-consuming to rectify. Turnaround times measured in single-digit hours are now close to the norm for container services.

Automation and integration technology has been adopted since the 1960s in the shipping industry and is now applied to most shipboard systems. Integrated bridge systems are now a standard feature on new ships. The bridge has become an information and control centre for all shipboard functions including navigation, propulsion and communications. The layout of this system has more similarity with an aircraft's cockpit than with the traditional wheelhouse arrangements.

During the 1970s, the introduction of computers to monitor and control propulsion systems resulted in unattended machinery spaces, where constant watches were no longer necessary. Nowadays, most seagoing vessels operate with periodically unmanned machinery spaces. The main effects of deck and engine-room automation and integration are a reduction of manning levels and a change in work organization and shipboard environment.

The introduction of satellite communications has also had two major repercussions on ships' personnel. First, the possibility of direct and immediate contact between ship and shore management has often done away with the former notion of “line management”. Second, the introduction of electronic distress and safety communications has abolished the position of radio officer.

Satellite communications in shipping were given a boost by the establishment of the International Maritime Satellite Organization (INMARSAT) by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 1976. Since then, the use of communication satellites has greatly improved not only safety and distress communications, but also public correspondence and fleet communications between ship and shore.

On 1 February 1999, the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) was implemented, heralding a new era in ship distress and safety communications. This integrated system of satellite and terrestrial communications is intended to improve the accuracy and response time to distress calls originating from ships. All passenger ships and cargo ships over 300 gt engaged on international voyages are now required to participate in GMDSS by having the appropriate equipment on board and trained personnel to operate it. Ships participating in GMDSS are not required to carry a dedicated radio operator, as distress communication functions have been passed on to the designated GMDSS operators on board (deck officers). This provides another opportunity to reduce manning levels.

For public correspondence purposes, satellite communications by voice are still expensive. However, a few seafarers are benefiting from the use of the Internet at sea which can be used for correspondence, leisure and even distance learning. As technology in this field advances, the cost for sea-based users will decrease making communications more affordable to all seafarers.

For fleet communications between ship and shore, the use of satellites is revolutionizing the way ships are managed by enhancing communications, data transfer and operational control.

The rise of the ship-management company

The long crisis of the 1980s found shipowners of the traditional maritime nations looking for cost-cutting survival strategies. Some left the industry to focus on more profitable parts of their business. For example, the large British firm, Ocean Transport (better known as Blue Funnel), progressively sold its shipping interests and became a logistics company. Others flagged out their ships to “open registers” of one kind or another which allowed them to make large and immediate labour cost reductions. In 1983 an author pointed out that: “relative advantages based on only lower manning costs are impermanent and will not finally save even the most cost-effective operator”.^[8]

A number of shipowners turned to managing ships for other owners as a means of utilizing spare management capacity. In 1983, P&O won a contract to manage four tankers owned by one of the Gulf States – in addition to a further 15 ships it managed for various other companies.

Third-party ship management, although not unusual among established shipowners in the traditional maritime nations, had previously only been on a very limited and almost incidental scale. In the United States, however, it became a specialist business in the 1950s when American owners built up substantial Liberian-flagged tanker fleets. Probably the first major step towards similar businesses in Europe came in the 1960s when the family-owned Scottish tramp company, Denholm's, rapidly became a specialist ship manager upon taking over the management of a substantial part of what had been the Naess fleet. Ship management as a recognizably specialist sector in world shipping then grew rapidly – initially in Hong Kong, China, in the 1970s, where professionals were needed to operate ships being bought by private entrepreneurs and then to continue operating them on behalf of financial institutions. Ship-management companies in Europe, mainly in Germany, Monaco, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries, by contrast, mainly developed as extensions of existing shipping enterprises.

In-house management buy-outs or the creation of self-sufficient but wholly owned subsidiaries of technical and personnel management services became extremely common among many of the larger shipowning companies. Many of these offshoots successfully evolved via mergers or takeovers into the now familiar ship-management companies of the 1990s. Success was due in no small part to the fact that many shipowners were looking for ways to cut their overheads and saw in these new organizations the possibility of reaping some of the benefits of economies of scale that were hard to achieve in small fleets. Economies were especially likely to be found in the area of crew management because of the difficulties involved in hiring crews either wholly or in part from cheaper but unfamiliar world regions. In these circumstances subcontracting to specialist firms became attractive.

As ship-management firms have developed and expanded they have become the world's largest employers of seafarers. Such is the scale of their labour requirements and their consequent need for efficient organization that they have collectively become a powerful source of labour market stability. Unlike shipowners with small fleets who may be recurrently driven by circumstance to look for a new and cheaper source of labour, ship managers with perhaps 5,000 seafarers spread over 200 ships need orderly and predictable supply lines. By the mid-1990s a number of ship-management companies had already become seriously involved in officer training, at least two of them to the extent of running cadetships in the manner of some of the large – now defunct – liner companies. Others had set up their own training establishments for ratings.

By the late 1990s ship managers had become centred in both the old and the new metropoles of world shipping: in Europe – Hamburg, Glasgow, the Isle of Man, Geneva, Piraeus and Cyprus; in the United States – in and around New York; in Asia – Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

The managed fleets typically embrace a wide range of ship types, flying various but mainly “open register” flags with owners and crews drawn from a number of different countries. For example, the mid-range firm, Univan, founded in Hong Kong, China, in 1973 by a Belgian shipmaster, has a fleet of more than 70 ships flagged to the Newly Independent States (NIS), Liberia, Panama, Cyprus, Hong Kong, China, and the Bahamas; of these ships 30 per cent are owned in Norway, 25 per cent in the United States, 12 per cent in Japan, 12 per cent in India and 5 per cent in the United Kingdom. Crews are mostly Indian (90 per cent) with others from the Philippines and Myanmar.^[9] Other companies have a similar range of clients but normally draw upon a wider range of crewing sources: Acomarit employs large numbers of Russians; Barber International's main crew sources are the Philippines, India and Poland.

The ship-management market is as stratified as any market. Perhaps as much as 80 per cent or more of the market is accounted for by companies with fleets in the size range 15-200+ ships and 50 per cent of the total market by managed fleets of roughly 200+ ships. These are then followed by a long list of small firms managing less than ten ships. Firms in this range do not have the resources to have vertically integrated organizations with agencies in the labour-supply countries and, other things being equal, are more likely to be “footloose” in sourcing crews.

In at least the medium term, the larger ship managers' organizational imperatives ensure that at any given moment they have a strong interest in sustaining the status quo in the labour market. They have established dense and personalized networks in the labour-supply countries, often reaching into training and educational institutions – and social capital of this kind is not easily accumulated. On the other hand, the interest and investment in stability provides no guarantee of its continuation. It would only take one large ship-management company to seek short-term competitive advantage by opting on a large scale for a significantly cheaper source of labour to send competitors off in pursuit. The effects would be similar to those produced by the flight to offshore registries in the 1970s and 1980s. Several management companies are known to be diversifying their sources of labour on a small scale – e.g. by employing Vietnamese and Chinese on a limited scale while employing large numbers of Filipinos.

The ship-management sector, though still growing, has now entered its mature phase. Its main centres are in northern Europe including the Nordic countries, Greece, South-East Asia (principally Hong Kong, China, and Singapore), Japan and the United States, and its main customers are from the same countries and regions. Some estimates now suggest that perhaps 10,000 ships have at least one of their functional areas run by third-party managers. Ship-management functions are conventionally designated as commercial (charters, mortgages, insurances, etc.), technical (ship maintenance, dry-docking, periodic survey, etc.), and crew management (finding, organizing, paying and training crews). By the mid-1990s the ship-management sector was sufficiently well established to successfully launch the International Ship Managers' Association (ISMA). In 1994, ISMA members alone managed 1,800 ships totalling 60 m dwt; a further 1,053 were fully managed (i.e. commercially, technically and crewing); 717 were solely under crew management contracts and a further 70 were under other forms of service contract. More than 80 per cent of managed ships flew an offshore flag: second register or flags of convenience; the remaining 20 per cent flew national flags. The total seagoing labour force of ISMA members was approximately 50,000, the great majority from the Philippines, India and Eastern Europe. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the ship-management companies' clients are for the most part small to medium-sized shipowners but, by virtue of the central management provided by the managers for all their clients, it might be said that ship-management companies provide at least some of the benefits of scale otherwise only found in large and powerful shipping companies.

The arrival of environmental politics

Wrecks, founderings and other incidents, many of them involving crude oil tankers, have had far-reaching consequences for world shipping's regulatory environment. Modern developments in port state control began with the wreck of the Amoco Cadiz off the northern coast of France in 1978. This control was reinforced after the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989, the incident off the Western Australian coast when the entire bow section fell off the Kirki, and the wreck of the Braer on the United Kingdom's Shetland Islands in 1993. These incidents have all contributed to a string of regulatory consequences.^[10] The most important of these has been the global spread of transnational port state control systems aimed at identifying ships failing to conform with IMO and ILO Conventions. The various provisions of these Conventions offer a wide range of opportunities to “capture” defective ships: structural deficiencies, inadequate life saving and fire-fighting appliances, poorly stocked medicine chests, deficient food and accommodation, insufficiently or improperly certificated officers are all grounds for delaying a ship's departure. The oil industry with its own initiatives has also introduced practices designed to squeeze out sub-standard ships. In 1993, the Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) established the Ship Inspection Report Programme (SIRE), a commonly held database of reports of the oil companies' own ship inspectors. The scheme was designed to ensure that ships taken on hire by the oil majors met good structural and operational standards. As the SIRE system has developed it has increasingly been concerned with crew competence and crew conditions of service. Within just three years of operation the London shipbroking community was persuaded that it was no longer possible to fix a sub-standard ship with any of the oil majors. The SIRE regime, taken together with the state-based port state control system, has received support from all of the industry's representative organizations and has undoubtedly gone a long way towards improving safety generally – especially for crews. It is fair to wonder, however, how much of this new regulatory regime would have developed without the arrival of the environment as a major political issue.

Every major disaster involving large-scale pollution has consequences for policy-makers: for example, the Amoco Cadiz, Exxon Valdez groundings and more recently the sinking of the Erika, with the dramatic pollution of the French coast that ensued, are expected to have a significant impact on international maritime legislation. As far as seafarers are concerned, one of the negative consequences of the heavy impact of environmental issues has been the ease with which national authorities have held masters in custody for protracted periods after maritime casualties involving pollution of the environment.

The internationalization of shipping registration

There is no doubt that the “flag” has a bearing on the conditions of work of seafarers. This is recognized by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which compels States to take measures with regard to labour conditions and training of crews, taking account of the applicable international instruments. The ILO has examined the evolution of ship registration several times in the last 50 years, and particularly in the period preceding the adoption of the Merchant Shipping (Minimum Standards) Convention, 1976 (No. 147). The practice of allowing foreign shipowners to register vessels under one's flag has grown. “Flags of convenience” emerged to give flexibility in the operation of ships. As a response to intensified competition in the industry, many major maritime States have created registers which provide similar flexibility. These open registers have been termed offshore, secondary, second or international. Most of them have some or all of the characteristics of “flags of convenience” as defined in 1970 by the Rochdale Inquiry into Shipping:

(i) the country of registry allows ownership and/or control of its merchant vessels by non-citizens;

(ii) access to the registry is easy. A ship may usually be registered at a consul's office abroad. Equally important, transfer from the registry at the owner's option is not restricted;

(iii) taxes on the income from the ships are not levied locally or are low. A registry fee and an annual fee, based on tonnage, are normally the only charges made. A guarantee or acceptable understanding regarding future freedom from taxation may also be given;

(iv) the country of registry is a small power with no national requirement under any foreseeable circumstances for all the shipping registered (but receipts from very small charges on a large tonnage may produce a substantial effect on its national income and balance of payments);

(vi) the country of registry has neither the power nor the administrative machinery effectively to impose any government or international regulations; nor has the country the wish or the power to control the companies themselves.

A large number of countries have registers which offer some or all of these advantages. For example, they may reduce taxes applying to shipping and allow the employment of foreign seafarers. Some States have created second registers which provide some or all of these advantages while maintaining a distinct primary and less advantageous register.

The Office has identified 24 such second registers, a list of which is given in table 1.8. The term “second register” does not imply the form of the relationship between the two registers or the rationale and operation of their respective registers; hence it needs to be used with some care.

A number of these second registers are minimal and show little, if any, growth; furthermore, they cover only small ships. Their status as a second register is a result of their being based in a non-metropolitan territory of another State although, in terms of shipping registration, there may be no links with the State's primary register. In addition, that territory might not have entered into the registry business. These registers could be classified as non-active, in terms of both their operations and international significance. Eight of them might be considered in this category: Wallis and Futuna Islands; Cook Islands; Macao; Anguila; British Virgin Islands; Channel Islands; Falkland Islands; and Turks and Caicos Islands.

A few are active as registers, and are significantly autonomous in their operations. However, a second register does not define the rationale behind the register's existence – i.e. the register does not exist solely with a view to attracting shipping from the metropolitan State. The relationship between the territory and its metropolitan State tends to be visible through the content of laws, for example in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands the principal shipping legislation in force is the United Kingdom Merchant Shipping Acts; the Isle of Man legislation is also principally based on these Acts. These second registers are, in effect, open registers based in non-metropolitan territories.

One of the responses to the phenomenon of “flagging out”, has been the creation of new registers or the cultivation of an existent territorial register. The aim is to minimize the loss of tonnage from a flag State by effectively encouraging a shipowner to remain under the auspices of that State while benefiting from a number of enticements such as lower taxation and less-regulated crewing requirements. This action is the pragmatic recognition of the force of international competition from open registries – and of their competitive advantages because of their flexibility. With few exceptions, such as the German second register, these flags attempt to attract international shipping as well as maintain the national fleet.

The creation of these registers began in the late 1980s with France-Kerguelen Islands (1987), the Norwegian International Ship Register (NIS) (1987), the Danish International Ship Register (DIS) (1988), Portugal-Madeira (1988), and the German International Ship Register (GIS) (1988). After this initial period of activity, there was a significant lull in the further creation of second registers, with the sole exception of Spain-Canary Islands (1992). However from 1997 onwards there has been renewed activity in this area, with the creation of a Turkish second register in 1997, a Brazilian Registro Especial Brasileiro, and an Italian second register in 1998. Current activity suggests that the option of utilizing a non-metropolitan territory has become less attractive, and new second registers are exclusively concentrated on the nominal constitution of second registers within the primary countries themselves. Both the recent second registers and those countries currently engaged in debate over this issue (the United States is expected to reach a policy decision on a second register in the near future) favour this option. The disadvantages attached to the use of a non-metropolitan territory has led the French Government to consider plans to create a second national register within France to replace the Kerguelen Islands. Concerning the attempt to retain tonnage, the GIS has been most successful in the first instance. When Germany introduced its second register in 1988, 52 per cent of German tonnage was registered abroad; it subsequently fell to 38 per cent but was up to 65 per cent in 1997.^[11] According to the Federal Office of Maritime Shipping and Hydrography, 96 per cent of German registered tonnage appears on this register. It is also unusual in terms of second registers in that only ships acceptable to the primary register may be entered on the GIS.

The increased level of deregulation within these second registers – and, in particular, the relaxation of crewing requirements plus the increased amount of non-national shipping attracted to these registers – has led to significant amounts of interest from the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) who have concluded that 13 second registers should be considered to be flags of convenience.^[12]

The importance of the international fleet consisting of open and second registers compared to the world fleet as a whole has increased considerably. Based on available information, the Office has estimated that the international fleet, which in 1989 represented 44.5 per cent of the world fleet by gross tonnage, had reached 64 per cent of the world fleet in 1999 (table 1.6). By number of vessels the proportion had grown from 19.5 per cent in 1989 to 28.7 per cent in 1999.

Table 1.6. Evolution of international fleet as percentage of world fleet (gross tonnage)

The international fleet consists mainly of large vessels and these are concentrated especially in a few very large registries. In the 1990s, the ten largest registers consistently covered around 90 per cent of the international fleet and around 50 per cent of the world fleet (table 1.7).

Table 1.7. Evolution of international fleet as percentage of world fleet (numbers)

The majority of vessels registered in the international registries are effectively owned in other countries. In the five largest international registries, Greek interests own most of the tonnage on the Maltese and Cyprus registers, Japanese owners control 40 per cent of the Panamanian fleet, whilst there is no significant tonnage owned by nationals of any of the countries concerned (table 1.8).

Table 1.8. Nationality of effective owners of the five major open registry fleets, by percentage
(as at 31 Dec. 1997)


Country of effective ownership	Flag State
	Liberia	Panama	Cyprus	Bahamas	Malta

Greece	12.4	11.1	72.6	19.0	56.3
Japan	7.1	40.0	0.6	1.7	0.0
United States	13.5	2.1	1.0	15.2	0.8
Hong Kong, China	7.8	13.1	0.1	1.4	0.4
Norway	8.2	1.3	0.4	21.5	11.7
United Kingdom	3.4	0.5	0.5	6.5	0.5
China	6.5	5.4	1.0	0.0	1.2
Republic of Korea	1.7	10.8	0.0	0.0	0.1
Sweden	7.9	0.2	2.3	4.4	0.0
Germany	6.0	1.0	7.8	0.1	1.2
Saudi Arabia	8.2	0.1	0.0	5.5	0.0
Taiwan, China	0.6	5.0	0.6	0.0	0.0
Singapore	1.2	1.0	0.0	1.6	0.3
Denmark	0.5	0.2	0.0	1.6	0.0
Russian Federation	2.0	0.1	4.0	0.6	1.5
Switzerland	0.9	1.7	0.2	0.5	4.6
Italy	0.6	0.2	0.6	2.9	5.2
Belgium	1.6	0.2	0.5	0.5	0.0
France	0.4	0.5	0.0	1.8	0.0
Spain	0.1	0.2	0.3	2.3	0.0
Croatia	0.7	0.0	0.0	0.1	2.5
Finland	0.0	0.0	0.0	5.0	0.3
Others	8.7	5.3	7.5	7.8	13.4
Total	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0

Source: UNCTAD: UNCTAD review of maritime transport 1998 (New York/Geneva, United Nations, 1999).

For many reasons the international registers have steadily become more important within the global maritime industry. As suggested by Bergantino and Marlow^[13] “flagging out is primarily caused by the desire to minimize costs …”. The same authors also suggest, however, that other factors such as the quality of available labour, management costs, fiscal considerations and questions of effective control are important elements in such decisions.

Data on detention and casualty rates nonetheless also reveal that many national flags often have records worse than the international registers. The average global detention to inspection rate by port state control in 1998 was 6 per cent,^[14] and of the 39 countries who exceeded this rate, only eight were international registers whose combined total gross tonnage represented just 20 per cent of the entire international fleet (table 1.9).

Table 1.9. The 39 registries that exceeded the average global detention rate in 1998


Registry	Number of inspections	Number of detentions	Percentage detention/inspection

Albania	10	7	70
Democratic People's Republic of Korea	22	10	45
*Equatorial Guinea*	16	7	44
*Bolivia*	8	3	38
*Mauritius*	12	4	33
*Lebanon*	72	22	31
Sudan	11	3	27
Cape Verde	17	4	24
Georgia	14	3	21
Syrian Arab Republic	152	32	21
Croatia	60	12	20
Guinea	10	2	20
Indonesia	89	18	20
*Belize*	611	114	19
Nigeria	11	2	18
Tonga	11	2	18
Bangladesh	18	3	17
Turkey	889	151	17
*Cambodia*	202	32	16
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya	31	5	16
*Honduras*	570	84	15
Bulgaria	122	17	14
*St. Vincent and the Grenadines*	1 274	172	14
Azerbaijan	31	4	13
Pakistan	45	6	13
Egypt	60	7	12
Morocco	65	8	12
Romania	233	28	12
Islamic Republic of Iran	85	9	11
*Malta*	2 131	207	10
Turkmenistan	10	1	10
Malaysia	248	22	9
Samoa	11	1	9
Algeria	90	7	8
*Cyprus*	3 107	236	8
Russian Federation	1 997	132	7
*Sri Lanka*	29	2	7
Thailand	247	18	7
Ukraine	520	38	7

*Bold italics* denote FOC. Source: ITF: Flags of Convenience Campaign Report 1998 (London, 1999).

