A Bill of Rights for Seafarers

Government, employer and worker delegates attended an international conference in Geneva in September to draft a Bill of Rights for the 1.2 million seafarers who handle nearly 90 per cent of the world's trade.
Hosted by the International Labour Office (ILO) the bill will replace a host of existing labour standards to protect exploited seafarers for adoption to the Maritime Session of the International Labour Conference scheduled to take place in 2005. It will set global labour standards that can be enforced in practice -- minimum standards for employment; working conditions; repatriation, entitlements and leave; standards for onboard working and living accommodation; social protection and seafarers' welfare.
"The international community has sought to establish a safety culture on board ships, for many years" said Jon Whitlow, Secretary Seafarers' Section, International Transport Workers' Federation. "The aim is to bring together key principles and rights and standards developed during the last 80 years."
National Secretary Paddy Crumlin is playing a key role in developing the Bill. This is his address to the ILO Maritime Conference:

We were confronted with three issues, each detailed and specific to the needs of seafarers.

In that detail lies the stuff of great satisfaction mirrored at times by great frustration. Satisfaction in that one can easily project into the essential value of protection of under age seafarers, the health of seafarers, their training, what they are paid, how they are paid, how long they work and their protection from fatigue, their entitlement to leave and repatriation back to their families, the numbers aboard their vessels and the quality of life aboard those vessels. , the size of their cabins, their bunks and their mess rooms, their protection against extremes of heat and cold, how they eat and how they sleep.

The minutia of the lives of working men and women toiling, resting, living in their steel encased communities plying the endless oceans of our world far from courts, far from hospitals, far from theatres and culture, far from all the mundane support our shore-based lives rely for the most part unconsciously, on international law.

The life of seafarers is unique as are the communities and those community values that stem from the pursuit of their vocation and livelihood.
These seafarers are part of a unique workforce, cosmopolitan, culturally diverse, linguistically segregated, some from the 1st and 2nd World, but a great many from every part of the 3rd World.

Because their lives and work are beyond the physical boundaries of territory and because many of the flags that fly from the sterns of their ships reflect business opportunity not national responsibility, their lives are often marred by crushing exploitation, savage intimidation and, life and limb threatening neglect.

These are the sinister threads that stitched together the original decision by the ILO to have special arrangements for seafarers. More than 80 years of continual tripartite dialogue has not resolved these fundamental abuses.

Those abuses are clear and present. Seafarers are run aground in foreign ports because the companies that run their ships failed, and the flags that regulate them could not care less.

Repatriation is fundamental to our industry. Without guarantees, enforceable guarantees, the quality of their life is negligible.

It doesn’t matter whether they are a Master, Chief Engineer, Cook or AB, if they are forced to work day in, day out, caught between the economic short cut of under-manning and the demanding requirement to work their vessels 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they wear themselves down and disappear into illness and disregard far before the normal expectation of their working life.

In a world full of fear, they are looked at as dangerous and full of risk. Their shore leave is denied and they languish in spaces increasingly emasculated because it saves costs in shipbuilding and some savings on tonnage tax.

But, by far the worst abusers are the parasites and criminals that exploit their labour, recruit them from poverty and enrich themselves by stealing the compensation and value of that seafaring work as the commission for finding them jobs.

Private recruitment and placement has always been the bane of the world's seafarers over generations and even centuries.

Shanghaied and pressed into labour, the practice is as pervasive today as ever before, a gross manipulation of 3rd World labour. The industry of international shipping trade is often driven by these dark machineries.

It was to our great satisfaction, but not without its frustrations that our committee applied itself, seafarers, shipowners and government to give practical, detailed and specific sustenance and protection in order to protect the unprotected.

Our Committee has made a long journey in our determination to play our part in building standards for seafarers in minimum requirements for work, conditions of employment and accommodation, recreation and catering, standards that will continue to nourish and protect workers long after our individual life work is done.

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