“I would say the numbers of stranded seafarers has gone up but I would say not anywhere near what we saw as the potential for the problem,” Stephen Cotton, acting secretary general for the ITF, told Seatrade Global in an interview.
This year has a seen a number of high profile cases of abandonment in particular involving Taiwanese shipowner Today Makes Tomorrow (TMT) including a case in April where the Singapore Maritime Officers Union managed to recover $300,000 in unpaid wages for the crew of the C Whale.
However, despite such cases overall the issue is not as severe as it was in previous recessions. Cotton put this down mainly to two factors, first that banks have been less willing than in the past to call in bad debts, and second unlike previous recessions there have not been cases of a whole company going down and leaving hundreds of ships stranded across the globe
He noted that the banks were increasingly taking ships over themselves, handing management over to a third party manager, keeping the crew on and trading the vessel. “They keep it with the ITF, we have had quite a lot of discussions behind the scenes,” Cotton explained.
The newly minted Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) requires owners to have insurance cover for abandonment but it only covers repatriation costs not unpaid wages.
“We are in intense dialogue with the ICS and other parties about amendments to the MLC about security for abandonment. MLC at moment deals with repatriation but what we didn’t have was the repayment of wages,” Cotton said.
It also understood that P&I Clubs are looking change their rules so that forward cover is provided rather than it be the case that as soon as the premium stops being paid cover also ceases. “If you’re on top of you premiums, we would hope and expect in future, the club’s coverage would ensure that if you stop paying on 1 January and the ship is abandoned in February there would be value in the premium to cover the costs of repatriation or pay the wages,” he explained.
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