With regards to casualties, there is a similar picture. Of the 21 States whose losses as a percentage of its fleet exceeded the world average losses of 0.1 in 1998, only seven were FOCs and their combined total gross tonnage accounted for only 25 per cent of the FOC total (table 1.10).

It is therefore evident that FOCs have evolved since the 1970s and only a few have a safety record which is any worse than the world fleet average.

Some maritime nations are allowing considerable tax advantages to shipowners in order to attract ships back to the country's flag. The recent adoption by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom of new tax regimes for shipping has prompted the return of some beneficially owned tonnage to the national register.


Registry	Number of ships lost	Percentage of flag fleet lost

Congo ¹	1	29.13
Austria	1	2.84
*Equatorial Guinea*	1	1.62
Democratic People's Republic of Korea	1	1.48
*Belice*	10	1.12
*Cambodia*	2	0.78
Argentina	1	0.73
*Honduras*	3	0.72
Syrian Arab Republic	1	0.68
*St. Vincent and the Grenadines*	6	0.64
Philippines	2	0.64
*Antigua and Barbuda*	3	0.42
Isle of Man (UK)	1	0.41
Turkey	3	0.36
Chile	1	0.32
Indonesia	3	0.31
Spain	1	0.30
*Cyprus*	6	0.26
South Africa	1	0.22
*Bahamas*	6	0.19
China	3	0.16

*Bold italics* denote FOC. ¹ According to Lloyd's World Fleet Statistics, in 1998, there were 21 ships on the Congo register. The loss of one vessel would, therefore, represent a 4.76 per cent loss rate. Source: International Underwriting Association (IUA): Marine report and statistics (London, IUA, 1999).

Initiatives relating to the implementation
of conditions of work

Port state control and quality shipping

Following the Amoco Cadiz disaster in 1978, a regional arrangement for the inspection of ships by port state authorities was started in Europe. This arrangement, first called The Hague Memorandum, was replaced by the Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control (MOU) in 1982. Ships are inspected for the application of a number of IMO conventions as well as ILO Convention No. 147. Deficiencies found are required to be corrected and ships can be detained for deficiencies involving risks for health and safety. Information on inspections and deficiencies are shared among the participating maritime authorities. Nine memoranda on port state control have been or are in the process of being signed. It is fair to say that, although initially port state control was developed mainly to enforce shipboard living and working conditions required under Convention No. 147, the emphasis has shifted on to technical issues mostly covered by IMO Conventions. In order to try to remedy this situation, the MOU initiated a concentrated campaign on working and living conditions in 1997. Twenty-five per cent of 3,791 ships had deficiencies in at least one of the inspected areas. Thirty-five per cent of those with deficiencies were detained or required to rectify the deficiencies before departure. Interregional cooperation between the memoranda is set to continue to improve. There are moves to encourage harmonization between the regional port state control agreements. In a declaration, the First Joint Ministerial Conference of the Paris and Tokyo Memoranda on Port State Control confirmed its determination to strengthen commitment to quality and safety in all aspects of shipping and to play an active role in the common goal to eliminate sub-standard shipping.

During 1999, the Paris Memorandum reported a substantial increase in deficiencies (5 per cent more than 1998) aboard ships inspected. It urged owners and flag States to recognize the seriousness of these (deficiency) figures and take adequate measures to improve operational safety.

In order to give port state control more “legal teeth”, the Commission of the European Communities adopted a Directive on port state control of shipping in 1995 (95/21/EC). This Directive, which makes port state control compulsory in all European Community maritime States, also covers shipboard living and working conditions. It is in the process of being reinforced further in the wake of the sinking of the Erika.

In November 1997, a quality shipping campaign was launched to improve maritime safety based on a dialogue between public authorities and shipping industry players. The campaign aims at encouraging voluntary measures by the industry.

This year an information system called EQUASIS was started by the Commission of the European Communities and the maritime authorities of a number of countries. It aims at collecting existing safety-related information on ships from both public and private sources and making it available on the Internet. The information given on the site covers a variety of safety-related information including the ship's history with regard to registry, classification, port state control and human element issues such as collective agreements.

Voluntary initiatives

The International Shipping Federation (ISF) is the employers' voice in industrial relations. It has consultative status in the ILO and provides information and guidance to shipowners on international labour standards. However, there are some subsectoral associations which bring together interests from sections of the shipping industry whose objectives, inter alia, encourage their members to apply international standards relating to safety. Among them are associations of shipowners operating specialist ship types such as the International Association of Independent Tank Owners (INTERTANKO) and specialist companies such as the International Ship Managers' Association (ISMA). These associations have, until now, given more attention to the technical requirements of ship operations; with regard to the crew, therefore, they have dealt mainly with matters relating to training. They could be encouraged to give more attention to the improvement of standards of working and living conditions.

An example of the type of subsectoral agreement whose implementation could assist in the improvement of conditions of work and life aboard ship is the one concluded by the French-based oil companies. This agreement, called the charter on maritime safety for oil transport, provides that shipowners and managers should only use manning companies which apply ILO standards, particularly with regards to training, hours of work and conditions of work. It also provides that charterers should only charter vessels registered in States which have ratified IMO and ILO standards, namely on safety, inspection and training and certification of crews.

Another interesting initiative is the setting up of the International Commission on Shipping. This Commission, which consists of a number of recognized personalities, has been established under funding from the International Transport Workers' Federation. It aims to look into compliance with international minimum safety, environmental and social requirements, examine their compatibility with applicable international law and recommend an appropriate strategy which would include both regulatory and non-regulatory approaches. The Commission is only at the beginning of its work and is expected to publish its report in the first quarter of 2001.

Reducing costs

A series of structural changes transformed the world's shipping industry in the course of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Some of these changes were technical in nature – but all of them have had profound effects on the economics of shipping: containerization of the liner trades; the evolution of ship types dedicated to the carriage of specific or narrow bands of commodity groups; the appearance of large fleets run by independent ship-management companies; the emergence of free registries referred to as flags of convenience; second registers; open registers or otherwise; and the impact of environmental issues on geopolitics generally and on the regulatory structures of world shipping in particular. A more subtle change has been the growing momentum in the process whereby transnational and international regulatory systems are superseding national regulations, especially in the major industrialized regions of the world. Most significant of all has been the eradication of national boundaries in the labour market for seafarers. Unwittingly and unintentionally, the shipping industry has found itself with the world's first working example of a relatively open labour market. Taken together, these changes signify little less than a revolutionary transformation of the shipping industry and the emergence of the world's first genuinely global industry.

The change has been cumulative and gradual except in the case of the labour market. In little more than a decade, the transformation which began in the mid-to-late 1970s, became virtually complete. The industry's largely casual labour force and the shipowner's ability to legally sidestep labour regulation by the simple expedient of switching flag meant that, provided there was at any one time a pool of reserve labour somewhere in the world, the labour force as a whole could very rapidly be reconstituted. In the 1980s a ship could arrive in a port flying the flag of one of the traditional maritime nations, with a crew recruited from the citizens of that nation, and then sail a day or so later flying an “offshore” flag with a crew mainly recruited from the other side of the world – but with the ship's owners and/or its managers, its insurers and its classification society unchanged.

The pace and the scale of change in the 1980s in the composition of the labour force generally, and consequentially in the nationality/ethnicity of crews, was unprecedented in the sense that nothing of this sort had ever happened before. In 1987 alone, the employment of Filipino seafarers in European-owned ships increased from 2,900 to 17,057 persons. Translated into crews, this meant that the number of European-owned ships with a substantial Filipino component went from approximately 200 to 1,130 ships in just 12 months. Almost all of the displaced seafarers were domiciled in the traditional maritime nations of Europe.

Throughout the 1980s the shipping industry press regularly reported news of new crewing sources and the cost-savings potential to be had by drawing upon them. In many cases the savings could only be made by re-flagging to States entirely devoid of both indigenous maritime labour markets and functioning systems of labour regulation. By 1986, for example, 45 per cent of German-owned ships were operating under other flags with these labour market characteristics – and the same trend applied in Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom. The savings to be made by flagging out were unquestionably considerable, even making due allowance for exaggeration. In 1987 the Netherlands tanker-owner, Van Ommeren, said that crew costs on its Netherlands-flagged ships were up to US$1 million a year higher than on flagged-out competitors. Later in the same year the Danish Shipowners' Association said that it could halve its members' crew costs by shifting to the Isle of Man flag. In 1988 the Japan Shipowners' Association, in making its case for replacing Japanese seafarers, said that employment costs for an 11-person Japanese-crewed ship were US$1.5 million a year compared with US$0.4 million a year for a South-East Asian crew of 22 persons.

The industry's mounting preoccupation with crew costs was a reflection of trading conditions. The 1980s were disastrous for shipping – and by far the worst decade since the 1930s. The problem was essentially twofold. On the one hand, the structural readjustments in the world economy led, in 1981, to a substantial fall in aggregate seaborne world trade and then in freight rates. Subsequent recovery was prolonged; trade did not climb back to the 1980 levels until 1988 and freight rates thereafter generally showed only gradually modest improvement despite short-lived booms in most trades at some time or other. On the other hand, and despite very high scrapping rates in the mid-1980s, there was the continuing question of too many ships and the upstream problem of surplus capacity in world shipbuilding.

The world trade downturn would probably have been more manageable but for the glut of ships. The rapid and state-sponsored growth of shipbuilding capacity in parts of Eastern Europe, Japan and the industrializing countries in South-East Asia and Latin America, coupled with protective policies everywhere in Europe and the United States, meant that until the early 1980s new ships were plentiful and cheap. Many of these ships had been ordered in the 1970s when, on the basis of the then recent history, it could seem reasonable to expect continual growth in world trade; however, others (and many of them) were bought speculatively at what seemed to be bargain prices. At the same time, relatively modern and well-found general cargo ships, which were being driven out of liner trade routes by the rapid advance of containerization, could be bought cheaply and then sent in search of a share in the contracting break-bulk trades. The structural problem facing the industry was straightforward and can be simply summarized. A slump in world trade and a glut of ships produced a spate of intense competition and the inevitable accompanying drive to cut costs.

As we have already seen, labour was inevitably the first target for cost reduction, even though crew costs as a proportion of voyage costs had been falling steadily since the 1960s. By the 1980s labour productivity had already been substantially increased by a series of capital substitutions. Containerization, new techniques in cargo handling and stowage and automated engine rooms had produced a steady reduction of crewing levels in new ships. There were also productivity gains in older ships. The reorganization of deck and catering departments, the introduction of general purpose ratings and planned maintenance systems also led to reductions in crew size. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding, crew costs remained the only substantially variable element in the voyage costs equation.

In many cases the labour costs savings could only be found in the first instance by avoiding the sophisticated labour regulatory regimes that had evolved in the traditional maritime nations and by taking advantage of the relatively cheap labour to be found – first in Asia from the 1970s and then in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s. The route to labour regulation avoidance was already available in the shape of the free registries. Originally established with United States government support in the 1920s in the case of Panama and the late 1940s in the case of Liberia, these flags had for many years very successfully allowed American shipowners to recruit foreign crews. Their overriding objective was to avoid American crew labour costs which in world competitive terms were prohibitive. The fact that they and other owners using the Liberian and Panamanian flags mostly employed European seafarers under European terms and conditions was not to last. As soon as the downturn in trading conditions began to bite, those owners who were already flagged out had an immediate competitive advantage because of their unrestricted ability to recruit cheaper crews from other world regions. In these circumstances the owners using national flags with sophisticated labour legislation generally had no choice but to follow suit. With an offshore registry system in place and with a marked turn away from the politics of social democracy and toward free market policies in most traditional maritime nations, the process of flagging by shipowners who had previously been strongly opposed to the system was relatively uncomplicated.

A number of the traditional maritime nations (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Germany) developed a variety of second-register alternatives to flagging out. While these measures delivered the same domestic labour “avoidance” solutions sought by shipowners they did retain some aspects of labour regulation. In the case of the Norwegian and Danish second registers (NIS and DIS), for example, the Norwegian and Danish trade unions were actually present during collective bargaining meetings setting wage rates for seafarers from the new labour-supply countries aboard NIS and DIS ships.

While the labour cost reductions from flagging out produced immediate benefits, shipowners also looked closely at the costs of ship maintenance and their own shore-based organizations. On-board maintenance, adversely affected by hiring less experienced crews, was partly addressed by the long-established expedient of hiring temporary auxiliary labour. Just as owners in the West African and South-East Asian trades had historically hired local labour for local coastal circuits, owners began hiring skilled workers, often from Eastern Europe, as “riding crews” – to do at sea what had once been done either by larger crews or by port labour at voyages' end.

The owners' own organizational cost savings frequently found radical solutions. In-house management buyouts or the establishment of wholly owned but self-sufficient subsidiaries of technical and personnel management services were extremely common among many of the larger shipping companies. Through a subsequent series of mergers and takeovers, these subsidiaries evolved into the major European and Pacific/Asian ship-management companies of the 1990s.

As far as the shift to free registries was concerned, all decisions to adopt new sovereignties were in every case determined by the individual circumstances of individual shipowners. This inevitable fragmentation of decision-making reflected the ownership structure of the industry; namely that in every sector – although more in some than in others – ships were owned in small “lots” by a very large number of owners, even if ownership was still heavily concentrated among nationals of the United States, Japan and European States. It therefore followed that it was effectively impossible for any one owner to act upon a personally held view that the longer term collective impact of a host of individual flagging-out decisions would be negative. Seafarers from South-East Asia, and principally from Indonesia and the Republic of Korea and, above all, the Philippines, were the newcomers to the world fleet. Apart from India, which had been providing crews for European ships on a large scale since the middle of the nineteenth century, the new supply countries were very new indeed. In the ILO's report to the Second Asian Maritime Conference in 1965,^[15] Korean seafarers received no mention whatsoever and Indonesians and Filipinos were reported as working on small inter-island ships. Small numbers of both nationalities had in fact worked on a few Netherlands- and United States-owned ships – but not on a scale sufficient to provide the basis for a rapid and large expansion into international shipping. A similar situation applied to Koreans; indeed, small numbers of them, domiciled in Japan, had for many years sailed on Japanese ships. And yet by 1988 there were estimated to be 50,000 Korean seamen, half of them working aboard Japanese-owned ships, flagged mainly in Panama. Only six years later, in 1994, and in a neat illustration of price sensitivities in the seafarers' labour market, shipowners of the Republic of Korea were pressing their Government to be allowed to employ Chinese seafarers who could be paid half the Korean wage.

The move offshore not only led to the recruitment of large numbers of seafarers on account of lower costs but also resulted in a massive decline in nautical training and education in the traditional maritime nations and a growing reliance on the under-resourced, inexperienced and poorly regulated training and educational colleges in the new labour-supply countries. The initial gap in relative standards between the “old” and the “new” sources of seafarers was inevitably wide. In the last 20 years the training quality gap has narrowed. Training standards have advanced most in the more rapidly developing regions/nations of Asia such as the Republic of Korea. Hong Kong, China, and Singapore, although sites of excellent training standards have meanwhile ceased to be significant suppliers of seafarers. Whereas in 1964 Hong Kong, China, had some 45,000 seafarers, this had declined to 2,088 in 1992, even though the Hong Kong-owned and managed fleet had grown to 1,233 ships.

It is clear that the move to flexible international registries and the employment of seafarers from new labour-supplying countries is mainly due to cost considerations.

A report of the French Economic and Social Council concerning the causes and consequences of the sinking of the Erika referred to “the development of flags of convenience” as “the creation of an international market for maritime labour in which the logic is a race to the lowest social denominator”. It added that expenses relating to the crew (salaries, social protection, training and recruitment) were primarily targeted in order to reduce the operating costs of a ship. The report examined in detail the impact of these cost reductions and concluded that the major industrial countries “had entered in the spiral of a race to the lowest social denominator” by the creation of registries aimed at competing “by using an international labour force under international labour market conditions” (see appendix).

In its 1997 annual report, the Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control noted a dramatic increase in deficiencies in relation to working and living conditions, observed as a result of a concentrated inspection campaign on these issues. It concluded that “the increased figures may also indicate that some shipowners are now trying to save costs and cut corners at the expense of the well-being of the crew on board”. It added that “if this is the case, port States have to be vigilant to ensure that such a trend is reversed”.

This pressure to cut costs has been a long-running one. In order to counter these competitive pressures to cut operating costs, governments have acted through the IMO to impose minimum standards through conventions, agreements and codes, such as the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping (STCW, 1995) and the International Safety Management Code (ISM code).

The responsibility to do the same as concerns crew conditions lies with the industry. However, since voluntary action is unlikely, in view of competitive pressures, responsibility for initial action lies with governments. Shipowners and seafarers may wish governments to be more forceful in imposing minimum standards where they are relevant.

The industry has a powerful need for a self-confident, proud and highly skilled workforce; however, more coherence and quality in training and education will not in itself be sufficient. There are also the pressing social and human rights issues associated with crew composition and size, wage levels, continuity of employment, health and safety, the quality of shipboard life and, above all and quite fundamentally, an unfailing recognition of the seafarer's need for dignity and respect. None of these issues can be properly dealt with without appropriate regulation of the labour market at the global level.

Regulatory regimes and employment

During the latter decades of the twentieth century, it was government policy in most industrialized countries to engage in a process of deregulation of the labour market. In the shipping industry the elaborate networks of institutions of the traditional maritime nations concerned with regulating seafaring labour have experienced a process of attrition as national labour markets have had to give way in the face of a global labour market. Both with respect to safety standards and labour market regulation, the world's shipping industry is undergoing a transitional stage. The regime of national regulation in shipping has been weakened – a logical consequence of increasing globalization. However, the industry is rediscovering that an orderly labour market is an asset to the industry as a whole. Despite the fact that the role of international regulations is fully recognized, as regards technical issues relating to the ship and its operation, the need for global regulation of conditions of work and life through the relevant ILO standards is not so fully appreciated.

By the 1970s, after more than a century's development, the structures, institutions and organizations concerned with seafarers looked remarkably similar in all the traditional maritime nations. Political systems and practices naturally varied from country to country; but whether it was Japan, France or the Nordic countries, the State, shipowners, seafarers and various ancillary organizations (typically with charitable status in Europe) had developed ways of working together to produce systems of “regulation”. The market was “regulated” through a legal framework which specified standards of technical competence, shipboard safety, work discipline, accommodation and victualling, and crew engagement and discharge – including the keeping of registers of seafarers. Training and education was provided by the State or state-supported institutions with governing bodies based upon “constituency of interest” principles. The terms and conditions of employment and crew recruitment were settled and supervised by corps of permanent officials working to agreed rules and precedents agreed by representatives of shipowners and seafarers. National and local committees considered matters of health and welfare.^[16]

Shipowners and seafarers' representatives, examiners and surveyors, senior civil servants, nautical college principals, missions' chaplains and officers of various charitable organizations in their specific roles – but also as members of various industry-based committees – took part in a “regulatory system” which was so similar in its effects and applied to such a large proportion of the world's internationally trading ships, that it effectively set international standards or applied them. In this context, ILO standards were applied, sometimes without ratification. This “regulatory system”, where the actors were familiar with ILO standards, acted as a vehicle for the application of the relevant instruments. The reason for the weakening of the system in the context of increasing globalization lay not so much in its standards but in its dependence on national institutions. As soon as it became possible for shipowners to make substantial short-term reductions in labour costs by flagging out, the inevitable consequence was the dismantling of regulatory systems which had been nurtured by the traditional players of the shipping industry.

