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| Danny Fil II (Orig. Don Carlos) |
Danny FII was not a new ship, but it was modern, because her
crew was international: a British captain and chief engineer, 59 Pakistanis,
some Filipinos, a Lebanese and a Syrian. Though she was Uruguayan, she flew
another country’s flag. She was a typical member of the 90,000-strong fleet of
freighters that sail the seas, bringing us 95 per cent of everything that we
consume.
Eleven miles out from
Tripoli, the night, the weather and the Danny FII itself combined to create a
fatal outcome. The details are still unclear, but Danny FII changed course,
then capsized. Twenty-three sailors reached the lifeboats, but they capsized,
too, and the seas filled with drowning animals and men. Forty men survived, 43
did not, including the captain, who went down with his ship. And so Danny FII
was added to the 36 other ships that sank that year and the 43 men were added
to the estimated 2,000 or so who lose their lives annually.
Why were there no headlines? Consider the reaction if 37
airliners crashed every year, or 37 trains, and if it happened every year,
regular as a shipping schedule. In 1910, the journalist FR Bullen wrote that we
regarded this ‘indispensable bridging of the ocean’ as ‘no more needing our
thoughtful attention than the recurrence of the seasons or the incidence of day
and night’. Nothing has changed.
The man who goes to sea, wrote Marco Polo, is a man in
despair. This is still true, but today’s man of the sea is also probably poor,
probably exploited, and living a life that contains, at the least, chronic
fatigue and overwork; boredom, pirates and danger. Suicide rates of seafarers
are triple those of land-based occupations and carrying sea cargo is the
second-most deadly job on the planet after fishing.
The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), which
represents seafarers, said recently that ‘the maritime and fishing industries
continue to allow astonishing abuses of human rights of those working in the
sector. Seafarers and fishers are routinely made to work in conditions that
would not be acceptable in civilised society’. Middle-class shoppers may think
they are helping the world’s poor by buying Fairtrade food, but, chances are,
they have never given a thought to the conditions on board the ships that bring
them those goods.
Only last year a young South African cadet named Akhona
Geveza was found floating in the sea, an hour after reporting that she had been
raped by a senior officer. An investigation by South Africa’s Sunday Times
newspaper interviewed other cadets and found two made pregnant by senior
officers; two male cadets raped; and a widespread atmosphere of intimidation.
‘When we arrived,’ one female cadet told the newspaper, ‘we were told that the
sea is no-man’s land and that what happens at sea, stays at sea.’
The International Commission on Shipping estimates that
thousands of seafarers, working on 10-15 per cent of the world’s ships, ‘work
in slave conditions, with minimal safety, long hours for little or no pay, starvation
diets, rape and beatings’. All to bring us our Fairtrade coffee and our
ethically sourced clothes.
A British Navy Admiral last year accused Britons of ‘sea
blindness’; of having no idea what sea life is like. But how can we? Shore and
sea lives are nothing alike. You would expect for example that the families of
Danny FII’s dead crew would be compensated, because that is what happens in
shore life, ideally, where there are checks and balances and courts and
redress. But the men of Danny FII lived in a world that is essentially lawless.
When something goes wrong at sea, a seafarer has nowhere to
turn. ‘A land-based person would have national jurisdiction,’ says Deirdre
Fitzpatrick of the ITF,. ‘I’m in the UK, my problem is here, and I know where
to go for help. If you are Filipino, on a Panamanian-flagged ship, travelling
from South Africa to the Netherlands, what law is going to govern you? You are
a total moving target.’
International, multinational, transnational: this is normal
in shipping, an industry whose complexity would impress offshore bankers. Crews
of five or more nationalities are standard, and 60 per cent of ships now fly a
flag of a country that is not that of their owner. These days, the average ship
in British ports is unlikely to have either a British flag or a British crew.
The only thing you can predict with certainty about it is that its sailors will
be from poor countries, and exhausted. Occasionally, they will also be unpaid,
or worse, which is where Tommy Molloy comes in.
