This competition for jobs has meant higher profits for owners, especially as wages on ships from imperialist countries have begun to shrink toward those paid workers from Third World countries. At the same time, wages for some seafarers from underdeveloped countries have risen. This narrower wage gap was revealed in studies released by the International Labor Organization (ILO) prior to a January meeting of its Joint Maritime Commission in Geneva, Switzerland. That meeting raised the need for a revised recommended minimum wage and for a new bill of rights for merchant mariners.

The ILO is part of the United Nations, and its proposals are not binding either on member countries or on shipowners and seafarers unions--although representatives of the body says its decisions are used in bargaining sessions between the latter two groups.

The Geneva meeting was opened by ILO general secretary Juan Somavia, who said, "I strongly encourage the social partners in the shipping industry to intensify their social dialogue in order to ensure decent work for seafarers." By "social partners" Somavia means on one hand the exploiting shipowners, and on the other the International Transport Federation (ITF), which has the affiliation of some 600,000 trade union members around the world with jobs in the transportation industry, including quite a few seafarers.

In recent years the growing resistance by seafarers to attacks by shipowners has pressured the ITF to begin to respond. That's the real motive force behind the ILO's attempt to forge a new social contract between the ITF and shipowners--an attempt that continues to exclude the active participation of rank-and-file seafarers. Their next-to-nothing class-collaboration proposal is better understood by looking at the world maritime industry today.  
 
Small minority covered by contracts
The industry includes seafarers from around the world competing for 1.25 million jobs on 50,000 vessels, including large bulk carriers, container ships, passenger ships, and giant supertankers. Not included in this total are offshore supply boats, ferries, and river craft. Only a small minority of seafarers--mainly from imperialist countries--are on ships covered by union contracts. The majority are from economically underdeveloped countries, have little or no union protection, and earn far less than the ILO's minimum wage guideline of $435. In addition, they subsist on poorer quality food, and face deteriorating safety conditions and the lengthening of the working day to as much as 16 hours without overtime.

One result is that 2,200 seafarers are estimated to lose their lives annually, according to a joint study by researchers at the universities of Wales and Hong Kong. The study's authors explain that half these deaths are due to ship sinkings and other maritime disasters. Their estimates include a figure of 100 seafarers a year dead from suicide and homicide.

At the 1996 commission meeting, ILO head Michel Hansenne said that the "dangers to which shipowners and governments are exposed are financial or political in nature, but seafarers are exposed to physical risks which threaten their very lives. It has, for example, been emphasized that since the last tripartite meeting of 1994, 180 ships of more than 500 tons have been lost at sea, causing the death of 1,200 seafarers and many passengers. In the first six months of 1996, twice as many human lives were lost at sea [as] in the whole of 1995."

Prior to the 1996 conference, an ILO press release noted that while many "new ships are typically larger than in the past many are highly automated resulting in a reduction of personnel and placing a greater responsibility on the seafarers who remain on board." The release said that in 1950, for example, a 12,000-ton oil tanker had an average crew of 40. Today, a tanker 20 times as large has an average crew half that size.

An ILO report says that in the 1980s, seafarers' wages fell and work conditions on ships sharply worsened. That deterioration leveled off in the 1990s, when resistance by multinational crews began to escalate. Many of the seafarers involved are recruited from an international industrial labor reserve army from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Latin America. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, increasing numbers are from East European workers states like Bulgaria, the Ukraine, and Romania. Then, since the end of British rule in Hong Kong, more workers from mainland China are going to sea. This has helped to raise the already high percentage of Far East seafarers on deep sea ships today.  
 
Internationalization of the workforce
Many seafarers are recruited by labor contractors in their home countries, then flown to work on nonunion ships in other parts of the world. A large percentage of these ships are registered in countries which have weak or nonexistent maritime laws protecting seafarers' rights. This places mariners more at the mercy of profit-hungry absentee shipowners.

During the 1980s and 1990s, attacks on wages and conditions aboard merchant ships escalated, affecting both union and nonunion seafarers. The success of this shipowners' assault on the wages of seafarers in imperialist countries is reflected in statistics compiled by the ILO. They point out that between 1992 and 1999 the percentage of wages for able seafarers in imperialist countries declined an average of roughly 50 percent. Hardest hit were workers in Australia, with a 65 percent decline. Wages fell in Germany and Japan by 53 percent, in Belgium by 51 percent, and in Denmark and the Netherlands by more than 40 percent.

The ILO also pointed out that wages for seafarers from Bangladesh, Myanmar, China, India, and Poland increased during the same period by between 25 to 91 percent.

In the mid-1990s, Chinese workers were among the lowest paid. The difference in wages paid to an all-European ship's crew of 24, and a comparable Chinese crew, for example, totaled $58,200 each month, or $694,400 a year. This makes quite clear how shipowners profit from the competition they breed.

That same decade, however, a pattern of resistance to shipowner attacks began to grow, including work stoppages and other forms of protest aboard ships. The same pattern continues today. Such struggles often take place in ports in countries where seafarers have over the years won some legal rights. One such ship was the 740-foot Delta Pride, which left a port in Mexico and anchored off the port of Brownsville, Texas. The company left 22 Pakistani seafarers marooned with only rain as a source of drinking war. Their food was rotting cabbage, a couple of tomatoes, and whatever fish they could catch.  
 
Workers use ships as base of struggle
The ITF reported that during 1998 the crews of more than 35 ships had been abandoned in seaports around the world by profiteering owners eager to avoid paying wages, taxes, and other shipping costs. An increasingly common tactic by seafarers has been to refuse to leave these ships until they are paid, in effect using them as a base of operations to demonstrate and win support for their rights.

Another example of miserable working conditions aboard luxury cruise ships was given reporters in 1998 by a Filipino crew member on the luxury cruise ship Westerdam. "We work very long, [up] to 14 hours a day," he said. "They only pay for 10.5 hours. Even when you are sleeping they knock on your door to help clean up."

Similar grievances provoked action by the 27 officers and crew of the Epta, a cargo vessel, when it arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1998. Demanding the payment of $173,000 in back wages, they refused to finish unloading, sealed the ship's hatches, and hung banners over the side of the ship to publicize their struggle.

Many of these actions have been successful in helping pull the ITF into the struggles of unorganized mariners. This has led to some legal successes in defense of multinational crews, including sometimes winning back pay and family allotments.

The ability of these multinational crews to begin to organize a collective fightback is helping stamp a union presence on worldwide shipping. These workers are an inspiration for all working people under attack, and deserve all-out solidarity when they go into struggle. And their growing ability to fight back is a far better formula for beating off continuing shipowner attacks than the hoopla for a social contract being promoted by the ILO.  
 
 
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