Moreover, in countries with increasingly large registers, there are few representative organizations of the social partners, especially of seafarers. Consequently, there is no national tripartite machinery for the consideration of labour issues. The national consultations required in the application of ILO standards do not function properly. There is no national lobby to give priority to maritime labour issues and, as a result, progress on these issues is slow.

The extent of the decline of the seafaring labour forces in a selection of some of the traditional maritime nations is indicated first in table 2.1, which compares the period 1935 to 1965, and second in a more recent period – 1968-92 (table 2.2).


Country	1968	1974	1982	1992	1992 % 1968

Denmark	18 145	17 641	14 442	7 722	43
France	28 849	18 858	11 630	7 004	23
Germany	44 161	31 914	24 562	18 747	43
Greece	39 835	51 096	46 021	n.a.	–
Italy	35 479	n.a.	n.a.	34 170	96
Netherlands	25 570	13 719	16 117	10 530	41
Norway	57 504	39 738	35 216	40 055	70
Spain	16 990	24 458	18 406	10 229	60
Sweden	17 160	13 946	12 102	14 209	83
United Kingdom	121 750	112 721	53 772	33 037	27

n.a. = not available. Source: OECD: Maritime Transport, op. cit.

The global labour market

The global labour market is now a reality for most of the world's seafarers, except for those working in the coastal and near-sea trades of either the world's economically developing regions or developed countries with cabotage policies. There are, of course, still a large number of internationally trading, nationally flagged ships crewed by nationals but, with the exception of China, none of these fleets are large. China, now the only nation with a sizeable fleet of merchant ships crewed by nationals who have been trained and certificated in a well-regulated system of colleges and universities, also licenses manning agents to supply seafarers for foreign-flagged ships. Elsewhere in the world, the national flag flown by a ship rarely corresponds to the nationality of a significant proportion of the crew. The world's largest fleets are attached to either flags of convenience or second registers and the nationalities of these fleets' crews do not correspond with the flags of their ships.

The now global labour market for seafarers has two obvious defining characteristics. First, it has no nationality restrictions, so that a seafarer of any nationality may be recruited. Second, recruitment is highly organized through extensive global networks linking shipowners, ship managers, crew managers, labour-supply agencies and training institutions. The inclusive nature of the market and the existence of an efficient globally integrated supply chain make it in principle a relatively straightforward matter for buyers of labour to arrange and rearrange crew composition at will.

The most comprehensive study available of the global supply of seafarers estimates that there are 404,000 officers and 823,000 ratings.^[17] The worldwide demand for seafarers is estimated to be 420,000 officers and 599,000 ratings. Consequently, there seems to be a shortfall of about 16,000 officers and a surplus of ratings. Increasingly, seafarers are from the east of Asia, the Indian subcontinent and eastern Europe. Seafarers from OECD countries constitute some 27.5 per cent of the global maritime workforce – compared to 31.5 per cent in 1995.

The recent SIRC crew survey estimates that during the 1998-99 period the total number of seafarers at sea aboard ships was 934,000 persons (see table 2.4). In the international trading fleet some 20 per cent of seafarers are Filipino. Other large nationality groups working in “open” registry ships are Indian, Russian, Polish and Chinese. Crewing levels stabilized during the 1990s; indeed, the large reductions that were predicted in the 1980s as ships became even more automated failed to materialize. The average crew size in 1998-99 for bulkers was 20; reefers, 20; tankers, 24; containerships, 20; and chemical tankers, 20. Fuller detail of crewing levels by size and type of ship is shown in table 2.3.

Mixed nationality crews are hardly a new phenomenon – but what makes the modern mixed-nationality crew distinctive is the extent to which it is consciously composed. The examples of crew selections of three specialist ships operating in European near-sea trades and seen in tables 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 show that the composition of the multinational crew is the result of clear policy and not chance. Crew composition is contingent upon language compatibility, availability of skills and many other factors. Mixing seafarers of different origins to compose crews to attain objectives of cost and efficiency requires specialist knowledge. Therefore, in today's shipping industry where crews are assembled from different national groups, a global organizational capacity is essential. It is no doubt for this reason that a growing number of shipowners hire ship-management companies to organize their crew management for them. The scale of the crewing requirements of the larger ship-management companies and the range of owners' crew preferences these companies have to satisfy, inevitably involves them in linkages with local manning agencies, local training institutions and local trade unions. Furthermore, since ship-management companies are constantly trying to cut costs they are in the vanguard of the search for potential new sources of seafaring labour. And by the very fact that they have to search and establish connections, they play a key role in shaping and sustaining the global labour market. Ship-management companies may not, for example, have been the first to have spotted the opportunities provided by the opening up of Eastern Europe; but firms like Barber International and Acomarit were quick to establish a major presence in Poland and the Russian Federation.

Tables 2.8 to 2.17 are based on data from SIRC surveys of crew composition in 1992-93 and 1998-99 and show clear patterns in the global labour market. The variation in the degree of labour market contributions from the different countries in the two periods may reflect the more extensive base of data collection in the later period but the general trends are probably correct. For example, tables 2.8 and 2.9, giving the predominant crew nationalities to be found aboard selected nationally flagged fleets, shows increases in the numbers of nationals of the Philippines and China. Tables 2.10 and 2.11 show a decrease in the percentage of non-nationals employed as officers on the flags listed except for the United States. Tables 2.12 and 2.13 show that, for almost all nationalities, there is an increase in the numbers employed on FOC vessels. However, in the fleets of Liberia and Cyprus, there were fewer ships with a mix of more than three nationalities among the officers (tables 2.14 and 2.15). On the other hand, tables 2.16 and 2.17, listing numbers of nationalities in whole crews, show relatively little change; in each of the selected flag fleets in 1998-99, approximately one-quarter had four or more nationalities in their crews.

Table 2.8. Percentage contribution of selected nationalities to crews, 1992-93


Flag	*Nationality as percentage of total crews**
Flag	Ph	Ko	Prc	It	Ru	Cro	In	Pol	BI	Nor	Ger

Panama	17	16	12	10	8	7	–	4	5	–	–
Liberia	27	10	–	1	9	10	12	2	4	1	–
Bahamas	28	–	–	–	–	7	8	25	5	–	–
NIS	52	–	–	–	3	3	13	6	3	13	–
St. Vincent and the Grenadines	26	–	–	–	–	44	–	–	7	–	–
Bermuda	25	–	–	–	–	–	30	–	33	–	–
Antigua and Barbuda	49	–	–	–	4	–	–	18	–	–	21
Cyprus	31	–	–	4	9	4	2	10	–	–	5
Malta	17	–	20	–	–	–	–	5	–	2	–
Hong Kong, China	37	–	–	–	–	–	9	–	28	–	–

* Nationality key: Ph: Filipino; Ko: Korean (Rep. of Korea); PRC: Chinese; It: Italian; Ru: Russian; Cro: Croatian; In: Indian; Pol: Polish; BI: British and Irish; Nor: Norwegian; Ger: German.

Table 2.9. Percentage contribution of selected nationalities to crews, 1998-99


Flag	*Nationality as percentage of total crews**
Flag	Ph	Ko	PRC	It	Ru	Cro	In	Pol	BI	Nor	Ger

Panama	46	5	12	–	1	<1	6	2	1	<1	<1
Liberia	32	<1	8	–	7	4	7	2	2	2	3
Bahamas	33	2	<1	<1	4	5	5	15	10	<1	<1
NIS	42	–	–	<1	1	1	7	12	5	24	<1
St. Vincent and the Grenadines	42	–	–	<1	28	21	–	<1	2	–	<1
Bermudas	57	–	–	–	<1	3	20	1	17	–	–
Antigua and Barbuda	21	–	–	–	8	1	<1	30	<1	<1	11
Cyprus	19	–	–	–	17	4	<1	11	1	–	2
Malta	29	–	–	4	10	3	14	8	<1	<1	<1
Hong Kong, China	15	–	55	–	–	–	28	–	2	–	–

* Nationality key: Ph: Filipino; Ko: Korean (Rep. of Korea); PRC: Chinese; It: Italian; Ru: Russian; Cro: Croatian; In: Indian; Pol: Polish; BI: British and Irish; Nor: Norwegian; Ger: German.

Table 2.10. Crew nationalities (officers) aboard selected national flag fleets, 1992-93

Table 2.11. Crew nationalities (officers) aboard selected national flag fleets, 1998-99

Table 2.14. Number of nationalities among officer corps of ships
with total crew size >10, selected flags, 1992-93

Table 2.15. Number of nationalities among officer corps of ships
with total crew size >10, selected flags, 1998-99

Table 2.16. Crew composition by number of nationalities aboard ships
of all sizes, selected flags, 1992-93

Table 2.17. Crew composition by number of nationalities aboard ships
of all sizes, selected flags, 1998-99

Preferences for particular nationalities and views about their “ability to mix” are unsurprisingly influential in deciding crew composition. The SIRC surveys reveal that citizens of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea are normally found only in single nationality crews and that when Russians sail in the company of other nationalities they do so usually in ones and twos rather than in larger groups. By contrast, the survey also shows that while Filipino, Polish and Indian seafarers frequently provide large proportions of crews, they are less likely to form whole crews in FOC ships. English language ability is probably the decisive factor in most of these cases. Where standards of English are relatively low, as is widely held to be the case among seafarers from the Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea, it is presumably prudent to employ them in homogeneous and monoglot crews. Indians, Filipinos and Poles are, on the other hand, thought to be sufficiently proficient in English and can therefore be more safely mixed with English-speaking senior officers of other nationalities.

Nationalities are also often chosen on the basis of what might be called interregional and intraregional preferences. In some of these cases preferences appear to be a residue of historic associations. It is noticeable that the only groups of Indonesians and West Africans found in the sample worked respectively in Netherlands and British ships, and that the largest employers of seafarers from the Republic of Korea were Japanese. Elsewhere, nationalities seem frequently to be selected on the basis of intraregional familiarity. There are a number of cases of Egyptian officers sailing with Greeks in what might be called a “Mediterranean association”; a “Baltic connection” might account for Poles providing a high proportion of the crews of small German and Norwegian ships; and a “South-East Asian connection” presumably explains the predominance of Malaysians, Thais and Indonesians aboard Singaporean ships. These nationality choices are not, however, essentially determined only by sentiment or cultural familiarity but by the relative prices of intraregional labour.

A good illustration of the implicit structuring of nationality choice by price can be seen in the crewing strategy of a European shipowner with a large fleet of Panamanian-flagged container and ro-ro ships in long-distance trades. Seven of this company's ships appeared in the SIRC 1992-93 survey, and in each of them the officer corps consisted of Italian and Croatian officers in that order of seniority. The petty officers and ratings were likewise employed in a consistent pattern of nationality and seniority except that this part of the crew had a triple-layered price structure. First and second were the “Western” and “Eastern” European layers consisting of Italians and Croatians. Third was the “developing country” layer, mainly Samoan or Malagasy.

The “big-picture” – the mainstream nationality patterns revealed by the surveys – are of course only cross-sectional representations of a particular moment in time. Earlier or later “snapshots” of the same owners' ships might well show different groupings of nationalities. In November 1992 a large products tanker owned by one of the oil majors had European officers and was otherwise manned by Filipinos. By April 1993, the ship had the same officer composition but the Filipinos had been replaced by Sierra Leonians. Such changes of crew sources within fleets and over a period of time are common. However, and as we shall see shortly, this does not mean that owners and managers are constantly transforming the crewing arrangements of their fleets or of selected individual ships. The 1998-99 SIRC survey found that the oil major mentioned above was still employing Sierra Leonian seafarers six years later.

Shipowners and ship managers will therefore usually keep a crew arrangement which gives satisfaction until forced by cost or other considerations. Crewing policies do change when acceptable nationality groups or combinations fall into disfavour. The labour market at any given moment is not, however, so anarchic and inconsistent that ships frequently sail with untried permutations of crew nationalities. The labour market may be fluid, but it is not characterized by large and rapid inflows and outflows over short time periods.

Women seafarers

On average, women account for about 7.6 per cent of the total seafaring labour force in EU ships. As shown in table 2.18, Swedish women seafarers (3,518) outnumber those from the other countries, with Danish women (1,478) and British women (1,463) following closely behind. Swedish women also outnumber other countries in terms of their percentage of the national total of seafarers. The proportion of women seafarers in Belgium (4.4 per cent), Germany (5.3 per cent), and the United Kingdom (4.7 per cent) are low.

Women's membership of seafarers' unions affords a similar picture. The International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) counts 9 per cent of women among its associated members in its Seafarers' Section.^[18] In the United Kingdom, women only account for 4.1 per cent of the membership in the country's two major seafarers' unions: the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT); and the National Union of Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport Officers (NUMAST). In Italy the Seafarers' Section of the Federation of Italian Transport Workers, one of the major seafarers' trade unions in the country with 6,130 members, has only ten women members.

The number and proportion of women cadets or students recruited in maritime education institutions confirms the equally low participation of female recruitment in the maritime industry. The ratio of male to female students at marine and nautical schools is 95:5 in the Netherlands; 96:4 in the United Kingdom; and 96:4 in Germany.

Worldwide estimates of the number of women working aboard vessels vary. In the 1990s, women's share of the total seafaring workforce was 5 per cent in Indonesia and Latvia, about 3 per cent in Australia and 0.5 per cent in New Zealand. In the Philippines, the biggest supplier of seafarers to the world merchant fleet, only 225 women out of 230,000 seafarers appeared on the national seafarers' register for 1983-90. In Manila, the newly opened Maritime Academy of Asia and Pacific (MAAP) has enrolled 150 students, among whom four are women. India has 43,000 registered seafarers, including three women. The Hong Kong Seamen's Union claims to have 7,000 members with residence in Hong Kong, China – and they are all men. In China, the China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (COSCO), a shipping company with the world's largest fleet with 600 vessels and 47,000 seafarers – and once internationally famous for its women-officers-only vessel, the East Wind, sailing internationally in the mid-1970s – has stopped employing any women on cargo ships since the mid-1980s.

Although women's participation rates in the industry vary internationally, occupational segregation is a consistent feature of the seagoing workforce. For example, the proportions of women among seafarers in Denmark and Germany are 15.1 per cent and 5.3 per cent, respectively. However, in Denmark as well as in Germany, the majority of the women are employed in the service and catering sectors. Women comprise over 21 per cent of the catering personnel as cooks and waitresses.^[19] In the United Kingdom, the Chamber of Shipping (COS) Fleet and Manpower Inquiry (1995) found that 81 per cent of female seafarers aboard all vessels fell within the category of ratings, whereas cadets and officers accounted for only 19 per cent of the total.

Such a severely segregated labour force in the EU fleet mirrors the gender construction of the seagoing labour force internationally. For instance, in Australia 62 per cent of women seafarers are employed as catering attendants and 86 per cent of Swedish women seafarers are hired in the commissariat/supply service on ferries. In Latvia, it has been reported that all the women seafarers are employed on merchant ships as cooks or stewardesses.

There are of course “successful” women working up to the top of the ship hierarchy. But their number is very small. Among the 1,603 German captains or ship leaders, for example, there are only four women. In the United Kingdom, BP Tankers with a long-standing commitment to training women officers, had only one woman Chief Officer in 1997. While China saw its last woman captain withdrawing from seafaring in 1994, the Philippines' first woman Third Officer started sailing early in 1999.

Recruitment and the labour market

Only in coastal shipping is the labour market not dominated by crew managers and manning agents. Especially in the coastal tramp and feeder container trades it is still possible for individual seafarers to find ships for themselves. Around the world – and especially in the large ports such as Rotterdam and Piraeus – there are small clusters of domiciled Portuguese, Latin Americans, Cape Verdeans, Filipinos, East and West Africans, Poles, Russians, Egyptians and Indonesians who have lodged themselves in the informal networks that find crews for small ships. Similar communities, though composed of a different range of nationalities, can also be found in the larger ports of Japan and Pacific Asia. But whether in Europe or Asia, these are often precarious communities living in the half-light of doubtful legal residence. Intermediaries from within these communities have historically played an important role in linking shipowners with seafarers and they still do so, but these local “brokers” or compradores only bear a superficial resemblance to the highly organized crew managers. As for the communities themselves? They may be no more than residues of the once large but transient cosmopolitan waterfront districts of the world's larger ports but they do fill an essential labour market niche. Apart from providing a significant proportion of crews for the smaller and hard-running ships working in coastal waters, they can also supply the limited numbers of seafarers needed to make up the complements of deep-sea ships unexpectedly obliged to land sick or injured crew members.

The employers operating a high proportion of the world fleet are able to consider seafarers of any nationality as potential employees; develop the organizational capacity to assemble crews of any permutation of nationality; collect reliable information on national groups; “experiment” by varying crew nationality composition patterns; and regularize relations with labour agencies, training establishments and trade unions in the countries of origin.

The structure of the labour-supply chain in the global market for maritime labour is fairly simple. Where shipowners or ship managers operate large fleets, overall manning policies are decided at senior management level and then made operational by in-house personnel departments through their connections with manning agents and training institutions. For companies with a global reach which operate either in specialist niche markets or use technically sophisticated vessels, crew recruitment and retention require a high level of investment. Permanent staff have to be employed at both the “metropolitan” and the “peripheral” ends of the business; in-house training programmes have to be run; attractive employment contracts have to be offered to retain key personnel; and senior managers must travel the world to monitor peripheral offices, agencies and training institutions to ensure a flow of suitably qualified new recruits. Illustrations of what can be involved are contained in boxes 2.1 and 2.2.

Crewing organization is, on the other hand, unlikely to be run in a highly efficient way by the owners or managers “who deliberately avoid compliance with international rules and standards which govern safety and pollution prevention in the shipping industry”.^[20] In his opening address to the INTERTANKO 1993 conference, Chairman Andreas Ugland commented: “Poorly managed sub-standard vessels and poorly selected and inadequately trained crews go hand in hand.” A German underwriter speaking at the International Union of Marine Insurance (IUMI) Conference in the same year simply remarked that “desperate owners find desperate crews”. Owners and managers fitting these descriptions more often than not turn to one of the very large number of smaller agencies in the various labour-supply countries who provide seafarers – but typically with little regard to either their abilities or their state of health. Where the supply of labour greatly exceeds demand, as in the case of ratings and doubtfully qualified junior officers, would-be seafarers frequently find there is a gatekeeper's fee payable in cash, in services or in a combination of both.

Box 2.1

Barber pushes Polish solution to manning
by Rajesh Joshi
Oslo Correspondent

Barber group, the Kuala Lumpur-based ship-management arm of Norway's Wilhelm Wilhelmsen, claims to have found the perfect solution for the crewing needs of cost- and quality-conscious European shipowners: Polish seafarers.

Poland's Solidarity trade union and Barber are equal partners in Polish Manning Services, a Szczecin-based joint venture headed by a Norwegian former master and staffed by English-speaking personnel.

Barber claims to have developed a reliable hold over the market for Polish seafarers, thanks to Solidarity's national standing, Barber's own operational and manning expertise, and Polish Manning Services' close relationship with the Szczecin Maritime University.

About 600 Poles already serve as part of Barber's seafarer pool of 5,350-plus. About 170 cadets graduate annually from the Szczecin university, and Barber currently claims to be training 20 cadets, ten each on the deck and engine side.

Poland has never enjoyed the recognition of countries such as the Philippines and India when it comes to affordable seafarer supplies.

Barber managing director Petter Larsen in Oslo last week tried hard to rectify this anomaly. He felt Poland stood out as a notable exception in the Baltic region, compared with countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which tended to be small, and Russia, which was seen as somewhat complicated and requiring special effort and treatment.

In contrast, Barber's bullishness on Poland was based on the post-communism development of the country itself.

“Bureaucracy has been substantially cut, more and more Poles are travelling internationally, and they have an excellent education system”, Mr. Larsen said. “Polish seafarers are physically strong and hardworking, which makes them good matches for cold climates. They are always seen immaculately dressed but, more importantly, they come out of the marine academy well educated and well trained, and with a basic understanding of big shipping companies.”