An inspector for the ITF, based in Liverpool, Molloy spends
his days visiting whichever of the world’s freighters has arrived at the quays
of Liverpool and Birkenhead, to see if they pass muster. We meet in New
Brighton, old-time seaside resort for Liverpool, now supplanted by Ryanair and
short-haul sunshine. His office is on a retirement estate for ex-seafarers run
by Nautilus, a seafaring union.
All the old seafarers here are British, and ‘they wouldn’t
recognise the industry today’, says Molloy, as we drive at pensioner speed
through the lanes. But he hardly ever sees a Briton on the ships that call
here, because they cost too much in wages, and expect things like being paid on
time, or having the right to be in a union, that shipowners can avoid quite
easily and legally by flying a ‘flag of convenience’, a
responsibility-avoidance system unique to shipping.
It is common to see ships who are owned by, for example, a
Japanese company, flying the flag of Liberia or Panama. This entitles them to
operate under a nation state that supplies none of the governance that it
should, a practice that makes tracking down bad shipowners near impossible.
Flagging out your ship, an Australian maritime union wrote, is like ‘being able
to register your car in Bali so you can drive it on Australian roads without
having to get the brakes fixed’.
There are decent flag-of-convenience registries, but
questionable ones abound. North Korea has a large fleet. When Cambodia-flagged
ships got involved in too many sinkings and drug trafficking investigations,
the registry office in Singapore was closed and two weeks later reopened as
Mongolia’s. The United Nations Law of the Sea specifies that there should be a
‘genuine link’ between the flag-owner and the state. It took years for
diplomats to agree on this. They are now spending years deciding what a genuine
link should consist of. In practice, when anything goes wrong, the seafarer is
on his own.
I drive with Molloy to Birkenhead docks. He has the right to
visit ships that have signed an ITF agreement promising to respect certain wage
levels and hours of rest. Otherwise he asks politely to visit. Shipping is the
only industry that regulates working hours by hours of rest, because it would
be impossible to conform to hours of work limits.
On a recent passage I took, conforming to regulations was
impossible. In port, crews were working 18 hours a day, because shipping these
days is 24 hours, seven days a week. The days of prolonged stays in port are
long gone. With containerisation, a ship can be unloaded and loaded and gone in
24 hours. Some of the crew on my ship hadn’t been ashore in months. ‘I’ve been
to New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo,’ the chief engineer said, ‘and they all look
like my engine room.’
Molloy doesn’t see many decent ships. ‘I deal with the dirty
end of the industry,’ he says. The first ship we visit, though, is fine. Hohe
Bank is flagged in Antigua, owned by Germans, managed by Britons, built by
Chinese, and with an Indonesian crew and Russian officers. Normal, in other
words. Molloy hands out ITF magazines in Russian and an Indonesian language,
and they are pleased to get them, because it is human contact, which they don’t
get much of.
Plenty of seafarers I meet tell me their job is like being
‘at prison with a salary’. Wrong, wrote the Maritime Charities Funding
Commission, which found that ‘the provision of leisure, recreation, religious
service and communication facilities is better in UK prisons than on many
ships’.
The ship ‘house’, where seafarers live, is small but clean. But
Molloy gives me a PowerPoint presentation about some other ships he has seen.
Mouldy, filthy couches, rotting fruit and meat. I hear complaints that
chandlers – suppliers – regularly give ships poor quality food, simply because
they can, when a ship is in port for 24 hours. But the crew doesn’t complain
here and the paperwork is orderly.
Still, even on the better ships, Molloy can go aboard and be
there for days. ‘You’ll find that all the crew have exceeded their contracts.
We always try to persuade them to leave but often they don’t want to.’
Non-officers don’t have permanent contracts, so staying at
sea longer means more money and less need immediately to look for work. I met
Filipinos with four children who had missed every birth and every birthday. It
is the price they pay. ‘We call it dollar for homesickness,’ one said.
