Maritime Labour Research Articles

Oman: Recent Developments in the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers and of Women

Abstract This survey is a review listing some key legislative and executive measures of the government of Oman in the year 2021–2022, which have relevance to mainly the rights of the migrant workers. Further, and in less detail, this survey also refers to some of the developments pertinent to the rights of women living in Oman. However, more generally these rights are less relevant to women who are not Omani nationals. Oman is a member country of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The GCC comprises six states in the Arab-Gulf region: Oman, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. These oil-producing states have a significant proportion of foreign workforce in the population. Foreign workers work mostly in the private sector and are also residents in the host countries. At 46.5 per cent, Oman has a relatively lower proportion of migrants in its population among the GCC members (UN DESA, 2020). Therefore, a broader spectrum of governments’ measures relating to the issues like labour, entry and residence, and ownership of property or business touch the lives of the foreign/migrant workers or expatriates in the Gulf country. Governments’ initiatives targeting domestic workers are relevant also for women because they comprise the majority in this group. The survey notes that most of the governmental activity in Oman in the past year largely concern new laws or amendments of the existing legislation and regulations linked to labour and residency matters. Some of the more relevant ones that the survey has selected here confirms this. It also marks the period post the pandemic, which had posed considerable economic challenge for the government. Hence, as also some neighbouring Gulf countries, Oman has shown a balance of measures. On the one hand, to revive its economic dynamism and competitiveness by facilitating more ease and benefits to attract and retain foreign labour and investment in the country. On the other hand, with measures such as increased nationalization effort and support expressly favouring the national workforce to boost their more active participation in the labour market. The new labour law declared by the Omani government and its signing of the Maritime Labour Convention are a few notable highlights. The survey has essentially drawn on the government’s documents and announcements as available in English or translated text, in addition to information in the press and other relevant sources.

NIMASA’s Lacunas in the Discharge of Its Regulatory Functions in the Management of Oil Spills Pollution in Nigeria

Nigeria and Niger Delta region in particular have experienced environmental pollutions consequent from oil exploration and production activities. Fauna and flora as well as the entire marine ecosystem in these areas are at risk from oil spills pollution. Investigation to establish the indebt consequences of oil spill pollution on key performance indicators as well as the remedial actions for resuscitation is most times hinged on effective implementation, monitoring of the regulatory framework of the regulatory agencies saddled with such responsibilities. The overall success of which depends fully much on the environmental ambient and the enforcement capacity of the regulatory agencies. Effective maritime safety administration, maritime labor regulation, marine pollution prevention and control, search and rescue, inspections, cabotage enforcement, shipping development and ship registration, training and certification of seafarers, and maritime capacity development are the main focus of NIMASA as a governmental agency. However, all these specific roles are often not met due to certain lacunas within the corridors of the regulatory framework.

Kebijakan Indonesia Tidak Meratifikasi Konvensi ILO No. 188/2007 tentang Pekerjaan Penangkapan Ikan

This research aims to explain why Indonesia did not ratify the ILO Convention No. 188/2007. The technique of data collection was conducted with literature study using primary sources in the form of ILO Convention No. 188/2007, and Recommendation, 2007, Law No. 15 of 2016 regarding the Ratification of Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 and secondary sources from data, documents, or reports related with the topic of this thesis. The results of this study showed that the reason why Indonesia did not ratify the ILO Convention No. 188/2007 is based on Indonesia’s rational choices that related to the consideration of profit and loss calculations in order to maximize the profits and minimize the costs in the decision-making process. Indonesia’s profits are not comparable to the economics costs and the administrative burden in reporting and implementing the ILO Convention No. 188/2007. In addition, the ratification of the convention is still not an urgency for the Ministry of Manpower because the Ministry of Manpower considers that the regulations are sufficient in providing protection for fishermen. This is also supported by the fact that only 19 ILO member countries have ratified ILO Convention No. 188 of 2007 so that it does not have a significant impact on Indonesian fishermen.

Kebijakan Indonesia Tidak Meratifikasi Konvensi ILO No. 188/2007 tentang Pekerjaan Penangkapan Ikan

This research aims to explain why Indonesia did not ratify the ILO Convention No. 188/2007. The technique of data collection was conducted with literature study using primary sources in the form of ILO Convention No. 188/2007, and Recommendation, 2007, Law No. 15 of 2016 regarding the Ratification of Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 and secondary sources from data, documents, or reports related with the topic of this thesis. The results of this study showed that the reason why Indonesia did not ratify the ILO Convention No. 188/2007 is based on Indonesia’s rational choices that related to the consideration of profit and loss calculations in order to maximize the profits and minimize the costs in the decision-making process. Indonesia’s profits are not comparable to the economics costs and the administrative burden in reporting and implementing the ILO Convention No. 188/2007. In addition, the ratification of the convention is still not an urgency for the Ministry of Manpower because the Ministry of Manpower considers that the regulations are sufficient in providing protection for fishermen. This is also supported by the fact that only 19 ILO member countries have ratified ILO Convention No. 188 of 2007 so that it does not have a significant impact on Indonesian fishermen.