Mr. Larsen cited the high technical competence of the Poles as another strong factor. The Szczecin university was said to have upgraded its technology, with radar equipment to handle radar observer and automatic radar plotting aid requirements being enhanced by the addition of engine and bridge simulators from Norway's sophisticated Norcontrol.

Besides, the Polish Manning Services office was said to function with the aid of a computerized personnel system equipped for all stages from screening and selection through to crew rotation and client interface.

Mr. Larsen said proficiency in the English language was still a factor when it came to dealings with the 45-plus age group, but was rapidly ceasing to matter among the younger generation thanks to travel and the popular media.

“At a time when there is a scarcity of good people, Poland is a simple solution”, Mr. Larsen said.

But Barber claimed that the market's awareness of this solution was so limited that last year it was actually forced to run advertisements in the Swedish press seeking suitable employment for its qualified but idle Polish recruits.

Polish Manning Services coordinates twice-a-year officer seminars in Szczecin, which are also an installed feature in the Barber group's operations in India, Norway and the Philippines. The latest such event was held in late November, providing Barber's Polish officers an opportunity to get updated on the latest developments.

In this context Mr. Larsen identified safety and competence as increasingly important factors in the future. He said that Barber's Polish hand was strengthened by the fact that the Szczecin university's course section had IMO and STCW courses including courses in tanker safety, advanced fire-fighting and GMDSS.

Source: Lloyd's List (London), 11 Jan. 1999, p. 2.

Box 2.2

Communication skills and an understanding of the seafarer's mentality are a prerequisite for a manning agency, says Baltic Marine's general manager Jersy Przybyt, a former chief engineer with extensive deep-sea experience.

An ability to match individuals with client ship-management companies' precise needs and do it consistently is crucial to an agency's competitiveness. But effectiveness is not only a matter of vetting procedures and organization, but also very much a factor of proficiency in being able to judge people who make their livelihoods in circumstances unlike those in any other field of employment.

The personal touch, coloured perhaps by first-hand knowledge of the insensitive or offhand treatment seafarers often experience on shore when seeking a position or dealing with a job-related problem, marks the Gdynia-based company's approach.

This in turn has a bearing on efficiency and competitiveness, argues Mr. Przybyt, since it raises the agency's reputation among seafarers and helps attract long-term commitments from both sides.

Run by a staff of ten from refurbished offices in the centre of Gdynia, Baltic Marine is a 100 per cent subsidiary of Baltic Marine (Isle of Man), with which it has an exclusive agency agreement.

The Isle of Man firm is in turn controlled by another company within the German-owned Schulte Group. The Polish agency accordingly concentrates on supplying seafarers to five ship-management companies within the group, namely Atlantic Marine in Hamilton, Bermuda, the Isle of Man-based Dorchester Maritime, Eurasia Shipping & Management in Hong Kong, and the Limassol-based undertakings Hanseatic Shipping and Navigo Management.

As well as heading all agency matters relating to Baltic Marine, Jerzy Przybyt also acts as local representative for Dorchester Maritime.

The various affiliates of the Hamburg-headquartered Schulte organization manage more than 200 vessels, and the group's interests also include two crewing agencies in the Philippines and another in Bombay.

Baltic Marine came into being in 1987 as the group's representative in Poland, and as a joint venture of Atlantic Marine and Hanseatic Shipping. Two years later, Baltic Marine Warsaw became a branch office of Dorchester Maritime, providing services to the group as a whole. An additional office was subsequently established in Gdynia, to which the entire Polish operation was moved in 1992 as a Polish limited liability company with an Isle of Man parent. It acts purely as an intermediary, in that it does not enter into contracts with the seafarers, who are employed by their respective Schulte ship-management entities. The fact that rates of pay are common to all five companies concerned helps simplify matters from a recruitment and placement point of view. Since the formation of the company, the number of Polish seafarers employed has risen from 200 to more than 1,000 per year, covering all types of tonnage. Certain ships are crewed throughout by Polish nationals.

Baltic Marine has 3,000 officers and ratings on its list. Full details of all registered seafarers can be made available to clients immediately. Ship-management companies are increasingly selective as to the people they engage, says Mr. Prsybyt. They want good professional qualifications and shipboard experience. For instance, clients more often than not now seek specific familiarity with certain types of machinery, particularly as regards medium-speed diesels, when calling for engineers.

Demand for Polish mariners is buoyant because of wage costs that are typically 30 per cent lower than those of their north-west European counterparts. Mr. Prsybyt says the calibre of seafarers has risen both in terms of professional qualifications and specialized areas of training.

Baltic Marine has its own English language lecturers and up-to-date language training facilities. Courses typically span eight hours per day over a three-week period, and such is the requirement from the industry that the agency is hoping to double its throughput by engaging a third and fourth English language teacher.

Mr. Przybyt is convinced that the emphasis placed on special training as well as careful selection has had much to do with positive feedback received in the past two years regarding the quality of people supplied. He is accordingly looking at expanding this vital area of activity either by setting up a new division or creating an independent Polish company concentrating on seafarers' training. He is also examining the scope for moving into other areas, including technical services and spare parts/ship repair agency.

Source: Lloyd's List (London), 27 May 1994.

Seafarers' hostels and bars in the very large ports of the world are still places where seafarers go to learn if jobs are available – although not to the same extent as in the past. However, in Rizal Park in Manila, there is a daily street market where several hundreds assemble every day in the uncertain hope of finding a job (see box 2.3).

Most of the new professional seamen entrants from Eastern Europe were originally trained by the State at no cost to themselves. And the same applies in the main to seafarers from the traditional maritime nations of Europe and Japan. In the new labour-supply nations of South and South-East Asia this has rarely been the case; at some stage in the process of entry to the industry, costs have been incurred by recruits and their families. These costs may have involved payment for training in private schools of doubtful quality; further payment for certification; and, very often, the recruitment fee itself, payable to the manning agent. These illegal payments are long-standing malpractices well known in the industry.^[21] Throughout South and South-East Asia and increasingly in the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and the former Soviet bloc nations of the Black Sea rim, such gatekeeper fees have become routine and taken for granted. Both the existence and the magnitude of the entry costs ensure the exclusion from the labour market of those who cannot afford such a fee. They also reflect the high value placed upon dollar-earning employment at levels often impossible to obtain in the indigenous labour markets.

The growing cruise industry recruits women crew members (up to 30 per cent of the crew) in completely different ways according to their national origins. Western women mainly rely on advertisements to find jobs with cruise lines. Some women are recruited through “word of mouth” from friends or relatives; but they are in the minority. Crewing agents in the West adopt practices which are different from their counterparts in Asia. In the United Kingdom, for example, the agents' main role is to collect information on job vacancies in the industry and sell it in the form of booklets or newsletters to applicants. Normally, they do not provide training or even conduct interviews with applicants. Their contact with the potential seafarer is primarily by phone, fax, e-mail or post. Except for the cost of the information they provide, they do not charge individual seafarers for the jobs they help them find.

The recruitment and training experienced by Asian women are significantly different. First of all, these women depend upon friends and relatives for information and rely mainly on crewing agents – not only for recruitment but also for training which is a thriving business in many countries. Indeed, a recent study found that all cruise companies use crewing agents to recruit seafarers and 74 per cent of the companies surveyed use agents working exclusively for certain cruise lines.^[22]

English tests are employed by many agents, especially in Ukraine and other non-English-speaking countries, to screen the applicants for shortlists. Maximum age limits and minimum years of service in hotels or restaurants (12 months in most cases) are usually set to ensure that the industry gets a young, energetic but somewhat experienced workforce. Age requirements for women are much stricter than those set for men. In the Philippines, for instance, the ceiling for men to be employed on cruise ships is 40 years old, while for women, it is 29.

The bigger and better regulated crewing agents in Asia and Eastern Europe tend to have a steady pool of seafarers for their main clients or “principles” and these seafarers are trained or retrained before they sign on ships. In this case, there is usually no charge incurred for the seafarers. Many of the crewing agents are however small and less sophisticated. They often charge seafarers, in violation of accepted standards and legislation, for their services and overcharge for sub-standard training. In the Philippines, according to a study conducted in 1998 on seafarers employed in a major cruise company based in Miami, it is typical for a seafarer, woman or man, to pay an agency fee of 45,000-60,000 pesos (US$1,200-1,500) to get a job on a cruise ship. The money is said to cover the return trip airfare with an open return ticket, the seafarer's visa and the medical exam totalling US$1,100-1,300. The difference goes to the agent.^[23]

A financial bond is employed by some crewing agents to ensure that the seafarers employed through their service complete the contract to the full satisfaction of the cruise company. There are also cases of seafarers being cheated out of their money by “flying agents” – agents who collect fees and bonds from seafarers and disappear without providing any service.

Trade unions and collective bargaining

Well-organized trade unions and national collective bargaining institutions were at the heart of the labour market regulatory systems in the traditional maritime nations. The rapid decline of these countries' fleets since the 1970s has, of course, been accompanied by declining union memberships. Trade union influence, however, has remained significant, especially in Europe, Australasia, Japan and the United States, where unions have continued to play an important political role in the development of policies aimed at fighting sub-standard shipping. In the 1990s, informal and mostly tacit alliances with shipowners, insurers, classification societies and Protection and Indemnity Clubs (P&I Clubs) significantly contributed to the substantial progress in extending effective port state control measures and institutions. Port state control may have had little effect on the employment possibilities for seafarers in the traditional maritime nations but it has unquestionably made a major contribution towards the stabilization of the global maritime labour market.

The trade unions of traditional maritime nations still play a considerable role in the global labour market. Many of them influence the labour market through their affiliation to the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) and also through the negotiation of wages and conditions of work for seafarers serving on the second international/open registries. The role that the Norwegian trade unions played in the creation of the Norwegian second register in 1987, when they gave support to Norwegian shipowners, is an example of this. Part of the quid pro quo for this support was the involvement of the Norwegian unions in setting wage rates and ensuring collective bargaining agreements for foreign seafarers (principally Indian and Filipino) working aboard NIS ships. The impact of the Norwegian influence on the Filipino labour market was almost instantaneous: European shipowner employment of Filipino seafarers increased by 83 per cent in 1986-87.

More recently, some of the Danish trade unions have established a similar transnational bargaining role with Danish shipowners in respect of DIS crews. This possibility has not been open to British trade unions in respect of the British group of registries. The United Kingdom's national collective bargaining machinery, the National Maritime Board, was dismantled in the mid-1980s. The German maritime union, OTV, does not play any part in negotiations between German shipowners and foreign trade unions regarding collective agreements for German second register ships.

There is no doubt that developed systems for collective bargaining in many traditional maritime nations have declined in importance or disappeared. And it is also clear that such systems did not originally exist in most new labour-supply countries – especially in relation to seafarers employed on foreign flag vessels. The Norwegian employers, followed by the Danes, started to change matters by having a collective agreement in India and the Philippines covering NIS vessels, and this pattern has followed elsewhere, e.g. in Latvia, Poland and China. The International Maritime Employers' Committee (IMEC) entered the business in 1994 by establishing a negotiating system in India and the Philippines covering ITF-approved agreements.

The Norwegian seafarers' trade unions have also had a considerable influence on ship-management company practice as a whole. Given that Norwegian ship-management companies such as Barber International commonly have collective bargaining agreements in labour-supply countries, others have been obliged to follow in their attempts to attract well-trained seafarers. By 1993 Barber had actually established an agency in Poland in cooperation with Solidarity – though not all ship-management companies were keen on union involvement. When BP Tankers flagged out its fleet to Bermuda and the Isle of Man and awarded crew management contracts to Wallem, Acomarit and the Schulte subsidiary, Dorchester Maritime Limited, in 1986, all three companies refused to agree on negotiating rights with the British ships' officers' union, NUMAST.

Among the labour-supply countries of Asia, India was initially the only nation to have well-established trade unions which, like those in Europe and Japan, were active participants in an intricate tripartite regulatory system. Until the 1970s, much of the Indian union's membership worked aboard British-, Norwegian- and Danish-flagged ships; however, since the 1950s, growing numbers had been employed in the new state-owned shipping companies. The seafarers' unions of the Republic of Korea and the Philippines only became firmly established when their countries became large suppliers of labour in the 1980s.

The actual extent to which the trade unions of the labour-supply countries are directly involved in the national collective bargaining machinery varies. In some cases, the presence of collective bargaining arrangements does not extend much beyond the union signifying its agreement to the terms of the contract of employment. These agreements are frequently not normally discussed in any permanent or standing bodies capable of dealing with disputes or grievances as they arise. Shipboard representational schemes are extremely rare. The International Ship Managers' Association (ISMA) Code of Ship Management Standards does require procedures for dealing with complaints and/or grievances from or about personnel but makes no reference to trade union representation – although this does not of course preclude the possibility of such machinery being provided for. The possibility of disputes, grievances, etc., being dealt with at ports of call by trade union organizations is also low. It is not common for the trade unions of the new labour-supply countries to have arrangements with foreign trade unions. Even the more experienced and organizationally efficient trade unions of the traditional maritime nations have never been enthusiastic about ceding representational services to other unions except in pressing emergencies. Furthermore, the limitations placed by turnaround times and the remoteness of many port locations, as well as the lack of personal skills required to register complaints effectively, all combine towards severely restricting the possibility of trade union involvement during the period of engagement aboard ship.

The ITF has been instrumental in bringing together trade unions from labour-supply countries and traditional maritime nations, including those having a second register. The impact of the ITF's role has been to strengthen the influence of trade unions of labour-supply countries while maintaining that of the unions of traditional maritime countries.

The extent to which trade union organizations are represented in the shipping industry is best reflected by the ITF. In 1999 it covered 235 unions from 97 countries with a total declared membership of 660,059, representing approximately 66 per cent of the global maritime labour force. Apart from the trade unions of China, most of the world's maritime organizations are ITF affiliates.

The number of ITF-affiliated maritime unions increased by 10 per cent between 1994 and 1998, although their combined membership fell by 9 per cent. This tends to suggest a diminution in the size of national maritime unions, a phenomenon that is most apparent in the “traditional” maritime countries. The Federation also maintains an inspectorate consisting of 105 inspectors in 39 countries. In 1998, 6,187 inspections were carried out – 87 per cent of which were on vessels listed by the ITF as FOC registered.

The ITF is formally an international federation of trade unions. It is a hub for receiving and passing information to and from its affiliated unions because the structure of the modern shipping industry makes it impossible for a single nationally based union to influence significantly their members' employment situation, especially when they work on foreign vessels. The ITF, as well as being an international federation of affiliated national maritime unions, has become an international trade union in its own right, through its “Special Seafarers' Department” (SSD). The SSD also coordinates the industrial side of the ITF's FOC campaign. Membership of the SSD is open to all seafarers who sail on FOC vessels or “other such ships as the FPC (the ‘Fair Practices Committee' of the ITF which has responsibility for the FOC campaign) may decide”.^[24] In 1996, there were about 10,000 members of the SSD.

The ITF attempts to negotiate terms and conditions of employment with shipowners of vessels registered outside their country of ownership. To this end it focuses its efforts on flags of convenience and other offshore fleets. The ITF usually makes no attempt at regulation on national flag fleets except in circumstances where it decides that “local” practices undermine its global objectives. It also attempts to secure legislation in those matters which are beyond the reach of standard collective bargaining. The ITF, through its membership of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), therefore seeks to establish working partnerships with other shipping industry constituencies to create laws and Conventions on matters of health and safety, training and education, etc. – all of which contribute to seafarers' well-being. The ITF and the ICFTU are therefore active in many international forums such as the IMO and the ILO.

In the IMO, shipowners are represented by the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and the International Shipping Federation (ISF). The ISF and ITF are the main organizations representing shipowners and seafarers in the ILO and they therefore exercise considerable influence at the international level on the many labour issues which are of interest to the shipping industry. The ITF also negotiates with the IMEC on wages and other conditions of work on vessels owned or managed by the IMEC's member companies, most of them operating in open registries.

The ITF has certain rules on union representation rights. It stresses the right of unions in the country of beneficial ownership to conclude agreements covering the vessels owned in these countries, irrespective of the seafarers' country of origin. This principle seems to provide a response to the internationalization of crewing, with a single trade union negotiating for seafarers of several nationalities who may be on the same vessel. It does not, however, encourage the reinforcement of trade unions in labour-supply countries, some of which might require assistance in this respect.

Training and certification

In an early evaluation of the economics of flagging out, G.N. Yannopoulos argued in 1988 that:

This assessment of the consequences of flagging has been borne out to a great extent. The sudden switch to employing seafarers from non-established sources, most of whom have not previously been employed on ocean-going ships, has unavoidably entailed a reduction in standards of competence.

Seafarers' training, education and certification have become increasingly prominent issues affecting the supply of seafarers, largely as a response to concerns among industry professionals about levels of crew competence. In the mid-1980s, a spate of reports from underwriters, the Salvage Association, shipmasters and maritime administrators in different parts of the world all questioned the adequacy of the quality of maritime education and training. Confidence was not enhanced when the maritime authority of a major supplier of seafarers said in 1990 that approximately 50 per cent of its seafarers had had no formal training. One of the oil majors announced that henceforth it would expect owners of chartered vessels to commit themselves to proper training programmes for staff and crew and to have a clear policy regarding safe navigation and watchkeeping. A year later, in 1991, the Hong Kong, China, maritime authorities refused to recognize Philippine licences for employment on Hong Kong-registered ships. The ban was subsequently lifted when it could be shown that security in the administration of the licensing system had been tightened (see box 2.4).

These issues were brought to a head in 1993 when prominent captains of industry such as Andreas Ugland complained of the wide variation in standards required for certificates of competence, ranging from high to dangerously low. Ugland then called for higher STCW standards, greater policing of standards by flag States, better training and education and port state control inspections to ensure STCW compliance. The maritime employers represented by the ISF requested the IMO to embark on a substantial revision in 1995 of the 1978 International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW Convention). Both the ISF and the ITF made considerable contributions to the shaping of the text of the revised Convention, including participation in sessions of the IMO/ILO Joint Committee on Training. The full application of STCW by 2002 is expected to result in an overall improvement in the standards of training. However, some countries are having difficulties in complying fully with the Convention. The imminent publication of the “IMO white list” will possibly reduce the supply of seafarers as some countries fail to qualify for the list. Further complications might arise: in 1999 the IMO initiated research into false certification and the ISF proposed measures to enable internet checks on the validity of certification. While it is likely that the problem of forged certificates is largely confined to sub-standard tonnage – variously estimated to be between 10 and 25 per cent of world shipping – there are indications that a large number of certificates are fraudulently issued by some officials of certain maritime authorities. Box 2.5 recounts one experience of a port state control inspector in the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s.

To date there is no globally accepted list of approved maritime training institutions. The IMO will be in a position to publish this information once it has received and processed the applications for inclusion on its “white list” of institutions which are in compliance with STCW-95. Although precise data is not available, the trends in training and education are well known. The number and range of training establishments in the traditional maritime nations has decreased substantially over the last 20 years, while there has been considerable growth in South and South-East Asia; in Eastern Europe, there has been a modest decline. The shift of training and education from the relatively prosperous northern hemisphere to the less prosperous southern hemisphere has inevitably led to an overall decline in standards of training since investment has not matched demand or output.