Many seafarers also find themselves abandoned in a port with
no money, no supplies and no way to get home. The abandonment of ships peaks
during times of recession, but it happens all the time, usually when an
unscrupulous owner has run out of money and disappears.
The worst cases happen overseas, such as that of Arabian
Victory, stranded in Dubai in 2002 for 45 days in temperatures of 111F (44C).
The Indian and Ukrainian crew didn’t even have water. Appeals to Dubai
authorities, the flag state (Belize) and the Indian consulate failed. When the
crew decided to sail to India for help, the Iraqi owner tried to arrest them
for hijacking.
This case is extreme, but Molloy sees abuse that is alarming
for being so routine. He boarded one Greek-owned ship and found that the
Filipino crew and officers hadn’t been paid for months. ‘The captain got on the
phone to the company and told me $48,000 was being wired immediately. I said,
hang on, I haven’t even calculated the total yet, then I did and it was
$47,600. They knew exactly what they owed.’
Once, when Molloy got money for the crew, he had a call at
3am from a crew member. ‘He was at Manchester airport on his way home. He said:
“I’m the only one who refused to give the money back as soon as we got off the
ship, so they kicked me off.”’
But who is going to enforce anything? When a crew is
abandoned, the ITF can apply to special maritime courts to have the ship
arrested and eventually sold. This can take 12 weeks, and the sailors have no
money or food. Welfare organisations such as the Sailors Society, Mission to
Seafarers and Stella Maris are often the only solace for exploited seafarers.
They are crucial, especially when the crew won’t leave for fear they will never
get paid.
Molloy tells of one Sri Lankan who told him: ‘If you send me
home, I will cut my throat.’ Like thousands of seafarers, he had coped with not
being paid by taking loans from moneylenders, who were threatening to kill his
family. Russians and Ukrainians are more likely to stand up for themselves,
says Molloy, but the Filipinos will resist longer because of blacklisting, a
practice that no one admits to but which is widely used among the crewing
agencies in the Philippines.
Roy Paul, who looks after Filipino seafarers for the ITF’s
Seafarers Trust, says it is common practice. ‘You’ll have someone who has
worked for a ship for four or five years, then makes a complaint against, for
example, a racist captain. Suddenly the agency has no ship for him, though it
did for four years.’
The conditions that Molloy sees every day would cause outrage
ashore. And it’s not just lower ranking crew members who suffer. In South
Korea, the Indian captain, Jasprit Chawla, was imprisoned for 18 months after
his anchored ship was hit by a runaway barge and leaked oil into the Yellow
Sea. He was only released after a protracted campaign. ‘You land a plane at sea
and you’re a hero,’ Paul says. ‘You put a ship on land and you’re a criminal.’
Of course, there are many responsible ship owners. As Deirdre
Fitzpatrick points out, ‘They know that their most valuable asset is their
employees.’ They also know that there is a worldwide shortage of officers (a
33, 000 shortfall at the last count).
Campaigners hope that this shortage will put pressure on the
industry to clean up its act. Not much else seems to be working. Even the
Fairtrade Foundation is defeated by the complexities and realities of this
extraordinary, unique industry. It would be nice, says Fairtrade’s Ian Bretman,
to insist on using ships that have signed ITF agreements, or to avoid flags of
convenience, but without any way of monitoring, ‘this would be merely an empty
gesture. [But] I hope that it will not be too long before we can consider what
practical support we would offer trade unions in the maritime and shipping
industries so that seafarers can also see the benefits of Fairtrade.’
None of the seafarers I met shares this optimism. In a
seafarers’ centre, I ask Menandro, a ship’s cook, if he would send his son to
sea. He used to be a civil servant in the Philippines, but the economy
collapsed and only the shipping agencies were hiring. He now spends his days
bringing us everything we need to survive. Menandro is an educated and
articulate man, but his answer is brief. ‘No, no and no. I am doing this so he
doesn’t have to. This is no life.’
By Rose George
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