Maritime Labour Regimes in the Neoliberal Era

Maritime Labour Regimes in the Neoliberal Era

The Maritime Labour Convention 2006 in human rights context: An appraisal

The industry of shipping has been integral to human civilisation since its inception, and continue to be essential today. In fact, the vast majority of international trade, approximately 97%, is conducted through waterways. Seafarers are a vital part of this process, playing a critical role in ensuring the smooth operation of the global supply chain. Despite their importance, seafarers have historically not been granted fundamental rights. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) attempted to address this issue with a series of conventions and treaties between 1920 and 1996, but these legal instruments failed to produce the desired results. The "Maritime Labour Convention 2006" (MLC-2006) is a landmark convention that went into effect on 20th August 2013. It incorporates all previous ILO instruments and is regarded as the "fourth pillar" of the international maritime legal system, alongside SOLAS, MARPOL, STCW, and the "Seafarers' Bill of Rights." The aim of this study is to evaluate the MLC-2006 from the standpoint of human rights in order to determine whether it genuinely preserves seafarers' rights as a charter of rights because some believe it is an intentional attempt to restrict competitive advantage. Nonetheless, the MLC-2006's zero-favourable treatment concept creates a "level playing field" and a barrier to biased competition for every state in the worldwide maritime sector. In conclusion, this study evaluates the MLC-2006's impact on seafarers' rights and contributes to the on-going discussion around this important issue.

The Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 and the ILO Decent Work Agenda: A Work in Progress

Abstract The Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 came to light to “secure the right of all seafarers to decent employment” as stated in Article I thereof. In line with the ILO Decent Work Agenda, the Convention is meant to contribute to four objectives: employment creation, respect for rights at work, social pro-tection and social dialogue. However, after reviewing each objective, this article contends the Convention’s success is limited because decent work deficits still remain on board ships. The governance model set out in the Convention reinforces public capacity by allocating responsibilities to flag, port and labor supplying States, involving other stakeholders in supporting public governance to ensure compliance and enforcement. However, this research shows that the problem might not be in enforcement, but in the Convention’s standards where there is much room for improvement. To this end, social dialogue is of the essence. While local collective bargaining is impaired by global competition in labor matters, the social dialogue mecha-nisms embedded in the MLC, 2006 itself still provide a way forward as long as the ILO maintains its ability to bring States, capital and labor together in order to promote decent employment in shipping.

Analisis Kebijakan Kualifikasi Kesehatan Dan Standar Pengawakan Terhadap Kinerja Awak Kapal Bedasarkan Penerapan MLC 2006

Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) 2006 is a standard level of manning when establishing, approving or revising the level of manning, the competent authority is obliged to pay attention to the need for working hours or minimize excess working hours, as well as the principles of applicable international instruments, in particular from the International Maritime Organization regarding the level of manning. The purpose of this study is to analyze health qualification policies and manning standards for crew performance based on the application of MLC 2006 in PT. Dhama Lautan Utama Semarang Branch. The method used in this study was descriptive qualitative where the sample used was 6 people. The data analysis technique uses the SWOT analysis method using the calculation process of IFAS (Internal Strategy Factor Analysis), EFAS (External Strategy Factor Analysis) and SWOT Analysis diagram using a likert model scale. Based on the results of the analysis, it shows that there are internal and external influences on health qualification policies and manning standards on the performance of ship crews based on the 2006 Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) in PT. Dharma Lautan Utama, Semarang branch. Using SWOT IFAS and EFAS analysis in the calculation of external factors, the value is 0.667 internal while internal factors of 1,063 have a higher value than opportunity-threat. This shows that the optimization of strenght and opportunity in the development of corporate strategy.

Indonesia Inspection Mechanism: A Way to Comply with Maritime Labour Convention

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the necessity of the Indonesian government to establish a national legal framework and inspection mechanism based on Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) by emphasising its role as a flag state, a coastal state, a labour supplier state, and a port state. Design/methodology/approach: This is doctrinal research that applies a system-structural analysis by identifying, selecting, and synthesising all relevant sources, data, and provisions on the intended topic. Findings: After MLC was ratified through Law No. 15/2016, some technical provisions passed as mandated by the law. However, even now in 2021, insufficient comprehensive technical regulation for conducting standard inspection assessments hinders national maritime industry compliance. As a temporary measure in 2020, the authority relied on co-operation and assistance from another state/institution to conduct the assessment.