In the 1960s and 1970s considerable attempts were made, in the traditional maritime nations, to create a highly skilled and professional seafaring labour force at all levels of the shipboard division of labour. Since then, the situation has been steadily changing because of the decreasing demand for places in training institutions. Many colleges have closed, especially those specializing in training for non-officer ranks; meanwhile, the declining number of colleges specializing in officer training has been accompanied by an increasing demand from foreign students – upon whom the colleges have become more and more dependent. For some years the number of foreign students enrolled in the British, Irish and Australian colleges have greatly exceeded those of home students. Indeed, but for the foreign demand for places, more of these officer-training colleges would have closed. In more recent years there have been concerted attempts in Norway, the Netherlands and now the United Kingdom to arrest the decline in the training of nationals. In view of some efforts to recruit more cadets in developed countries, it is possible that there could be a greater demand for training places in the traditional maritime nations, particularly in Europe. There has been a noticeable convergence in wage rates between Europe and the new labour-supply countries – and rising port state control expectations in respect of standards of training and competency are likely to lead to some rebuilding of the European officer corps. European training standards in the 1990s have been at least maintained; however, further increments would signal a renewed commitment to professionalism and have a knock-on effect in the new labour-supply countries, where in some cases there is an urgent need for upgrading.

Recent research by the World Maritime University and SIRC, commissioned by the European Union, has produced an objective account of training provision and standards in China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Unsurprisingly, the research generally reports funding levels insufficient to match the general level of standards found in the traditional maritime nations. Relatively speaking, these are developing countries which cannot be expected to provide the high level of sophisticated equipment required to train high numbers of highly qualified seafarers for sophisticated vessels. The research does, nevertheless, report high overall training standards in China and India. The situation in Indonesia and the Philippines is quite different where most of the training provision comes from a large number of private institutions which are typically inadequately equipped and staffed.

Shipowners have recognized the limitations and requirements of training establishments in labour-supply countries and many of them have assisted in the upgrading of training facilities. For example, Norwegian and Japanese shipowners, individually and through their national associations, have been very active in the Philippines. They have invested in training facilities and provided technical assistance to training institutions. In India, training is supported by a voluntary training levy paid by Indian and foreign maritime employers. In the Philippines, IMEC has provided funds, raised through a training levy on the employment of Filipino seafarers, for the upgrading of training.

Outside the ship-management companies' personnel departments recruiting seafarers, there is little recent knowledge of current standards in Eastern Europe. The Polish system is widely held in high regard – but to what extent the colleges in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania have been able to maintain what were once regarded as high standards will be revealed by the IMO's current work on the “white list”.

As trading conditions have improved and regulatory requirements increased in recent years, there is some evidence of a renewed interest in crewing ships from top to bottom with well-trained multiskilled “professionals”. The United Kingdom Chamber of Shipping, for example, has expressed such views which have been echoed in Norway, the Netherlands and other countries. The possibility of transferring more routine and even upgrading maintenance to ships at sea has always been recognized, but giving effect to such a change has been inhibited by the lack of sufficiently skilled ratings and the need to reduce costs. Driving out sub-standard ships may not be possible unless there are possibilities for significantly upgrading the skills of all seafarers, including those of ratings.

Freedom of association and the right
to collective bargaining

The transfer of ships to registers of countries in which industrial relations in the shipping industry are not developed also poses problems relating to freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.

It has been reported that, in some cases, seafarers are prevented from joining trade unions. For example, a crew agreement may specifically state that the crew is not authorized to request assistance from a trade union in the event of a dispute over terms and conditions. In other cases, seafarers may be asked to sign a “letter of loyalty”, in which they undertake not to claim for benefits not covered by the contract and to refrain from contacts with international trade union organizations. The International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) has reported widespread blacklisting of seafarers in several countries, whereby seafarers have been unable to pursue a career at sea after raising contractual problems with trade unions.

Such abuses of the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining may also be linked to the compilation of lists by recruitment agencies to prevent seafarers from gaining further employment. This issue was discussed at the 84th (Maritime) Session of the International Labour Conference and resulted in the inclusion of an appropriate provision in the Recruitment and Placement of Seafarers Convention, 1996 (No. 179).

Wages

The shipping industry is a prime example of an increasingly globalized industry – a transnational industry which interacts with national boundaries but is not confined within them. The shipping industry differs from the common examples of global trade, such as McDonalds and other American franchises, due to its fixed capital being itself movable. The extensive fluidity, which defines the practice of shipping in the contemporary era, initially flows from this capital which is both fixed and mobile.

Due to this characteristic of the industry, the nature of the decisions that have to be taken within the shipping sector differ qualitatively from those made in other sectors. If manufacturing plant is to be built in a country yet to be determined, then the wage component of the equation is a “once-and-for-all” decision. If a cheaper – and adequately skilled but geographically displaced – source of labour becomes available, then the cost of utilizing this labour can become prohibitive. Either the plant has to be relocated, or the employer has to overcome national laws concerning the movement of labour. By contrast, many shipowners are able to operate effectively outside these constraints. Labour composition can then be altered with ease and it is possible to avoid operating in countries whose laws explicitly exclude foreign seafarers.

Where there is a relatively large pool of adequately skilled and mobile labour, the wage and employment market is more likely to be highly competitive, if not volatile. The mobility of ships and the decreasing incidence of intervention by national States and para-national organizations allow shipowners some freedom to set conditions of employment. These are therefore highly variable according to, inter alia, country, type of ship, trade route, etc. However, the facts show that wage differentials in the industry are still considerable, reflecting the gap between developed and less developed parts of the world.

The International Shipping Federation (ISF) conducts regular surveys of wage rates, and these show that there are large variations between the average monthly earnings of able seamen (AB) of different nationalities. While these surveys enable comparisons of wages between countries, care must be exercised as the wages expressed in United States dollars are sometimes dependent on currency fluctuations. In 1992, the survey showed that the average monthly earnings of a German AB (US$5,758) were 19 times higher than the earnings of a Bangledeshi AB (US$305). Average earnings in Hong Kong, China, and the United Kingdom were on a par with the level of average earnings for all countries surveyed (US$1,762). All nationalities earning above the international average were from either Western Europe or other developed parts of the world (United States, Australia, Japan and New Zealand).

The 1995 survey revealed that the average earnings for an AB had, since 1992, declined from US$1,762 to US$1,526. The above-average earning nationalities were more or less the same as in 1992 except that Sri Lankan seafarers had joined those earning more than the international average. The 1995 data also showed new, low-paid, labour-supplying countries in the global seafaring labour market. The gap between the lowest and highest average-earning countries still persisted, however, with the average earnings of ABs from Japan (US$9,349) being 33 times higher than the lowest average AB earnings of Bangladeshi seafarers (US$227).

The 1999 ISF survey pointed to further reductions in the average earnings of ABs – with a global average of US$1,318, accounting for only three-quarters of the 1992 average. The nationality composition above and below the overall average was still evident in 1999. There were large differences between the bottom and the top average AB earnings, with the top average earnings in the United States (US$5,550) being 16 times higher than the lowest average earnings in Papua New Guinea (US$342).

An analysis of the different national average monthly AB earnings between 1992 and 1999 shows that, regardless of nationality, average wage rates in absolute terms declined during this period. The ABs from the developed countries were particularly badly affected. In absolute terms the Australian ABs' average monthly earnings declined by 65 per cent over the seven-year period between 1992 and 1999 – compared to 53 per cent for Japanese and German ABs; 51 per cent for the Belgians; 43 per cent for the Danish; 49 per cent for the Dutch; 26 per cent for the Portuguese; and 14 per cent for the French. By contrast, wage rates for Brazilian, Bulgarian, Filipino, Indonesian, Latvian, and Russian ABs exhibited no significant change in absolute terms. Bangladeshi, Burmese, Chinese, Hong Kong, China, Indian and Polish ABs' monthly salaries increased between 25 and 91 per cent (in absolute terms). The highest pay rate increase was that of the Chinese (91 per cent) which, from its lowest point of US$381 in 1992, reached US$726 in 1999.

As may be seen, some nationalities have achieved significant wage increases since the early 1990s, but these wages still remain below the average for all nationality earnings.

The situation for officers is comparable with one exception. The global labour market for officers has in the last decade shown an imbalance, with supply falling short of demand. In the absence of other countervailing factors, this normally leads to an upward pressure on wages. The ISF survey of chief officer wage rates confirms this situation, showing that the rates of pay in the major officer-supplying countries have been rising steadily since 1993.

Breaking down this data by nationality shows average pay rates for Filipino chief officers increasing by 1.6 per cent in 1993-94, by 4 per cent in 1994-95 and by 14 per cent in 1995-96. The average rates of pay for Polish officers also increased by nearly 50 per cent in the same period. In the United Kingdom, however, average pay rates for chief officers actually fell by nearly 10 per cent. The latest figures show that a number of Indian and Polish chief officers are paid well above the rates of their lowest paid United Kingdom counterparts. At the extreme end of the range, salaries of Polish chief officers may be 35 per cent higher than those from the United Kingdom.

The figures concerning wage increases may distort the fact that wage rates are stratified by nationality. For example, the most highly paid Filipino chief officer receives 10 per cent less than the lowest paid United Kingdom chief officer. In short, although there is still a clear demarcation between the average pay rates for chief officers from developed and developing countries, wage differentials are not as marked as they are for ratings, and look set to close further.

In 1998, MORI compiled data on wage rates for the ITF on the basis of a questionnaire to which 6,504 seafarers of various nationalities had replied.^[26] The survey categorized the monthly wages of seafarers into 13 bands, as shown in the overall analysis of replies in table 3.1. These have been divided into three categories, “low” (less than US$300 to US$499), “medium” (US$500 to US$2,999) and “high” (US$3,000 to more than US$4,000) categories. At this point, it should be noted that these categories are not intended to imply any value judgements as to the levels encapsulated within the bands, but are to be used purely for comparison purposes.


Monthly wage band (US$)	Number	Per cent

Less than 300	258	5	Low
300-499	645	13	Low
500-699	702	14	Medium
700-899	499	10
900-1,099	505	10
1,100-1,299	385	8
1,300-1,499	259	5
1,500-1,999	606	12
2,000-2,499	371	7
2,500-2,999	234	5
3,000-3,499	221	4	High
3,500-3,999	107	2
More than 4,000	248	5
Total	5 040	100

Source: MORI, op. cit.

Eighteen per cent of seafarers fall within the low category, 71 per cent within the medium, and 11 per cent within the high, but these wage levels are strongly influenced by flag, nationality, rank and type of vessel.

With respect to flag, whilst only 10 per cent of seafarers on FOC-flagged vessels fall within the high band, on national-flagged vessels this rises to 15 per cent. However, low wages are equally prevalent on national flag and FOC vessels. Fifteen per cent of seafarers on FOC vessels fall within the low category and for national-flagged vessels this rises to 19 per cent. On Greek-flagged vessels, for example, 26 per cent of seafarers fall within the low category, whilst for Romanian, Filipino and Russian vessels the figures are 27 per cent, 28 per cent and 29 per cent respectively.

The nationality of seafarers also plays an important part in determining wage levels. Forty per cent of seafarers from the Ukraine fall into the low wage band, whilst for seafarers from Africa and the Middle East, Croatia and China the figures are 31 per cent, 30 per cent and 27 per cent respectively.

Table 3.2 shows the effect of rank on monthly wages, from which it can be seen that there is not only the expected distinction between officers and ratings, but that there is a wage structure hierarchy within these groups.

With respect to the type of vessel, the lowest paid seafarers are most commonly found on general cargo and bulk carriers, whilst the highest paid seafarers are most usually found on crude oil carriers and passenger vessels.

Available information shows that employment/manning agencies have little direct effect upon wage levels. However, seafarers often have to pay a fee to such agencies to obtain employment. This is most common for seafarers working on FOC vessels, with 12 per cent stating they had to pay a fee, compared to 9 per cent of seafarers on national-flagged ships. Indonesian, Ukrainian and Chinese seafarers are most affected in this regard, with 43 per cent, 28 per cent and 27 per cent of them reporting fee payments, respectively.

On cruise ships, officers and managers are among the highest paid personnel within the shipping industry. These positions attract fixed monthly wages, and bonuses might be given at the end of the voyage, the season or the year. At the other end of the scale, the lowest ranked personnel are amongst the lowest paid of the workforce in the fleet. In hotel and catering departments, seafarers are divided into wage earners and tip earners. Tip earners are primarily those who provide direct services for passengers such as waiters/waitresses and stewards/stewardesses. In this case, the seafarers receive a small monthly stipend from the company and are expected to make up the rest of their monthly wages from tips or gratuities given by the passengers. Most cruise lines advise their passengers that they are expected to tip their service seafarers at a specified minimum rate per day.

Pay levels and methods vary according to the company and, more importantly, according to the region in which the ship operates. In the Caribbean, the Bahamas and other regions where most of the passengers are from the United States, seafarers who are tip earners typically receive as little as US$50 as monthly stipend from the company. This payment is only nominal. Seafarers are then expected to earn tips from passengers by providing high-quality service. This system makes seafarers extremely uncertain about their wages and increases their feelings of job insecurity. However, the level of income may well be higher than the minimum wage recommended by the ILO for able seamen.

Cruise lines operating in Europe and Asia tend to pay service seafarers fixed monthly wages. As both seafarers and companies explained, this is due to the fact that “European passengers are not as generous as passengers from North America” and “Asian passengers rarely tip for the service provided”. Wage levels vary greatly from US$270 to US$2,400 per month for the same or similar positions. There are many factors involved, with nationality being the most significant: for example, waitresses from the United Kingdom, France and Germany are paid more than twice as much as waitresses from Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines on a top-market cruise ship operating worldwide. Similar patterns are found in ships operating in the Asia-Pacific region.

The extent to which the level of tips is taken into account in wage setting depends on the geographical area within which the ship is operating. In Europe and Asia, companies also advise passengers to pay tips at the end of the voyage. However, this advice is not given as strongly as on the American-based ships. In Asia, tips are collected by management and shared among the crew rather than paid directly to the service seafarers who have direct contact with the passengers.

It has been reported that some cruise lines have in recent years introduced a system of security bond. The purpose is to ensure that seafarers provide the services and complete their contracts to the full satisfaction of the company. The most widely adopted practice is to deduct a certain amount of money, typically around US$100, from the seafarers' wages every month. The company keeps the money until the end of the seafarer's contract, when it is paid as the seafarers “leave pay”. However this practice is generally not applied to tip-earning seafarers nor does it seem to be applied to seafarers employed from developed countries.

International wage benchmarks/standards

There are several competing definitions and interpretations of the minimum wage. Currently, the minimum wage recommended by the ILO is set at US$435 per month for an AB (Seafarers' Wages, Hours of Work and the Manning of Ships Recommendation, 1996 (No. 187)). This is a basic minimum wage excluding all other payments such as overtime, holidays with pay, or social benefits. Other interested organizations have subjected this instrument to alternative readings working into it all the supplementary payments and benefits. The ISF calculates that total gross wages would be US$563, while the ITF puts this at US$971.

However, this basic pay set by the ILO raises two sets of problems on account of the substantive content of the Recommendation itself and its legal status. As regards the substantive content, the ILO minimum wage and the interpretations based upon it, are only set for an AB; there is no reference to other ranks. The Recommendation does not, therefore, provide the means to calculate any other benchmark levels. Furthermore, the ILO instrument only provides a definition of the rate at which overtime should be paid (1.25 times the hourly rate of pay), without reference to the number of such hours which may be worked. Hence, this integral part of the working life of the seafarers, in terms of both level of income and general quality of working life, does not receive full and sufficient treatment.

As regards its legal status, the application of Recommendation No. 187 is not mandatory, unless a government chooses to make it so through its own legislation, and only covers the basic wage of an AB. It is nevertheless used by shipowners and trade unions in setting wage scales and is interpreted differently by the parties concerned to calculate gross and net wages for all ranks. Being a Recommendation, it cannot be enforced and is therefore not applied by port state control.

In contrast to the various readings of the ILO minimum wage, the ITF standards of pay iterated within the “standard”,^[27] and “total crew cost” (hereafter referred to as TCC) agreements are explicitly utilized in negotiations of relevant ITF agreements covered by so-called “blue certificates”. These rates, previously set unilaterally by the ITF, are now negotiated with a group of employers of seafarers grouped within the International Maritime Employers' Committee (IMEC).

The ITF Standard Collective Agreement (as of 1 January 1998), sets US$934 per month (based on a 40-hour week) as the acceptable wage standard for an AB, and, as with ILO Recommendation No. 187, makes reference to the rate of overtime but does not set limits on hours of work. In contrast to the Standard Collective Agreement the ITF uniform “total crew cost (TCC)” collective agreement rate for an AB is US$1,204 per month, based on a 40-hour week and a guaranteed overtime of 103 hours a month paid an hourly rate of US$3.94. This figure of 103 hours of guaranteed overtime does not set an absolute limit on hours of work as extra hours can be paid to the seafarer. The agreements also cover a range of other contractual issues, such as allotments, disability compensation, repatriation, sick pay, paid leave, and so on. Contrary to Recommendation No. 187, both these agreements determine wage standards for all crew on board ships.

In 1998, 194 such agreements were signed (33 per cent of which were standard agreements) in 25 countries. As at 1 April 1999, 5,255 vessels were covered by such agreements, a 15 per cent increase from the 1998 figure of 4,589 vessels. These agreements covered around 95,000 seafarers – with around 5,000 of them being under standard agreements and around 90,000 under TCC agreements – which, according to the ITF, represented 35 per cent of all seafarers on ITF designated flag of convenience vessels. Many national affiliates of the ITF now spend much of their time and resources in negotiating and enforcing ITF agreements, rather than in negotiating with national shipowners. Table 3.3 gives a breakdown of ITF agreements according to the register.


Flag	ITF covered	Fleet size	% of fleet covered

*Panama*	1 938	4 834	40
*Liberia*	918	1 599	57
*Bahamas*	564	1 070	53
*Malta*	442	1 312	34
*Cyprus*	314	1 533	20
*GIS* ^a	274	535	51
*Antigua and Barbuda*	192	501	38
*St. Vincent and the Grenadines*	142	885	16
*Marshall Islands*	99	129	77
Singapore	67	968	7
*Bermuda*	50	96	52
Isle of Man	43	159	27
*Vanuatu*	43	85	51
*Cayman Islands*	31	51	61
*Netherlands Antilles*	21	104	20
NIS	19	674	3
Madeira	15	114	13
*Honduras*	12	612	2
*Belize*	10	509	2
*Barbados*	9	59	15
*Cambodia*	9	98	9
*Sri Lanka*	7	26	27
Hong Kong, China	7	268	3
Kerguelen Islands	6	77	8
*Lebanon*	6	99	6
*Tuvalu*	5	13	38
*Myanmar*	3	55	5
*Luxembourg*	2	37	5
*Malaysia*	2	495	*
*Mauritius*	2	18	11
Philippines	2	935	*
*Gibraltar*	1	18	6
Totals	5 255	17 968	29

*Bold italic type denotes FOC.* ^aThe figure used here for fleet size is the ITF estimate. If the correct figure of 547 as supplied to SIRC by the German Maritime Administration is used then the percentage of vessels covered equates to 50%. * Indicates less than 1 per cent. Source: ITF: Flags of Convenience … (1999), op. cit.

Length of contracts and tours of duty

Although the ILO has adopted standards to encourage continuity of employment, the majority of seafarers work on contracts covering a single voyage or tour of duty. A steady income is not assured; indeed, much depends on a seafarer's good fortune in obtaining a next contract – or on whether or not there is a flow of labour from lower wage labour-supply countries. For many seafarers the length of the tour of duty varies according to employer and nationality. For example, a typical tour of duty for a rating could be nine months for Filipinos, but 12 months for Sierra Leonians, and six months for Eastern Europeans. Typical senior Western European officers' tours of duty are generally determined by the voyage cycle of the ship and are normally between three to four months, in contrast to their Filipino and Indian counterparts, whose contracts are for nine months. At the end of their contract or tour of duty the seafarer is repatriated. A survey of 4,525 seafarers, conducted under the auspices of the ILO, found that in more than 50 per cent of cases, the longest tours of duty worked by seafarers was over one year in duration.^[28] It is, however, inevitable that ratings in particular tend to stay onboard longer than the specified length of their contract due to the lack of a relief system. Without a proper relief system, there is a tendency for seafarers to extend beyond the specific agreements within their contracts.

