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The scandal of stranded and unpaid seafarers

The scandal of stranded and unpaid seafarers
Marcus Hand looks at how when shipping companies run into trouble their seafarers can be left stranded thousands of miles from home on their vessels with no pay.

It is a sad fact of life that companies do go bust, especially in markets like we see today. Business decisions and risks go wrong and unfortunately firms run out of money.

Among the most unfortunate victims are employees who can find themselves without a job overnight. This situation can actually be much worse if you are a seafarer as you may suddenly find yourself thousands of miles from home, stuck on a ship not being paid, and with no money to run the vessel or pay for supplies.

This week saw 20 seafarers onboard the TMT ship C Whale receiving unpaid back wages of some $300,000, having not been paid for three months while their vessel sat Singapore port since February and under arrest since the beginning of March. Now TMT is clearly a company in trouble, but this was still an appalling predicament for the crew to be left in.

Luckily for the seafarers of the C Whale the Singapore Maritime Officers Union (SMOU) answered a call for help. Although the vessel was Liberian-flagged, and none of the crew were Singaporean, the union spent three months, along with the help of seafarer welfare organisations, ensuring the seafarers got what was rightfully due to them.

This by no means the first time SMOU has helped get seafarers their due pay, in fact they have managed to ensure stranded crew have been paid some $15m over the last 20 years.

With the current state of the shipping market there will sadly be more incidents of crews left unpaid and stranded on vessels thousands of miles from home. They may also not be so lucky as the crew of C Whale, where an influential union came to their aid.

Over the years there have been many stories of seafarers left on the ships of bankrupt companies for two years or more. As supplies ran seafarers have in some cases resorted to growing food in the holds, or even gradually selling parts of the vessel they are sat on for scrap to raise funds.

It is a situation that casts a sad pall over the global shipping industry and which needs to addressed at a much more coordinated level than the current adhoc system of seafarer welfare organisations and unions.