From Marx to Market: a legal and empirical analysis of the maritime labour convention in China

ABSTRACT Shipping is the ‘invisible’ backbone that keeps the global economy moving, even during the COVID-19 crisis. This article examines the extent to which seafarers have access to satisfactory shore-based welfare services/facilities (SBWS) that meet global regulatory standards under the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC). In particular, this article provides an empirical analysis of the implementation of relevant laws and MLC in European countries and China. While China has become a dominant player in world trade in recent years, the existing literature (especially in English) pays little attention to China’s implementation of MLC provisions, including SBWS provisions. To bridge this research gap, this article critically evaluates SBWS in practice in China, using manually collected data, and compares China’s arrangements with those of European countries. After exploring the different models adopted by Western countries and China, this article evaluates key SBWS providers in China through various lenses – past, present, and future initiatives.

Assessment of the Legal Regime for Protecting Abandoned Seafarers: A Study in Light of the 2006 Maritime Labour Convention

Abandonment is a significant challenge that seafarers face today. The number of seafarer abandonment instances has increased between 2020 and 2021, and dealing with this issue has become a major concern for policymakers. In 2021, in total, 1,399 seafarers on 94 vessels were abandoned. The 2006 Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) was amended in 2014 to include provisions for protecting abandoned seafarers. Newly inserted provisions established a financial security system for assisting seafarers in a seafarer abandonment situation. Although today the MLC incorporates this mechanism to protect abandoned seafarers, the issue of abandonment of seafarers continues to persist, and the time consumed in resolving these cases is sometimes very long. This article assesses the effectiveness of the financial security system under the MLC in granting protection to abandoned seafarers. It highlights the current regime's flaws and how the regime can be improved.

Britannia's “Gallant Crew”: Sailor Poets and the Legacy of William Falconer

The essay examines the history of poetry written by sailors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. William Falconer's The Shipwreck (1762, 1764 and 1769) inspired many seamen to turn poet and to write about their experiences at sea. Falconer's influence is seen in how sailor poets write about maritime labor and practices such as impressment and how they represent the beauties and threats of the ocean environment. They also share stylistic features, notably an emphasis on “terms of art” specific to shipboard life. Sailor poets provide key insights into important sociocultural developments related to the expansion of the British empire, including significant insights into the horrors of the slave trade and the cause of abolition. Falconer's legacy is one that is deeper than previously recognized.

Locked Up in Lockdown

AbstractThis essay traces how sailors aboard wooden sailing vessels (dhows) negotiate mobility across the Indian Ocean, revealing their precarious conditions preceding the COVID-19 pandemic that came to the fore after 2020. Focusing on Yusuf, a sailor in captivity in Iran during the pandemic, the essay suggests that the pandemic shone new light on preexisting patronage relations. However, these relations were creatively harnessed by laborers in times of crisis. Accustomed to sanctions regimes that restricted movement even before the pandemic, Yusuf facilitated his release through new patronage networks that built on his previous experiences of precarity. Rather than seeing this pandemic as a rupture, the essay argues that it led to an intensification of preexisting labor relations, such as patronage. The COVID-19 pandemic saw contagion, threat, vulnerability, devaluation, and precarity being used widely; however, these ideas were sutured to the Global South long before this pandemic, through sanctions regimes, occupation, and conflicts that restricted movement and disrupted supply chains. Patronage, then, was one mode in which maritime laborers navigated a geopolitical realm suffused with the language of threat and contagion. This essay charts a complex geopolitical reordering across the Global South, one not always mediated by the West.

Children on Board: Child labor on ships in the Indian Ocean, c. 18th – 19th Centuries


 
 
 A growing body of research has focused on adult Asian sailors’ employment on European ships in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. However, the experiences of children who worked on ships in the Indian Ocean World have received comparatively little attention. The scholarly lacuna is striking considering the tremendous increase in the scope and sophistication in the discussions on child slavery and abolition. This article examines the use of children as maritime laborers in the Indian Ocean World between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In doing so, it examines the multiple pathways through which children were brought for work on ships and studies the recruitment patterns of adult and child sailors. It focuses on the various types of labor performed by children on ships and discusses how conditions of servitude on land were transferred to a ship when children accompanied their masters. It then also discusses how prevailing understandings of childhood, domestic service, and child labor shaped the actions of English East India Company officials towards child sailors while undertaking anti-slavery measures during the nineteenth century.
 