Some seafarers are so-called “company men”, assured of continuous employment after leave taken between tours of duty. They may be paid “retainer” holiday pay when they are on leave.

The MORI survey showed that the most common tour of duty was between six and 12 months; as in the case of wages, this varied according to flag, vessel type, nationality and rank. Twelve per cent of seafarers overall indicated that their current contract was for more than 12 months. For all national flags this rose to 17 per cent, but for FOCs it accounted for only 8 per cent. With regard to vessel type, the extremes of contract length were even more apparent. Whilst 12 per cent of all contracts were over 12 months in length, for seafarers on passenger vessels this rose to 37 per cent; in the case of chemical carrier crews, however, it was only 5 per cent.

The nationality of seafarers also seemed to play an important part in contract length. For Ukrainian seafarers 12-month contracts only applied in 1 per cent of cases, but for their Japanese counterparts it rose to 39 per cent. With reference to rank, in overall terms, officers had contracts over 12 months in length in 12 per cent of cases. Whilst this figure was slightly exceeded by catering ratings who had contracts of this nature in 13 per cent of cases, deck ratings and engine ratings only had such tenure in 9 per cent and 8 per cent of cases, respectively.

Hours of work

The ITF TCC collective agreement specifies that the ordinary hours of duty of all seafarers are eight hours per day, Monday to Friday inclusive. The contracted hours of work specified in the contracts of seafarers vary. For example, the standard Filipino contract of employment indicates that the normal working hours are eight hours in every 24 hours, midnight to midnight, Monday to Sunday; the Sri Lankan standard contract specifies that the normal working week amounts to 44 hours; whilst the collective agreement for seafarers aboard Cypriot-flagged cargo and tanker vessels states that the hours of work per month are 173. Where flag States are less regulated, then the potential for owners to maximize hours is greater, and this is demonstrated in the very long hours of work reported by some seafarers in the ITF/MORI survey. Nonetheless, the figures in this survey do have to be treated with some caution, since they include overtime.

The survey revealed that, overall, 24 per cent of respondents had a typical working day of up to eight hours; 62 per cent worked eight to 12 hours; 11 per cent worked 12 to 18 hours; whilst 3 per cent of seafarers worked a typical day of over 18 hours. As with length of contract and wages, these hours varied according to flag, vessel type and crew nationality. The effects of rank and employing agency were less obvious. In respect of flag, 4 per cent of seafarers reported a typical working day in excess of 18 hours on FOC-flagged vessels, whilst for national flag vessels the figure was only 2 per cent. In terms of vessel type, long hours were most often reported on passenger ships and ro-ro ferries, whilst seafarers on reefers and bulk carriers reported shorter working days. With respect to crew nationality, North American, Indonesian and Filipino seafarers were most likely to report working days in excess of 18 hours – with 9 per cent, 8 per cent and 5 per cent in this category, respectively.

The ITF conducted a follow-up study to the ITF/MORI survey, based upon replies from 2,500 seafarers of 60 different nationalities, serving under 63 different flags. It revealed that, in many cases, seafarers worked hours in excess of the maxima prescribed by the Seafarers' Hours of Work and the Manning of Ships Convention, 1996 (No. 180). Overall, 3 per cent of seafarers had an average working day of less than eight hours; 65 per cent work eight to 12 hours; 27 per cent work 12 to 15 hours; and 5 per cent had an average working day of more than 15 hours. There was also evidence that seafarers worked consistently long hours on a regular daily basis. Sixty-two per cent of seafarers indicated that they worked over 60 hours per week, whilst 24 per cent stated that they worked more than 80 hours per week. Additionally, 60 per cent of seafarers indicated that their working hours had increased in the last five to ten years.

Even if these figures do not represent a full assessment of hours of work in the industry, it is evident that a great deal needs to be done to promote better awareness of the implications of hours of work on fatigue and safety at sea.

The relevant IMO and ILO regulations on hours of work will affect law and practice on hours of work in the industry. Their full impact will only be apparent in a few years' time. However, it is reported that shipowners are already taking these regulations into consideration in anticipation of the corresponding regulations which should become effective at national and regional levels.

For specialized vessels such as high-speed craft, which are more akin to airline industry conditions, it is possible that some form of special regulation might be necessary at least for watchkeepers.

Food, accommodation and welfare

Standards of food and accommodation vary enormously from ship to ship. At their best, ships have single berth accommodation for all crew members, with en-suite bath and toilet facilities, adequate space for storage, desks or tables, comfortable seating, air-conditioning/heating, good light and ventilation. Officers are allocated larger rooms or a suite of two rooms with separate living and sleeping areas and refrigerators. Laundry facilities include sufficient washing machines, driers, and irons. The minimum standards of accommodation are laid down in a number of relevant ILO Conventions (the Food and Catering (Ships' Crews) Convention, 1946 (No. 68), the Accommodation of Crews Convention (Revised), 1949 (No. 92), and the Accommodation of Crews (Supplementary Provisions) Convention, 1970 (No. 133)) and certain Recommendations.

Ships owned, and/or managed, by shipowners of north European States (Nordic ships are particularly likely to fall into this category), the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea tend to have high standards of accommodation. Whilst newer ships are generally thought to have better leisure and recreational facilities, the age of the vessel is not necessarily a good guide to standards of accommodation or other facilities. There are reports, for example, that some newer ships do not have adequate sound insulation between rooms, use cheaper and less robust materials in accommodation areas and suffer from excessive and continuous vibration.

It is difficult to generalize on the quality of accommodation and food. There is, however, some evidence that reefers, tankers (especially since the introduction of the oil industry's Ship Inspection Report Programme (SIRE)), gas carriers and container ships are more likely to have reasonable standards of accommodation than ferries, cruise ships and general cargo/bulk carriers. There are good reasons for this which not only relate to notions of benevolence or “good” and “bad” employers but more to market and operational considerations. Liners are protected from competition, to some extent, because they have grouped themselves in “conferences”. They are consequently under less pressure to cut costs than, for instance, bulker owners. They can therefore afford to offer seafarers better standards of accommodation. Owners of ferries and cruise ships which, like bulkers, also operate in a highly competitive environment, are particularly concerned about limiting the space (and therefore the facilities) available to seafarers because of its high opportunity cost. Even the most luxurious of the cruise industry's vessels continue to provide relatively poor standards of crew accommodation. Cabins in some vessels are hot and noisy with exposed pipework running along deck-heads. They have little space and very limited furniture: sometimes, one small fixed locker per person in cabins for up to four people. Competitive pressures can therefore have a direct and negative impact on welfare.

Although providing a reasonable standard of accommodation for seafarers involves costs, some companies have been quick to recognize the benefits which accrue from ensuring that their seafarers have good living conditions. The provision of good standards of food and accommodation may be viewed in terms of basic human rights. But there is more to it than that. Housing workers in multiple occupancy, badly heated/ventilated rooms, and feeding them pest-infested or nutritionally inadequate food, is more likely to produce unhealthy, highly stressed, and fatigued crews, which are much less likely to operate efficiently and liable to make misjudgements and fundamental errors. As an author pointed out: “An essential prerequisite to a seaman's health in addition to his personal comfort, dignity and welfare, is that he has adequate accommodation.”^[29]

Whatever their motivation, there are many shipowners and designers who have taken the provision of quality accommodation and recreational facilities seriously. Nevertheless, some seafarers continue to live in poor conditions. In too many ships, cabins are cramped and shared, badly lit and ventilated, and commonly infested with pests such as cockroaches. There are frequently no recreational facilities (apart from a television perhaps), toilet facilities are shared, and basic standards of hygiene are not met. These ships are more likely to be ferries and older generation bulk carriers, and general cargo ships, which do not operate on international routes. However, there are also many vessels operating internationally which fail to conform to the relevant ILO standards.

Despite the provisions of ILO Conventions Nos. 92 and 68 (Article 5) which are included in the Appendix to Convention No. 147, standards of food and accommodation were not always prioritized by port state control (PSC) inspectors. With the adoption of Convention No. 147 in 1976, ratifying States could apply the standards of Convention No. 92 and Article 5 of Convention No. 68 to all ships visiting their ports regardless of their origin or “flag”. For the first time sub-standard vessels could be detained for failing to comply with international minimum labour standards. Following the signing of the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on port state control, issues relating to food and accommodation were accorded greater attention. In particular, a three-month concentrated campaign of inspections was carried out in the autumn of 1997. During this period, nearly 4,000 vessels were inspected for working and living conditions. Although a 54-per-cent increase of deficiencies concerning accommodation and a 120-per-cent increase of deficiencies concerning food and catering were reported, the number of detentions remained low. It is still unusual for a ship to be detained on the grounds of deficiencies in accommodation and catering alone. The value of inspections is not however to be underestimated. Deficiencies have to be put right and the improvements in follow-up inspections result in improvements on board ships.

Although most ships are not detained solely on the grounds of sub-standard food and accommodation, there are numerous examples, in almost any given month, of vessels which are detained for these reasons amongst others. The Saint Vincent and the Grenadines-flagged 12,000 grt bulk carrier, Leader, was detained in Aberdeen in 1996 for 101 days for “structural deficiencies and unsanitary conditions in accommodation”. In November 1995 the 39,865 dwt Maltese-flagged, Atlantic Sea, was detained in Milford Haven with a number of deficiencies including “severe cockroach infestation” and “rotten food”. The 1976-built, 70,633 gt, Liberian-flagged tanker, Mystras II, was detained on 19 October 1999 by the United States PSC for numerous deficiencies including “accommodation spaces infested with roaches and numerous toilets, showers and sinks ... inoperable”.^[30] An examination of the declarations from PSC as published in Lloyd's List highlights the extent of the problem. In the randomly selected month of July 1999, Lloyd's List published details of the following vessels detained by PSC for reasons including poor (usually unsanitary) accommodation and catering provision:

Given the likely under-reporting of deficiencies in accommodation and food and the reluctance of port state inspectors to detain, it is perhaps surprising to find as many ships detained on these (amongst other) grounds. However, other sources also suggest that there is still a significant problem in terms of food and accommodation which needs to be addressed by the industry. Of 9,324 vessels detained in 1997, 406 were detained for deficiencies in accommodation (see table 3.4, column C).

Table 3.4. Main categories of deficiencies per flag authority (only those flag authorities about which
at least five detentions were recorded representing at least 5 per cent of the fleet), 1997


	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	Total

Algeria	4	2	7	14	16	8	4	5	10	4	5	3	82
Antigua and Barbuda	5	10	8	40	29	29	8	12	22	9	12	9	193
Bahamas	21	18	10	51	56	52	16	20	33	14	37	13	341
Belice	6		2	13	16	9	9	9	9	3	8	2	86
Bulgaria	31	32	14	82	58	63	40	23	65	28	36	15	487
Cambodia		1	3	13	11	8	6	8	7	2	2	1	62
Cyprus	73	58	52	198	190	176	93	93	152	57	109	32	1 283
Egypt	7	3	8	25	24	29	9	15	18	13	7	1	159
Estonia	3	1	1	5	7	9	3	2	5	3	1		40
Honduras	34	30	23	70	60	61	37	9	51	32	32	18	457
Lebanon	10	11	7	32	18	18	11	8	17	11	8	3	154
Liberia	15	16	14	59	70	48	33	13	26	8	22	12	336
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya	1	1	3	8	11	9	1	1	8	5	8	3	59
Malta	47	55	55	196	193	172	89	77	125	56	82	18	1 322
Marshall Islands	2	1	2	6	6	8	2	1	7	3	6	2	46
Mauritius	4	2	4	6	7	2	5	1	4	2	2	1	40
Myanmar	1	1		4	4	5	1	4	1	3	2	1	27
Panama	100	110	33	308	294	228	132	104	191	72	134	57	1 763
Romania	17	9	23	37	40	43	16	31	37	18	21	4	296
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	53	31	38	127	123	132	70	42	90	38	61	20	825
Syrian Arab Republic	13	13	23	46	33	36	21	8	37	16	12	3	261
Turkey	35	50	69	207	158	133	77	42	147	68	76	23	1 085
Total	485	459	406	1 559	1 437	1 289	691	531	1 070	467	689	241	9 324

Key: A: ship's certificates; B: crew; C: accommodation; D: life-saving appliances; E: fire-fighting appliances; F: safety in general; G: load lines; H: propulsion and auxiliary machinery; I: navigation; J: radio; K: marine pollution; L: operational deficiencies (SOLAS). Source: Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control.

Table 3.5 shows the number of deficiencies for ILO-related matters found in three years by the Paris MOU States. It shows that about 10 per cent of deficiencies found are related to crew and conditions of work matters. It should be noted, however, that this does not include such issues as the articles of agreement or contract of employment and other matters which the port state control authorities do not verify, although they are part of Convention No. 147.


	1996	1997	1998

Crew
Certificate of competency	699	810	835
Number/composition of crew	346	276	222
Medical certificate	231	262	227
Other	93	104	120
Total	1 369	1 452	1 404
Accommodation
Cleanliness accommodation/parasites	226	274	272
Ventilation/heating	52	97	78
Sanitary facilities	255	521	483
Drainage	13	23	36
Lighting	154	211	154
Pipes/wires/insulation	18	30	17
Sick bay	85	206	151
Medical equipment	462	530	488
Other	152	291	252
Total	1 417	2 183	1 931
Food and catering
Galley/handling spaces	510	955	705
Provisions	96	324	223
Fresh water/piping/tanks	29	84	63
Other	51	145	114
Total	686	1 508	1 105
Working spaces
Galley/handling spaces	26	31	34
Provisions	278	311	338
Fresh water/piping/tanks	104	163	146
Total	408	505	518
Accident prevention
Personal equipment	84	107	132
Protection machines/machinery part	218	330	341
Pipes/wires/insulation	121	174	186
Other	261	300	349
Total	684	911	1 008
Total of above	4 564	6 559	5 966
Grand total deficiencies	53 967	53 311	57 831

Current data collected by the Missions to Seamen in the United Kingdom confirm that significant numbers of seafarers are unhappy with their living conditions. Of 1,549 complaints by seafarers to the Missions to Seamen, between 1994 and November 1999, 123 (7.9 per cent) were concerned with living conditions (see table 3.6).

All this would seem to indicate that there are significant numbers of ships failing to provide even basic standards of accommodation and catering to their crews and that there are many more which, whilst not being particularly hazardous to health, do not provide reasonable standards of food and/or accommodation to seafarers. Whilst there has been a great deal of speculation within the industry about whether or not the transfer of ships to open registries has led to a decline in standards, the limited evidence available suggests that the flag of the ship is not necessarily a good guide as to the standards of food and accommodation. In 1950 an ILO report on conditions aboard Panamanian ships considered that ownership was, in fact, a better guide to standards and it appears that little has changed:

Table 3.4 shows that many detentions apply to a number of registries of all types, including national flags. In fact many companies with reputations for high standards have “flagged out” but maintained excellent standards of food and accommodation on their ships. If port state control inspectors would target certain types of flags, they might be doing seafarers a disservice.

With regard to food, accommodation and catering, it might be more relevant to target fleets of owners who are recurring offenders for more frequent inspections. Moreover, if ships are not detained in the first instance for such deficiencies, follow-up inspections should be made to ensure that deficiencies are put right. Failing such remedial action, vessels should be detained.

Recreation and communication

A recent survey by the Philippine Seamen's Assistance Program indicated that inadequate recreational facilities were listed as the third biggest source of dissatisfaction amongst Filipino seafarers. Thirty-six per cent of seafarers who took part in the research were unhappy about the recreational facilities aboard their ships and a further 30 per cent were unhappy about links with their families. This compared with 25 per cent who were concerned about standards of food and 14 per cent who were dissatisfied with accommodation. According to the MORI survey published in 1996 seafarers similarly felt that the need to improve recreational facilities was greater than that to improve either accommodation or food.

Various studies have highlighted the monotony of working and living aboard modern cargo ships – and many of the changes within the industry can be said to have exacerbated the boredom and social isolation which have always been a feature of a seafarer's working life. A recent study^[32] has demonstrated that ships of all types spend considerably less time in port than they did 30 years ago.

In 1998, 27 per cent (n = 428) of the ships visiting a certain port spent less than 12 hours there – compared with 1 per cent in 1970. Forty-five per cent (n = 707) of the ships spent 12 to 24 hours in port and this made up the largest category of ship turnaround times. The data showed that seven out of ten ships turned around within 24 hours and only 4 per cent (n = 58) of the ship stays were more than three days (see figures 3.1 and 3.2).

This dramatic change in “turnaround times” has occurred despite a substantial increase in tonnage. Between 1970 and 1998 the tonnage of ships calling at this port increased fourfold (430 per cent). Despite this increase in ships' size, turnaround times decreased ninefold. Table 3.7 shows comparative turnaround times for ships with different cargoes.


Type of cargo/ship	1970 Average GRT	1998 Average GRT	1970-98 Increase in per cent of GRT	1970 Average hours spent (hh/mm)	1998 Average hours spent (hh/mm)	1970-98 Decrease in per cent of hours

All ships	3 444	14 812	430	138.30	15.49	892
Dry bulk	2 306	12 488	541	150.37	48.36	310
Cars	7 983	31 076	389	207.00	13.19	1 569
General cargo/ containers	3 653	2 814	–23	150.37	11.23	1 350
Liquid bulk	2 517	4 752	88	58.22	17.07	341
Petroleum products	5 852	4 206	–28	35.04	20.48	58
Forest products	2 441	16 885	691	263.00	28.38	944

Note: In the 1970s general cargo ships carried a wide variety of small quantities of loose items, e.g. boxes, bags, packing cases, drums. Later containers come to dominate the transport of general cargo. Source: E. Kahveci, op. cit., p. 22.

Seafarers are isolated from friends, community and family. A crew forms a community which is itself isolated. This isolation has been exacerbated by the reduction in turnaround times. In theory no matter how short turnaround time is, there is still a possibility for seafarers to be granted shore leave. However, in practical terms this is extremely difficult. Other factors also make it difficult for seafarers to go ashore:

On top of the normal everyday routine work on board for deck, engine officers, ratings and galley staff there is also additional work which has to be undertaken in port. This includes: dealing with visitors, i.e. immigration, customs, port state control inspection; loading/unloading cargo; lashing and unlashing cargo; dealing with cargo plans; painting the hull; bunkering; crew changes; and many additional engine and maintenance tasks. Furthermore, modern ports frequently work 24 hours a day which means that pressure only begins to ease when the ship returns to sea.

In addition the last 20-odd years have also seen a reduction in crew size. In the early 1970s a typical 10,000 grt bulk cargo carrier would have had approximately 40 crew members. Today a much bigger (i.e. 30,000 grt) bulk carrier is likely to have 18 to 25 crew members on board. The same crew-size pattern applies to cargo-carrying ships of all kinds. The decline in the size of crews also makes it difficult for seafarers to be given shore leave in port. Small crews result in labour intensification, with seafarers working longer hours and performing a wider variety of tasks (see box 3.1).

Traditionally, ports of the world were located near to city centres; these ports are now regarded as historic ports/docks (e.g. Liverpool, Yokohama, San Francisco). By contrast modern port development generally occurs some distance from residential and shopping areas. These ports are automated, unpeopled, steel framed, and frequently devoid of public transport (see box 3.2.). In addition, there are reports that some ports have become insecure as a result of increased criminality.

Fast turnaround times have limited the possibilities for social contact for seafarers beyond the shipboard community, while the simultaneous reduction in crewing levels has diminished both the extent and the quality of social contact while at sea on passage.

Cargo ships are not built primarily to accommodate seafarers on board. However, these are places where many everyday life activities (i.e. working, eating, sleeping, socializing) take place in a restricted environment exposed to vibration, sea motion, engine noise, etc. Lack of shore leave means that many seafarers are trapped in this environment, often with people of different nationalities and cultures, for months at a time.

All these factors, together with lack of shore leave and recreation, affects seafarers' mental and physical well-being and reinforces isolation, fatigue, depression and stress (see box 3.3).

Recreational facilities aboard ship are not a luxury but a necessity for the preservation of seafarers' good mental health. They provide a release from boredom and, frequently, an opportunity to socialize with other crew members. Good recreational provision can counter the development of anti-social behaviour and practices amongst crews such as solitary drinking, drug abuse, and extreme behaviour during shore leave.

Aboard most ships, the availability of such recreational facilities is limited to intermittent TV and radio transmissions. There are, however, exceptions; some ships provide well-stocked libraries, saunas, well-equipped gymnasia, swimming pools, karaoke machines, video recorders, video libraries, stereos, musical instruments, dart boards, pool tables, cinemas, barbecue facilities, card/mah-jong tables, table tennis equipment, computer games, and access to learning via computer terminals.

The ability to maintain contact with family and friends also helps to diminish the feelings of loneliness and isolation. It is evident from the survey mentioned earlier in the text^[33] that most seafarers are family-orientated. Fifty-five per cent provide financial support for two to four people and 23 per cent support five or more. There are fairly large variations according to the nationality of the seafarer. For example, 40 per cent of Filipino seafarers support at least five other people. It is beyond dispute that entry into the global labour market provides some form of economic opportunity for seafarers and their families. In the long term, however, isolation from families is often a problem. Modern seafarers spend at least three-quarters of their working lives away from their families and local communities.

Not only do seafarers invariably have to spend a large part of their working lives away from home, they sometimes have to migrate with their immediate family to seafarer labour centres in certain large ports in order to have a better access to the labour market. The immediate impact of this type of migration is that seafarers and their families become isolated from their extended family and friends. This inevitably reduces the social support mechanisms available in the absence of the seafarer to his or her family.

Partners have to cope with looking after the children alone, dealing with everyday family life and problems, managing the household economy, etc. There may also be problems when seafarers return home. After long periods away the necessary adaptation process can be difficult – and, just when they are starting to adjust, many seafarers have to return to sea. This irregularity of contact causes particular problems (see box 3.4).

In some cases seafarers may sail with their families, although this opportunity is still usually open only to officers. It is rare for a rating to sail accompanied by family members.

Despite the existence of modern communication systems – such as fax, the Internet and satellite telephone systems – many seafarers continue to be effectively isolated from their families whilst at sea. Ratings cannot generally afford to be in regular telephone contact with their families. They are often afraid to use satellite systems because they fear that they will not be able to restrict themselves to the few minutes of conversation they can afford. INMARSAT (International Maritime Satellite Organization) rates are high and frequently seafarers cannot take advantage of the cheapest rates when calling home due to time differences. Calls from seamen's missions or pay phones ashore remain the most important means by which seafarers maintain contact with their families and friends at home. However, many of them have little opportunity to go ashore. For seafarers, poor communication adds to the sense of isolation and loneliness they frequently experience.

E-mail aboard ships has revolutionized ship-shore communication of both an operational and a personal nature. Very few shipping lines permit members of their crews (and usually officers only) to use e-mail for personal communication. They may have personal “mailboxes” and rely on masters to send and print out personal messages. Either way e-mail has made daily contact with family and friends a possibility for a number of senior seafarers and those who have access to it value it enormously. Research carried out by the Electronic Commerce Innovation Centre for SIRC revealed that e-mail was appreciated by users.^[34] But not all companies are prepared to offer even senior seafarers this facility. A respondent in the abovementioned study noted: “Our company procedures manual states that ‘whilst our (e-mail) system has the ability to connect to the Internet, this was established to allow business-related communications. It shall not be used for personal e-mail'. Recent questions raised about this issue make it likely that the rule cited above will be strictly enforced.”^[35]

Where the facility to use e-mail is offered by a company, access is often limited to officers either as a matter of policy or practice. On many ships, ratings do not have access to computer terminals and may, in any case, be inexperienced with e-mail and the Internet. To complicate matters further, most ratings do not have e-mail accounts at home and their families would, in any case, be unable to receive messages from them. This is likely to change, however, as the provision of Internet services improves in areas such as the Philippines, India, and West Africa. In this context shipping companies will have to re-evaluate their policies on Internet access. In so doing they will need to decide whether or not to allow all members of their crews access (free or otherwise) to e-mail. This could prove to be an issue of some importance as once crews have served with a company allowing such access, they may find it difficult to return to a situation where they have to rely, once again, on infrequent letters and telephone calls for contact with their families.

This year INMARSAT is set to market low-cost dedicated e-mail terminals for shipboard use. It would be highly desirable for shipowners to consider making e-mail available to seafarers.

Provision for worship

There is some evidence that seafarers are dissatisfied with the current provision for religious worship aboard merchant vessels. Most ocean-going cargo ships do not have space or time dedicated to worship and whilst cruise ships frequently have chapels, or their equivalent, crew are often denied access to them. Given that large numbers of seafarers are practising Christians or Muslims, consideration should be given to the provision of a place of worship aboard ships.

Gender issues

Very few women serve on cargo vessels. A relatively larger number serve on passenger vessels where they are mostly in the passenger service categories. In general, women serve on those cargo vessels which have high standards. Vessels with poor conditions of work usually do not have women working on board. SIRC's study on women seafarers employed on cargo ships in the EC fleet in 1998^[36] found that women feel constantly watched and compelled by their male shipmates to work to the limits of their endurance. Women seafarers feel that they are always pressured to prove their ability by having to work harder or by taking on the more demanding tasks. This confirms the findings of another survey conducted in Germany in 1997 on women seafarers, according to which “women were more intent on their work and made 150 per cent of their efforts”.^[37]

Doubtless, men also have to “prove themselves” when newly aboard ship. But the test they go through is shorter and much easier than for women. Group bonding helps break down boundaries between the seafarer who joins a ship and those who are “old hands”. While most men report that it takes them “a few hours” to be accepted by their ship mates, it typically takes “a few days” for women to be able to interact with their male colleagues on relatively easier terms. Circumstances change with each new ship to which the individual woman is assigned.

Sexual harassment is considered a serious issue by women seafarers aboard cargo ships. Women have to take extra care to protect themselves, especially when they are alone in their cabin. They must remember to lock their door; otherwise they may sometimes find men in their cabins as intruders. Pornographic posters, videos, and computer screen displays are also responsible for harassment. Women find such material “uncomfortable”, “embarrassing” and “disgusting”.

When asked how they cope with this kind of problem, women seafarers tend to say that they have to ignore it. They do not believe that they can get much help from any party involved. In their opinion, trade unions are overwhelmingly male-dominated and women's issues are not given due attention. On the other hand, the women concerned do not want shipping companies to know their problems. As one woman seafarer put it, “the companies are watching for problems with us. If they learn that we have problems on board the ship, they will say, ‘See? Haven't we told you that it is not a place for women?'”

It is worth noting that many women observe that such problems tend to be created by senior officers. Women seafarers on cargo ships rarely felt threatened or intimidated by ratings. Bullying and sexual harassment seem of lesser concern when men and women meet and interact in conditions which male sexuality is not linked with rank and status.

In addition to the ship's design and structure, the seafarer's rank, function, gender and nationality have an impact on policy with respect to seafarers' accommodation. First, the size and quality of seafarers' accommodation is determined by their positions in the ship's hierarchy. Since women account for a very small proportion of officers and senior managers, very few women are allocated larger, outside cabins or cabins on upper decks which are usually reserved for senior officers, managers or administrators. Most women seafarers are therefore assigned to smaller cabins below deck or in inside cabins. Very few have a cabin of their own and most share with one or more fellow female ratings.

On some large passenger vessels, women's cabins are placed together in several areas according to function. Sometimes, nationality is also taken into account. Ideally, women fulfilling the same function and of the same nationality are put together in a cabin. The objective is to accommodate these women's cultural needs “so that they don't feel isolated and can function well”. However, in practice, when the optimum pattern of accommodation cannot be achieved, the company will certainly sacrifice seafarers' “cultural needs” in order to keep the accommodation arrangement functional. The same policy is applied in allocating cabins for male seafarers. Examples of “good” and “bad” accommodation arrangements are given in boxes 3.5 and 3.6.

In addition to the physical boundary set between the women's and men's living areas, gender segregation is also extended to limit opportunities for interaction between male seafarers and female seafarers. In many cases, men are not allowed to stay in women's cabins after 11 o'clock in the evening. Women's response to such an imposed segregation is mixed. But most women welcome the policy and feel “safer”, “more convenient” or “less bothered” in their own area.

Despite the fact that most women's cabins are placed in the same area(s) in blocks, Western women and Eastern women have limited interaction with each other during their off-duty hours. They relatively rarely visit each other's cabins or eat or drink together in the crew mess or the crew bar.

Occupational safety

Seafaring remains a high-risk occupation: a survey carried out from 1986 to 1993, for example, revealed that fatal injuries and drownings among Danish seafarers were 11.5 times higher than average rates among the Danish male workforce ashore.^[38] Similarly, in England and Wales, the latest available official statistics on work-related fatalities show that seafarers' mortality rates for water transport accidents are higher than train drivers' rates for railway accidents and higher than truck drivers' rates for traffic accidents, despite the likely undercounting of some British seafarer deaths occurring outside British waters on non-British-registered ships. Among transport workers, only aircraft flight deck officers had higher fatal accident rates.^[39] An ILO survey of 1,600 seafarer fatalities in 30 countries over a 12-month period, estimated that at least 36 per cent of those deaths were occupationally related.^[40]

Although there have been moves to set up an international ship information database within the IMO there is at present no shipping equivalent of the International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) regular published analyses of global aviation industry deaths. In 1999, an IMO report discussed the fact that there was still no agreed methodology for casualty analysis on the IMO databases.^[41] Most of the (limited) research evidence on work-related fatalities and non-fatal injuries relates to seafarers from the developed world: the fragmentary research evidence from the developing world points to significantly higher fatality rates. Thus, a comparison of occupational mortality over 15 years in the British, Singapore and Hong Kong-registered merchant fleets showed that the Asian seafarers had occupational accident mortality rates 2.4 times (in the case of the Singaporeans) and 2.0 times (in the case of the Hong Kong, China, crews) higher than those of seafarers on British-registered ships,^[42] with many more Asian deaths due to foundering and grounding.

In the absence of comprehensive international reports, the best international dataset is probably that provided by the United Kingdom P&I Club's ten-year analysis of major claims,^[43] since the club's membership accounts for 20 per cent of the world's deep-water fleet and covers all major ship types. However, the P&I Club analysis of personal injuries and fatalities is of course limited to claims data and to those claims exceeding US$100,000. Over the period 1987-97, an initial rise in claims in the late 1980s was followed by a fall in the number of major claims over the 1990s, with claims due to “ship failure” falling more rapidly than claims due to “human error”. Some types of ship were over-represented in claims: not surprisingly, passenger ships accounted for a disproportionate number of personal injury claims, as did rig and supply ships, but the incidence of claims from the latter is falling. Ship failure was greatest among a cohort of ships built between 1973 and 1978 and among ships from certain flag States (United States, Bahamas, Cyprus, Panama, Romania, Malta and – since 1993 – Russian Federation). A United Kingdom study of mortality showed that 40 per cent of British seafarers' deaths on FOC ships were due to occupational injuries and maritime disasters, whereas on British-registered ships such deaths accounted for only 15 per cent of the total.^[44] “Human error” should not imply blameworthy behaviour when it arises out of commercial pressures, falling crewing levels and turnaround times, inadequate training, excessive hours, fatigue, etc. (see section on occupational health below). Major United Kingdom P&I Club claims due to “human error” fell in the 1990s; the fall was especially steep in respect of crew and deck officer error, which was probably due to the downward trend in numbers of officers and crew in the same period. “Human error” claims were disproportionately high in respect of medium-sized bulk carriers, probably reflecting trading patterns (with a greater likelihood of shorter voyages and more frequent berthing, discharging and loading). A 1993 report suggested that 53 per cent of casualties from grounding and 38 per cent of casualties from collisions were due to “less alert lookouts” and “dozing off during navigation”;^[45] in the United Kingdom, the Donaldson Report^[46] suggested that fatigue was the primary cause or a major contributory cause of 70-80 per cent of marine pollution-causing accidents.

Fatigue may be attributed to many factors: the voyage cycle, sea states, noise, vibration, climate, functional shipboard role and manning level. It is likely to be less of a problem in long-haul ships and more of a problem in near-sea trade ships with numerous port calls, short passages, small crews and frequent application of the two-watch system. The fact that at least one oil major will not take on hire any ships where the master keeps a watch may well exemplify a widespread problem in near-sea traders.

Equipment failure was estimated to cause around 20 per cent of accidents to seafarers in an earlier ILO review.^[47] In some areas of shipboard activity, the proportion of accidents attributed to equipment failure is very much greater: an international survey conducted by the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and the Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) found that 70 per cent of accidents associated with the lifeboat drills and launchings were caused by equipment failure.^[48] One area in which equipment appears currently to be inadequate is that of wharf/gangplank/vessel perimeter barriers. National data from Australia, Denmark and the United Kingdom all show very high rates of off-duty fatal injuries (crew of British-registered vessels actually appear to suffer higher rates of fatal injuries off-duty than on-duty), but much the commonest cause of off-duty accidents is that of falls into docks and rivers when returning to a berthed vessel from shore. Many of these falls were alcohol-related, but they only had fatal consequences because of inadequate and hazardous access arrangements. Fatal shipboard falls frequently occur into holds, etc., but many fatal and non-fatal injuries are sustained by falls down stairways in the ship's accommodation and engine-room areas – with the likelihood of falls being exacerbated by the steepness of ship's stairways which have typically had (despite regulatory changes) steeper angles of inclination than the domestic and industrial norm. Poor physical working conditions (excessive noise, vibration and heat) contribute to accidents as well as fatigue through long working hours, disturbed sleep and shift work patterns.

Occupational health

Health surveys of workforces tend to show lower levels of morbidity than surveys of general populations. This is known to epidemiologists as the “healthy worker effect” and is a consequence of unhealthy and incapacitated individuals leaving the workforce or being prevented from joining it. Effective health surveys require the long-term follow-up of a cohort of seafarers over time, including those leaving the shipping industry; no such longitudinal surveys are currently in existence.

The healthy worker effect can be expected to be strongest in an occupation such as seafaring with its mandatory periodic medical examinations designed to screen out chronic ill-health and incapacity: in 1998, the 25,438 seafarers' medical examinations conducted by the United Kingdom's approved medical examiners resulted in the failing of 672 seafarers, while 2,172 seafarers were only issued with restricted certificates; in the same year there were 90 appeals, but only 11 of these resulted in the seafarer being declared fit. Similarly, analyses of death certification data by the occupation of the deceased tend to understate deaths to persons in physically demanding occupations, since unfit persons may leave such occupations and take up more sedentary ones before their deaths; in the case of seafarers, death certification data are also thought to be subject to a degree of undercounting in respect of some deaths occurring abroad. Given all these reasons to expect relatively low levels of seafarers' morbidity and mortality, reported levels are surprisingly high.

In respect of morbidity, the United Kingdom P&I Club (which covers a broad cross-section of the world's deep-water fleet) reports rising numbers of repatriation and illness claims (with costs per claim averaging between US$10,000 and US$25,000). Furthermore, enhanced medical surveys of seafarers detect substantial morbidity among many seafarers who would probably have been passed fit at the standard examination. In 1996-97, for instance, an enhanced examination was conducted on 977 Filipino crew, utilizing tests for blood count, liver function, hepatitis B, malaria, lung function and an electrocardiogram (cost: US$80): 9.6 per cent of the crews were found to be unfit, most commonly because of abnormal liver function, hepatitis B, or high blood pressure. In 1992, a study of 135 Finnish pilots aged over 45 compared the results of physical examinations (mimicking the periodic medical examination) with an enhanced examination using blood analyses, chest X-rays and exercise-ECG: many more cases of cardiovascular disease were detected in the latter examinations and the authors concluded that “the current periodic health examination does not seem to effectively prevent a person with a possible health defect from working as a sea pilot”.^[49] A major difficulty here is the fact that in most countries the approved medical practitioners for the conduct of these periodic examinations are typically general practitioners who do not have direct access to specialized equipment or laboratories. For example, ILO/WHO guidelines lay down minimum in-service hearing standards: at least 30 dB (unaided) in the better ear and 40 dB (unaided) in the other ear within the frequencies 500, 1,000, 2,000, and 3,000 Hz, at a distance of 3 metres and 2 metres respectively.^[50] However, audiometric testing requires a soundproof room, to which general practitioners will rarely have access. Nevertheless, substantial amounts of serious morbidity are currently being detected under the present system. For example, the 672 seafarers who failed their United Kingdom examinations in 1998 included 98 cases of hypertension and 62 cases of ischaemic heart disease, 54 cases of diabetes, 32 cases of asthma, 24 cases of alcohol dependency, 14 cases of acute psychosis and 15 cases of hearing loss.

In respect of mortality, the United Kingdom Decennial Supplement data for 1995 can be taken as typical of seafarers' mortality data in the developed world, with United Kingdom seafarers having high mortality rates for cancer of the oral cavity, cancer of the pharynx, cancer of the liver, cancer of the larynx, cirrhosis, pancreatitis and “other alcohol-related diseases”. The editor commented that “these findings are consistent with those in previous Decennial Supplements and reflect unusually high consumption of alcohol among seafarers”. However, it can be objected that, while alcohol consumption undoubtedly plays a part in these high mortality rates, the possible role of hepatitis B and C in generating high rates of liver disease among seamen has not yet been properly examined, although fragmentary data are already available showing a high prevalence of hepatitis B in some national seafaring populations. Cardiovascular diseases can be expected to be a common cause of death among seafarers in the developed world, but cardiovascular deaths are also common in some developing world seafaring populations, such as Indian ratings.^[51] Suicide rates are reported to be high among seafarers from some developed countries such as the United Kingdom ^[52] and Denmark, ^[53] compared to other occupational groups, but suicides are not confined to developed world crews: 14 of 449 recorded deaths of Indian seafarers in the period 1990-96 were attributed to suicide, for example.

Exposure to toxic and carcinogenic materials is also responsible for significant numbers of seafarer deaths and acute and chronic illnesses. The Norwegian Cancer Research Institute have found that mesothelioma deaths are six times more common among Norwegian ships engineers and engine ratings than among the general population, as a likely consequence of past asbestos exposure. Among Danish seafarers, cancers are more common among engine than deck crew. Scandinavian studies have also documented the impact of organic solvents on seafarers' health,^[54]^,^[55] which affect the nervous system as well as being carcinogenic. Seafarers are also exposed to physical hazards to their health, particularly noise and vibration, but also excessive heat and cold and harmful radiation from sunlight. The Joint ILO/WHO Committee on the Health of Seafarers stated that engine-room noise levels sometimes exceeded 100 dB and living quarters noise was at times higher than 60 dB,^[56] impacting on hearing, alertness and mental health. Measured noise levels on a range of Polish merchant ships were shown to exceed acceptable levels for engine crews by an average of 1-2 dB; audiometric testing at the beginning and end of voyages showed statistically significant temporary shifts in hearing thresholds, with the shift being more pronounced for engine-room crews.^[57] Ergonomic hazards increase the risk of injury and musculoskeletal disease.

Seafarers are subject to infectious diseases, both as a result of shore and shipboard exposure. In the developed countries it is claimed that no other occupational group has a higher prevalence of infectious diseases than seafarers. Like other transport workers – and in the same way as migrant workers – seafarers have high rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs): a review of studies of STDs among seafarers showed that rates of gonorrhoea in different national groups of seafarers were between five and 20 times as great as the national average prevalence for males.^[58] Prior infection with STDs such as gonorrhoea and chancroid is known to increase transmissibility of HIV.