 

Of shipwrecks, fraudsters, and divers: Cartagena de Indias and the transformation of Spanish Caribbean labor and bullion flows, c. 1650–1660

ABSTRACT Using the wreck of the galleon Nuestra Señora de Las Maravillas (1656) as a point of departure, this article analyzes the role of Cartagena de Indias as a logistical center for fraudulent silver salvaging and transportation in the Spanish Caribbean during the middle of the seventeenth century. After 1640, Cartagena's insertion into Atlantic maritime networks suffered from the collapse of Portuguese-led slave trading, the decline in legal silver circulation in Spanish ports, and expansion of other European colonial powers across the Caribbean. The article uses the cases made against officials and contractors involved in unauthorized silver salvaging in Cartagena to show how Caribbean-based Spanish merchants and administrators created trans-Atlantic bullion transportation networks independent of royal control. Like their legal counterparts, these unauthorized networks relied on specialized maritime labor from free and unfree divers of African and Amerindian origin, and sailors of all races. Simultaneously, maritime laborers' knowledge, often extracted under torture, formed the basis of prosecutors' cases against suspect colonial officials. By following these maritime linkages, this article highlights the centrality of maritime labor and communication logistics in the structural rearrangement of the Caribbean during the seventeenth century.

Ruling the Wages: The Austrian Lloyd Steam Navigation Company and seafarers’ incomes in the Habsburg Empire, 1885–1914

One of the primary outcomes of the transition from sail to steam shipping was the profound change affecting maritime labour. The rise of new shipping companies played a pivotal role in reshaping the work onboard and the socio-economic position of maritime workers. In the Mediterranean, the case of the Austrian merchant marine, dominated by the powerful Austrian Lloyd steam navigation company, has long been neglected by historians. This article examines the dominant role of Austrian Lloyd in shaping maritime wages and depicts the main remunerative dynamics affecting maritime labour on steamers between the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, when Austrian crews successfully joined for the first time in collective labour protests and managed to unionise. It frames seamen’s wage conditions in the socio-economic context of the Austrian littoral by relating maritime incomes to the cost of living and the remunerations of other socially comparable groups of workers in the port city of Trieste. By identifying the structural factors making up crews’ overall earnings, the article contributes to the broader understanding of Mediterranean maritime workers’ incomes in an age of profound technological and economic transformation of shipping.

Study on the Liability of Shipowners for the Protection of the Abandoned Seafarers under the Maritime Labor Convention

Study on the Liability of Shipowners for the Protection of the Abandoned Seafarers under the Maritime Labor Convention

Unfreedom and Slavery Under Sail: Intercolonial Trade in the British Atlantic, 1698–1766

AbstractUsing evidence from 25,250 records of vessels entering and clearing the rivers of the Chesapeake Bay, this article demonstrates that intercolonial trading captains and crews significantly reduced the number of days their vessels spent in port in Virginia between 1698 and 1766. This contraction reflected a quantifying ethos in shipping that emerged during the early age of sail as the result of mutually reinforcing legal requirements and management practices. Responding to these productivity pressures, captains embraced practices that limited sailors’ freedom and turned to enslaved sailors to guarantee their maritime labor force. Embracing unfreedom aided captains to realize the dispatch goals that helped guarantee their investors’ returns.

A Study on the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Rights and OSH of Seafarers and Tendency in 2022 Amendments of Maritime Labour Convention

A Study on the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Rights and OSH of Seafarers and Tendency in 2022 Amendments of Maritime Labour Convention

Fishers and seafarers in international law – Really so different?

Fishers and seafarers are treated differently under international law. This differentiation has negative consequences for fishers whose lives at sea attract less attention and protective action than seafarers. This marginalisation has been cemented through separate conventions protecting seafarers and fishers: the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 (MLC) and the Work in Fishing Convention, 2007 (C188), respectively. Whilst the MLC is regarded as innovative and successful and has attracted widespread ratification, C188 has seen far fewer ratifications and establishes weaker protections for fishers overall.This article examines four possible reasons for the difference in treatment – (1) The varied fisher population, (2) the nature of employment in the fishing industry, (3) the historic interaction with maritime zones, and (4) the role of international organisations representing fishers and seafarers.The article demonstrates that invalid assumptions held in these four areas help perpetuate weak protection for fishers and often lead to severe consequences for them. Furthermore, a multitude of initiatives by international organisations and bodies to create legal frameworks for the safety and decent work of fishers are either confusing and ineffective or create parallel systems to C188. This in turn means that only some groups of fishers are prioritised. Whereas one option might be to revisit including large-scale commercial fishers within the scope of the MLC this would require extensive renegotiations. More effective solutions are likely found in a concerted effort to support and promote the ratification of C188 by all States and ensure more alignment across States and international bodies.