Lifestyle studies show seafarers to be more likely than general population samples to engage in a range of unhealthy behaviours. For example, a study of 1,806 Australian seafarers in 1997,^[59] showed that, compared to surveys of the Australian general public, seafarers smoked and drank more, exercised less and consumed more sugar and fat.

The mental health of seafarers has only comparatively recently started to receive the attention it deserves. High seafarer suicide rates have already been mentioned, but poor mental health may manifest itself in much less dramatic ways. Among the seafarers in the Australian study on Fatigue, Stress and Occupational Health (FASTOH), ^[60] 60 per cent reported moderate to high stress levels and 70 per cent reported poor quality sleep at sea, with masters, mates and pilots reporting higher incidences of stress and pilots reporting the worst sleep quality. Direct measurement (using wrist-worn actimeters) of sleep quality at sea and on shore, among crew from a European passenger ferry, showed that crew working split shift patterns experienced the worst sleep disturbance. ^[61] In the Australian study, the “home-work interface” was the highest ranked source of stress for all seafaring groups, and a parallel Australian study of the wives and families of Great Barrier Reef pilots found that pilotage work impacted on the mental health of the pilots' wives, with 14 per cent being assessed as having high anxiety levels and 9 per cent being depressed – a higher prevalence than would be found in a normal population sample.^[62]

Shipboard medical care is normally provided by fellow seafarers who have undergone “paramedic” training courses. While some trainees receive training of a high standard, an international investigation of training standards ^[63] showed considerable cross-national variation in standards. Furthermore, the prescribed international training standards were not being effectively enforced. It was considered that seafarers were not receiving the same quality of care as that available to land-based occupations.

Abandoned seafarers

Living and working conditions are generally at their worst when seafarers are abandoned. Due to a lack of systematic studies, however, the extent of the abandonment of seafarers is difficult to establish. A recent ITF study, covering the period from July 1995 to the end of 1998, revealed 199 separate cases. ^[64] However, there are many cases where there is no ITF involvement. For instance, six ships of Marti Shipping, a Turkish company, which were abandoned in 1997, are not included in the 199 cases covered by the report. Evidence of the extent of abandonment can be found in a catalogue of archived and contemporary cases of abandonment kept by the justice and welfare section of the Missions to Seamen and the Center for Seafarers' Rights in New York. Abandonment cases are also regularly reported in the shipping press, as well as in local media whose reports are not normally picked up nationally, and then perhaps transmitted internationally.

Seafarers are usually abandoned when their ship is under arrest by creditors, or when the ship cannot operate due to collision, repairs, port state detention, etc. Lengths of abandonment may vary from a couple of weeks to a couple of years. The severity of the abandonment can also vary according to the country in which it occurs, the state of the ship (i.e. age, type) and its stocks (i.e. food, fuel), and the local availability of support from statutory and voluntary organizations. There is no insurance policy scheme in the shipping industry to cover for abandoned seafarers – i.e., to provide support during their abandonment, cover their back wages, or offer repatriation – although some registries have set up funds to assist seafarers when stranded on ships abroad; an example of this is the recent introduction of the Singapore Stranded Seafarers' Fund (SSSF). ^[65] If there are no provisions under local legislation to nominate the party responsible for the welfare of the crew during the period of the arrest and if no assistance is available from funds such as SSSF, seafarers are left to their own devices for survival.

Despite the similarities between abandonment cases there are no globally uniform procedures dealing with them. The whole process may differ according to: local laws; ranking of creditors in the country of arrest/abandonment; or bilateral agreements between flag States and port States.

Although the protection of seafarers' wages and repatriation have been the subject of various ILO Conventions, there is no legal instrument to address fully the abandonment situation. In many cases of abandonment, the protection of wages and repatriation become subject to other determinants. Total claims against the ship and vessel value may, for instance, combine with the creditor status of seafarers in terms of ranking to effect the amount of money to be distributed amongst them.

The more fortunate abandoned seafarers may attract the attention of the local, national, and international media. It is not uncommon for local port chaplains and/or other welfare and trade union organizations to take care of abandoned seafarers and publicize their plight. Seafarer families are often less-visible casualties of abandonment. The families of abandoned seafarers may be scattered in different countries or throughout diverse regions of one country and, without the attention of media and welfare organizations, it is very difficult for them to make their voices heard.

A good case in point is the 103,325 dwt, 1973-built Turkish-flag combination carrier, Obo Basak, owned by Marti Shipping, and registered as a one-ship company, which was arrested in Dunkirk by creditors in July 1997 with 29 Turkish officers and ratings onboard. The crew had not received wages for the last nine months. Shortly after the arrest the captain and the chief engineer deserted the ship, leaving the crew without any cash or provisions.

At first, the crew was reluctant to take any action against the shipowner for fear of losing their jobs and being blacklisted. A month later, when it was evident that the shipowner had no intention of paying wage arrears, the crew decided to take industrial action and seek a court settlement. Upon learning of this course of action the shipowner sent a telex dismissing all the crew. The ITF and the Missions to Seamen eventually funded the repatriation of the crew to Turkey. The shipowner then brought in a replacement crew from Turkey. This second crew, unaware of the situation, were also left without any cash, provisions, water or fuel for heating and cooking on board.

Months later, the local court decided in favour of the seafarers. This ruling was appealed by the shipowner on the grounds of the court's jurisdiction. The case is now in the French high courts awaiting a decision to the appeal. In the meantime, none of the crew has received any wages.

Two years after the Dunkirk events most of the crew have been blacklisted in Turkey because of their court action. Many have lost their houses, possessions and even their friends. Pleas to the company have been fruitless. A wife of one of the crew, becoming very angry when she was verbally abused by the personnel director said to him: “Do you want us to become prostitutes?”; his answer was, “Don't come here any more. Your husband is claiming from the courts, so it is nothing to do with us any more”.^[66]

This example of the Obo Basak is typical of many other cases – which, however, do not necessarily attract the attention of the media. The Obo Basak's crew was abandoned in a port where seafarers' welfare services are efficient and experienced in handling such cases. The port chaplain, well-known for his organizing skills, was able to develop a programme of coordinated action with other agencies and generate front-page publicity in the French national press. The abandoned crews of ships in remoter parts of the world may pass wholly unnoticed or wait months before the case comes to the attention of parties able to organize action on their behalf.

A joint working group involving both IMO and ILO is currently examining the issue.

Concluding remarks

Chapter 1 of this report has highlighted the considerable changes which have occurred in the ownership, financing and management of shipping fleets, and in the way that ships are registered and controlled. There is now a greater distinction between the real owners of ships, the operators and the managers. The latter, often responsible for crewing, have to work within a rigid framework of instructions to reduce cost. In many cases, crews have become further removed from the beneficiary owners who have no direct responsibility for their welfare. Ship managers frequently are the real operators when it comes to crew matters and they are working on tight margins. Banks, owing to the modalities of financing, have a greater influence in the shipping industry than was once the case.

Chapter 2 examines the labour market for seafarers and some of the issues which affect their supply. In line with developments elsewhere, there has been considerable “de facto deregulation” of the industry. A large proportion of the world fleet has moved to international registers and is therefore operating under more flexible conditions than those which used to be prevalent in traditional maritime countries. The shipping industry, formerly regulated by a complex system involving the social partners at national level, now operates mostly under national systems which apply few international standards – often only the barest minimum. Frequently, there is no social dialogue at the national level in the shipping industry of these countries. Since seafarers come from other countries, social dialogue must be strengthened at the international level to promote progress on the application of minimum standards relating to conditions of work and life of seafarers.

Chapter 3 looks at some of the more important issues relating to the conditions of work and life of seafarers as they have been affected by changes in the shipping industry. There is considerable evidence that poor conditions of work persist in certain parts of the industry. Despite the hazardous nature of the maritime environment, the shipping industry generally provides work of relatively high quality; however, the industry needs to continue to be vigilant in respect of workers' fundamental rights, which are covered by the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work – an important component of the ILO's “decent work” agenda. The Commission may wish to discuss whether and how best to reinforce the industry's commitments to these basic principles which are the right to freedom of association, collective bargaining, and freedom from discrimination. As for the latter, it appears that discrimination and poor conditions of work might discourage women to have a career at sea.

Many cases of poor conditions of work in the shipping industry are in subsectors where there is heightened competition associated with either little regulation or the ability to avoid the impact of enforcement. The move of fleets away from the traditional supervision of maritime nations towards new forms of registries and the emergence of a more international vision of how shipping should be regulated, have had a marked impact on the labour market, which is now truly global.

An increasing number of seafarers come from developing countries and the composition of crews is much more diversified, with crews being frequently composed of several nationalities. The lower wages and reduced quality of certain working conditions may reflect the lower expectations of seafarers due to their origin or place of residence. Seafarers from developing countries are more likely to accept relatively basic living and working conditions compared with seafarers from developed countries. Assuming that there are minimum internationally accepted conditions, these seafarers who are working under the regulation of States of which they are not nationals need more protection. Furthermore, some of these States may accept only limited responsibility for issues relating to their status as seafarers, such as social security. Frequently, different regulations and conditions of work apply to crews on the basis of their national origin or place of residence.

Be that as it may, shipping today is increasingly contingent upon the application of international regulations by States and all the actors of the shipping industry, even if these regulations take the form of national laws. This is especially true of technical requirements, most of which are based on the direct application of IMO Conventions by their incorporation – almost without change – in national legislation. The application of most of these Conventions is unavoidable as evidence of their application, frequently a certificate, is required by port state control. When flag state inspections are required, even if delegated to classification societies, they are evidenced by relevant certificates which are checked by port state control inspectors. Since these certificates are issued by the competent authority under the relevant Convention, it is impossible to avoid ratification. The fact that some of the technical Conventions have been almost universally ratified is not due to a spontaneous recognition of their intrinsic value; it is rather the outcome of a mechanism which was intended to make all ships comply with basic regulation.

It is generally agreed that the world maritime labour market is characterized by the non-application and avoidance of social regulation; indeed, this situation is believed to provide a commercial advantage in competition. This aspect was highlighted, inter alia, by the report on the causes and consequences of the sinking of the Erika produced by the French Economic and Social Council (see appendix). In the most important flag States, there is no effective machinery for social dialogue at the national level. Consequently, there is no process of negotiation likely to lead to the application of international standards on social issues which are subject to ratification. States do not feel that they need to apply those standards. On the contrary, they feel that in order to attract ships to their register they must provide as flexible a legal framework as possible as concerns labour conditions and regulations.

At this point, it might be relevant to discuss whether collective bargaining in the shipping industry should in fact be carried out at the international level under more formal auspices, perhaps within the framework of the ILO's strategic objective to encourage social dialogue with a view to ensuring decent work for all.

The owners of ships – whether they are financial institutions or traditional shipowners – operate in line with the demands of the international markets. Those operating in sectors which are very capital-intensive, requiring a large organized commercial and logistic network, are less prone to intensive competition and can therefore offer above-average conditions to seafarers. In addition, they may act in this way because of their perception of corporate responsibility or need for a positive public image. Other shipowners, however, operate under conditions of cut-throat competition; faced with mandatory compliance with technical requirements and optional compliance with minimum standards of crew conditions they may well be tempted to “cut corners”. Knowing that the likelihood of being detained for technical requirements is very high in some regions, some shipowners may try to economize on crew conditions. This holds particularly true for ILO standards as they are the weak link in the international maritime legislative framework. They are not widely accepted by flag States, as evidenced by their rather poor ratification record, and do not have “muscle” in the form of effective enforcement as port States are reluctant to apply the ultimate tool of control: detention. The apparently successful application of Convention No. 147 by some regional port state control agreements must be qualified. Only parts of the instruments are considered apt for verification – for example those provisions on accommodation, food and catering, which are considered clearer. Other provisions are considered to be too vague or subject to interpretation. As a consequence, deficiencies are often detected but remedial action is not followed up and detentions are not as frequent as they should be. Any provisions in new instruments should, therefore, be designed with control in mind, with precise criteria for verification by both flag States and port States.

This vicious circle involving extremely low freight rates, very poor conditions, low standards enforced by inadequate regulation and reluctance to enforce must be broken. This can only be done if it is the will of the industry at the international level since there is growing support from many of the major flag States. The first step must be to adopt minimum standards which are supported by all the parties concerned: governments, shipowners and seafarers. Care must be taken to avoid adjusting these standards to the lowest common denominator or adopting unrealistically high standards which are not easily enforceable. These standards should then be implemented and strictly enforced. A campaign for ratification would also be required, supported by those who feel that appropriate conditions of work are necessary for human and technical reasons – not least because safety at sea depends so much on the human element. Furthermore, enforcement must be tight and transparent, probably relying as much on the efficiency of port state control as on flag state implementation. It should be impossible to run ships if the relevant ILO standards are not fully applied. Their application should be as universal as technical standards are. Possibly, the only way to achieve this is for any new instrument to contain a mechanism which encourages flag States to ratify and to verify the implementation through inspection. Further verification by port state control of the application of any minimum standards should be essential.

In this context, the role of flag States as prime enforcer of safety and crew conditions on board must be further reinforced. A mechanism should be created whereby pressure could be brought to bear on flag States to take their responsibilities on these matters. Recourse could be had to the means available in the ILO – such as the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations. The Commission could consider in this context the relevance of the concept of the “genuine link” in the context of conditions of work for ship crews.

Part of the incentive to make the regulation of crew conditions more effective must come from the pressure to protect the marine environment. The cost of pollution is so great that the avoidance of human error by making conditions of work on board ship more friendly to the human being is now good value for money. The high cost of the most recent pollution incidents – such as the one caused by the sinking of the Erika – bear witness to this.

Some of the basic elements for an “international seafarers' employment code” which could contain a comprehensive set of minimum internationally accepted standards on conditions of work and life for seafarers, already exist in the provisions of Convention No. 147. This Convention is one of the most comprehensive of the ILO's maritime Conventions. Its application is most demanding and yet it has been one the most accepted through ratification, covering about 45 per cent of the world fleet. It is argued that many States have only ratified it because it can be enforced through port state control to all ships – irrespective of whether the flag State has ratified the Convention or not. However, only some aspects of Convention No. 147 are at present actively enforced through inspections by port States, as parts of the Convention are considered as not being precise enough for impartial verification. Only a few provisions of the Convention give rise to deficiencies leading to immediate detention and port state control inspectors frequently hesitate to detain vessels only on account of Convention No. 147 issues. But failure to correct identified deficiencies can eventually lead to detention. Many Convention No. 147-related deficiencies are therefore actually rectified after they have been detected by inspectors well before detention occurs. The success of Convention No. 147 may therefore be attributed more to the fact that it can be applied to all ships rather than to any inherent flexibility which would enable ratification or application. In fact, its more precise provisions are more easily verified – and thus more likely to be properly applied. The widening of the range of issues covered by a framework instrument such as Convention No. 147 and the identification of corresponding check criteria that could be easily applied could make labour standards generally more enforceable.

Convention No. 147 cannot be revised easily. The 1996 Protocol has not received many ratifications, probably because of the heavy procedural requirements of ratification at the national level. A more simple amendment procedure is required for any new instruments and particularly for the detailed provisions which should facilitate verification. Such an amendment procedure would allow for changes to be made to the instrument to keep it compatible with the needs of the industry and its seafarers.

Furthermore, the social partners – acting together or separately – should strongly disclaim socially sub-standard shipping and call for improved crew conditions. Social dialogue could be intensified, using the ILO and perhaps the Commission itself for a continuous exchange of information and discussions on this matter. In addition to promoting the ratification and application of the relevant standards with the governments of member States, the social partners could promote the voluntary application of standards for crew conditions – which in some cases could be higher than the minimum ones agreed upon for compulsory enforcement. These voluntary initiatives could involve direct negotiations between shipowners and seafarers within some subsectors. This would be particularly relevant when there is little social dialogue at national level between shipowners and seafarers due to the absence of appropriate machinery in the flag State.

Certain sectors of the industry have specific problems. Many of these could be solved by direct negotiations between the social partners at national and international levels or by voluntary initiatives within those sectors. An example of this is the cruise sector where an international association of operators states in its code of behaviour that its members will abide by international labour standards. It is quite obvious that further progress needs to be made to improve the record of this subsector on matters relating to conditions of work and life of crews.

The report has examined specific aspects of conditions of work such as wages, safety and health and hours of work. In the case of some issues, it would suffice to incorporate the contents of existing instruments in any new standards. In the case of others, the Commission might wish to consider changes which have occurred in the industry. For example, it might be relevant to examine whether certain welfare measures relating to recreation and communications are necessary, given the possibilities afforded by advances in technology.

Suggested points for discussion

In the following suggested points for discussion, the Office has tried to cover the issues highlighted by the report. The Commission might wish to use these as a basis for its discussion.

1. The shipping industry should reinforce its commitment to matters relating to fundamental rights at work as stated in the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work adopted by the ILO in 1998. What action if any should the ILO take with respect to freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining? What action should be taken with respect to discrimination? Why are so few women taking up careers at sea? What action should be taken in this respect?

2. Commercial pressures on shipowners result in low freight rates, forcing competition on all aspects of ship operations. Since there are more and more stringent regulations relating to safety of shipping operations at international and consequently at national levels, the only areas left open for destructive competition are the ones in which national authorities are reluctant to legislate and implement high standards: areas affecting conditions of work on board. Low freight rates in certain subsectors such as bulk trades therefore result in poor conditions of work and life for seafarers. What can be done to break this vicious circle? What should be the role of flag States in this regard? What is the relevance of the “genuine link” concept to the regulation of conditions of work and life of seafarers?


Ship type	Average growth rate (gt)

Bulk carriers	3.4
Cargo passengers	–5.6
Chemical tankers	4.0
Container ships	9.0
General cargo (multi-deck)	–2.5
General cargo (single-deck)	4.9
Liquid gas tankers	5.3
OBO carriers	–5.8
Oil tankers	2.2
Passenger ships	9.6
Reefer ships	1.4
Ro-ro cargo ships	4.3
Ro-ro/passenger ships	7.7
Special ships	0.8

Source: Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics (ISL): Shipping Statistics Year Book 1998 (Bremen, 1998).


Sectors		1980		1998	Net growth %

No. of ships	147		225		53
Total gt of fleet	2 045 000		6 307 000		208
Passengers carried	1 500 000		7 500 000		400

Source: ISL, op. cit.; A.D. Couper (ed.): Cruise ship design and seafarers (University of Piraeus, Department of Maritime Studies, 1998); G.B. Wild: “Human resource in the cruise industry”, in Cruise and ferry (London, 1999).


Company	Number of lower berths

Carnival/Airtours	56 748
Royal Caribbean	30 996
P&O Group	22 996
Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL)	15 354
Star Cruise	8 214

Source: Wild, op. cit.


Year	International fleet	World fleet	% international/world

1989	182 533 014	410 480 693	44.5
1990	196 356 460	423 627 198	46.4
1991	210 261 430	436 026 858	48.2
1992	231 876 903	445 168 553	52.1
1993	243 668 349	457 914 808	53.2
1994	261 686 684	475 859 036	55.0
1995	280 026 076	490 662 091	57.1
1996	300 181 686	507 873 011	59.1
1997	321 270 935	522 197 193	61.5
1998	334 744 863	531 893 296	62.9
1999	347 822 402	543 609 561	64.0


Year	International fleet	World fleet	% international/world

1989	14 825	76 100	19.5
1990	15 747	78 336	20.1
1991	16 831	80 030	21.0
1992	18 465	79 726	23.2
1993	19 285	80 655	23.9
1994	20 022	80 679	24.8
1995	20 662	82 890	24.9
1996	21 801	84 264	25.9
1997	22 906	85 494	26.8
1998	23 774	85 828	27.7
1999	24 930	86 817	28.7

29th Session of the Joint Maritime Commission

Geneva, 22-26 January 2001

The impact on seafarers' living and working conditions
of changes in the structure of the shipping industry

Contents

Introduction